"You must feel desperate." "You must feel sorry for them." "You must feel sorry for yourself." "They're going to have so many more issues than a baby." "The older they are the more problems you'll have." "Are you sure you can handle their history?" "You won't have control over what they think." "Do you think they're even capable of loving you?"
--What people told us about our plans to adopt older children
Warner Bros. is set to launch Orphan on July 24. Which is why I post hesitantly, knowing that even bad PR is good PR because it's PR.
The movie's tagline is: "There's something wrong with Esther." Esther is the orphan, an orphan adopted as an older child. Esther goes to live with her new family and within a few scenes (as evidenced from the trailer) violence ensues. Violence perpetuated by Esther, the orphan. Menacing violence, burned-down-tree-house violence. Violence in which Esther threatens the lives and sanity of her new family, parents, siblings. Of course Esther has a secret which drives all this violence that the producers of the film have wrapped around the issues of abandonment and adoption without providing a stitch of context.
Warner Bros. is marketing Orphan as a horror flick. I guess that's better than calling it art.
"We were as excited as we were about the project because it felt like so much more
than your typical genre film. A lot of its appeal has to do with the fact that there is a
complex psychological drama playing itself out alongside the typical genre scares." That's what Leonardo DiCaprio, a partner at Appian Way and a producer on the film, says in the production notes about the film, viewable and downloadable at the film's website.
Layered, textured, complex, multidimensional. What this appears to mean is that the producers have intricately-purposefully-woven the thread of adopting an older child into the plot, characters, storyline, violence, menace, manipulations and trouble. Don't try to deny it Warner Bros. You're the one who gave it the title, too.
Some say "it's just a movie" and that horror flicks generally appeal to a younger demographic; teens in particular, "anyway." Of course these are kids not far from the age of the fictional Esther who go to school with children who were adopted at an older age. It will be just their luck that the child who plays Esther will be such a good actress, people will start believing her "performance" is more realistic than what's real and, by proxy, that children who are adopted older are just like Esther.
Even if Esther doesn't appeal to an older crowd, the messages it sends reinforces one many adults have already internalized and have no interest in questioning. I mean, look what people said to me before we adopted. And then there's the adults who made the movie, too.
The AP reported that "Warner Bros. says it has taken the concerns seriously and has already removed a particularly controversial line from the trailer." Suffice it to say, that line: "It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own," would likely have been something people would have said to us, had we had children to begin with. People say it all the time.
