Wendy Porter (Mira Sorvino) calls the cops and sends her abusive drunk husband Rip (Barry Pepper) to prison. Seven years later, she's there to greet him upon his release. He has stopped drinking and is a changed man. She reveals to him that they have a son and she let him be adopted. The adoption paper was forged by somebody inside the prison and a judge annuls the adoption. Joey is ripped from his comfortable home and loving parents Jack (Cole Hauser) and Molly Campbell (Kate Levering).The interesting thing here is that nobody is played as a pure villain. Everybody struggles in this movie. It's a losing proposition in any case. All four actors bring out some deep emotions. There are some real moments. The lack of one specific rooting interest does take a toll on the movie. This is a difficult but compelling watch.

This is one of the best films I have ever seen. It is so well acted, that it is difficult to see the film itself separate from the acting; if that makes sense. Barry Pepper and Mira Sorveno are stunning in their representation of a flawed soul and the wonderful woman who loves him. I could not love Mira more. She is utterly beautiful in her totally natural manifestation here.The strongest element of this film is the dichotomy between this less successful couple and their rivals, a very wealthy couple. The latter seem so one-dimensional by comparison. It fed my bias against the privileged. But by the end I took an arc.Really nice work too by the young boy in the film. Barry Pepper is an inspiration to young actors with great talent who might despair thinking there isn't room in the industry for character actors still.

LIKE DANDELION DUST is a very small scaled film about a very large subject: adoption and the struggles that at times are associated between birth parents and adoptive parents. Adapted from Karen Kingsbury's popular novel by Stephen J Rivele and Michael Lachance and directed with sensitivity and fine pacing by Jon Gunn, the film succeeds primarily because of the exceptional acting on the part of the acting by Mira Sorvino and Barry Pepper. Blue collar worker Richard 'Rip' Porter (Barry Pepper) is an alcoholic with anger management problems and as the film opens he is arrested for beating his wife Wendy (Mira Sorvino) and imprisoned for seven years. Simultaneously we meet the wealthy Jack Campbell (Cole Hauser) and his wife Molly (Kate Levering) who are playing with their six year old son Joey (Maxwell Perry Cotton) and interacting with Molly's sister Beth (Abby Brammell) and husband Bill (Kirk B.R. Woller) who are suggesting that Joey, being adopted, should be brought up in the church: there is conflict as Beth seems to feel Molly isn't caring correctly for Joey since he is adopted! Rip is released form prison and is clean from his alcoholism and anger management problems and Wendy confesses that when Rip was incarcerated she had been pregnant and because of Rip's problems she put her newborn son up for adoption, having her mother sign for Rip. Rip is shocked with the news and at once wants to get his son back. An adoption agency is consulted in the person of Allyson Bower (L. Scott Caldwell) who is placed between the Porters and the Campbells in making the decision as to where Joey should be. Because of the forged adoption papers Joey is still the child of the Porters and they fight the Campbells for custody. Joey is in the middle and with Allyson's guidance tries to adapt to his birth parents on planned visits while the Campbells try every avenue to retain their beloved Joey. How the game is played includes errors on the parts of both sets of parents but the situation is finally resolved in a very touching manner. Sorvino and Pepper are brilliant in their roles as the beleaguered Porters. The reason the film works as well as it does is the fact that the good and bad aspects of human behavior on the part of all the characters in the film is balanced. It is a realistic look at what appears on the surface to be polar opposite couples - and in the middle is the very finely tuned performance of little Maxwell Perry Cotton. This is a film that tugs a bit heavily on the heartstrings, but for anyone who has been involved in an adoption problem it will ring true. Grady Harp

I never heard of this film until it came to my attention on Netflix and I watched it. It was an amazingly well balanced film, similar to some stories that were in the news a few years back, where an adopted child is sought by his biological parents years after an adoption was assumed permanent, due to the father not having given legal consent. Reading the credits, I learned it was based on a novel by Karen Kingsbury, and after reading the other reviews here, learned it was released by a Christian company, which I was totally unaware of while watching the film. I am an agnostic, and lean toward atheism, but have loved some Christian films, like Treasures of the Snow, Fireproof, and To Save A Life. And while this barely touched on Faith, (Thankfully in my non-religious opinion), those who decried the changes from the book, (which I haven't read, nor probably never will), struck me as not liking the film for the very reasons that made it so good. That is, not portraying the parties in obvious colors, not making the biological parents totally unfit, at least at first, after Pepper's release from prison, and not portraying the adoptive parents as beyond fault, which raised this above the typical lifetime movie, in my opinion. In fact, when Barry Pepper reverts to some of his abusive behaviors late in the film, I was a little disappointed, because I didn't want the film to take the easy way out. And in some real cases in Ohio, the children were returned to the biological parents, which I think is very unfortunate when the child has lived happily for many years with the couple he or she knows as Mom and Dad. I wanted a happy ending, which I got, but I didn't want it to look so one-sided that the deck looked stacked. And as a non-believer, if a lot of Faith preaching is added, for me, it only detracts from the drama, and risks becoming corny and trite. If the film were a little livelier or faster paced, I would have given it a 10, but if it were like those who described the book as being, I would have given it a 5 at best.