Plain Truth (film)

Plain Truth is a 2004 TV drama directed by Paul Shapiro, starring Mariska Hargitay, Alison Pill and Jan Niklas. The film is based on Jodi Picoult's book Plain Truth, where an Amish teen hides a pregnancy, gives birth in secret, and then flatly denies it all when the baby's body is found, urban defense attorney Ellie Harrison decides to defend her.^[1]

Plot summary

Katie (Alison Pill) is an 18-year-old girl who lives in a small Amish community in the Pennsylvania farm country. When a newborn baby is found dead, police suspect foul play, and Katie is accused of having given birth to the child, then taking its life due to her shame about the baby's illegitimacy. Katie protests her innocence on both charges, and Ellie Hathaway (Mariska Hargitay), a tough and well-respected attorney, is brought in to defend her in court. Eventually it is revealed that Katie had conceived the child by a young male academic student whom she had befriended while attending college and wearing regular civilian clothes, and that the child had been born extremely sickly due to Katie's lifetime practice of drinking unpasteurized milk. It is assumed by the jury and the townspeople in general, therefore, that the baby merely died naturally of its weakened condition shortly after birth, and so Katie is declared innocent of all wrongdoing. At the very end of the story, however, Katie's mother Sarah privately reveals to Ellie that she herself had secretly murdered the baby with a pair of shears but had not told Katie, since Sarah knew that the baby would always be miserable and sickly, and so she had stabbed the baby to death while Katie was still unconscious from the exhaustion of childbirth, both to spare the child from a life of illness-riddled agony, and to lessen the stigma that Katie and her family would be subjected to by their stern and austere Amish neighbors for Katie's having "committed a sin of the flesh". Though shocked and horrified at the gaunt older woman's admission, Ellie chooses not to reveal her knowledge to the police. ^[2]

Cast

• Mariska Hargitay as Ellie Hathaway
• Alison Pill as Katie Fitch
• Jan Niklas as Aaron Fitch
• Kate Trotter as Sarah Fitch
• Alec McClure as Jacob Fitch
• Robert Bockstael as George Calloway
• Colin Fox as Bishop Stoflus
• Jonathan LaPaglia as Cooper
• Laura Leigh Hughes as Det. Lisa Munro
• Catherine Disher as Leda
• Andrew Martin-Smith as Samuel Stoflus
• Christopher Ralph as Adam Sinclair
• Jeremy Akerman as Judge
• Mauralea Austin as Jury foreman
• Nigel Bennett as Jeremy Whitmore

References

External links

• Plain Truth at the Internet Movie Database
• Plain Truth at AllMovie
• Plain Truth at the TCM Movie Database