Wildflower

And now it's time for our weekly installment of "The Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week." Once again, this week's selection was courtesy of the greatest channel ever, Lifetime Movie Network. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was a movie called Wildflower starring a young Reese Witherspoon as a Southern tomboy who lives with her older brother and drunken father (played by a slovenly Beau Bridges). Reese's mom is dead and one day Reese is out looking for a flower to put on her dead mom's grave, which is conveniently located in their front yard, which is creepy as hell. She comes across a dilapidated shed, and inside is a slightly feral girl who keeps a possum as a pet. Awesome. This feral girl, Alice, is played by Patricia Arquette, who totally out-Nells Jodie Foster. Anyway, Reese befriends Alice, and brings her older brother around too. Together, they teach Alice how to talk and shit, and it turns out that Alice is deaf and epileptic, so her stepfather thinks she is possessed by the devil and keeps her locked in the shed. And of course the brother falls in love with Alice but their love is forbidden except one night when he comes upon her bathing in the river and they totally almost do it but then don't. And the stepfather nearly catches Reese and her brother locking Alice back into her shed one night and they all run away and then Alice has an epileptic seizure in a cornfield and the doctor comes and isn't at all concerned that Alice lives in a shed but tells Reese about hearing aids, which are expensive. So Reese hocks her dead mother's locket to get Alice a hearing aid. Then the brother is supposed to go to college but Drunken Beau doesn't think his son needs any more book learning, but then he relents and Alice is all sad. So the stepfather nearly kills Alice and her mother one night and then falls off the porch and injures himself and can't walk and Alice's mom says that Alice can go live with Drunken Beau and Reese, which gives Drunken Beau a Reason to Live so he cleans up. The awesome part was when Drunken Beau and Reese came to take Alice away and the stepfather totally shot Alice's pet possum with a shotgun from his bedroom window. And then Reese's grandma teaches Alice to read and write but the older brother is all citified so he ignores Alice's letters and when he comes home, he blows her off. Meanwhile, Alice's mom is totally still living with the abusive murderous stepfather but no one really cares about her. And then there's a big town dance so Reese writes letters to her brother about how Alice has a new dress and her bosoms show and all the boys are courting her so the brother gets all jealous and hitches a ride home. But before he arrives at the dance, Alice's mother is there watching from the outside because no one cares about her and then the stepfather has miraculously recovered and shows up to take Alice and her mom back home, and then No-Longer-Drunken Beau yells, "We's her family now!" Which was awesome. And then the brother shows up and dances with Alice and they make out. The end.