Midnight Bayou

Young college student from Boston, Jerry O'Connell out on some hijinks with friends in New Orleans comes across an old deserted mansion and sees the ghost of a woman there. He feels a real connection to her and the house. Years later, now an attorney, O'Connell moves to the area to start a law practice aimed at making insurance companies cough up what they owe flood victims. But it's more than business that Jerry's got on his mind.

He buys the old mansion and has plans to renovate and move in. But he sees some startling visions of the past around the turn of the last century. He makes a connection with Lauren Stamile who also has a connection to the house. She's the great great granddaughter of the woman that Jerry finds out was murdered.

Midnight Bayou is based on a Nora Roberts romance novel of the same name, though its characters could have been taken from the works of Tennessee Williams. Faye Dunaway plays the grandmother of Stamile who raised her and she's fine in the part. The really evil one is the prostitute/junkie of a mother Marcelle Baer to Stamile. She is a bad person in the past and present.

The film is a cut above most of the Lifetime network productions and recommended for devotees of Nora Roberts.

Attempted to watch but found ourselves mostly fast-forwarding this Nora Roberts 'thriller' that we videoed for our Dad. It was a Channel 5 Saturday night premiere and we'd been burned once already with Willed to Kill. Plus, we'd seen a Nora Roberts movie before so should have been more wary. This was more of the same. Jerry O'Connell, that goofy, odd-looking guy plays the lead looking perpetually surprised – perhaps by the script which has Faye Dunaway (still pretty fine) calling him 'a beautiful young man' but I would say it's a fair guess that this line was not written with him in mind because he is not by a fair stretch of the imagination that beautiful or young. Young in comparison to Ms Dunaway maybe. And I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I'll say no more. If you're ready to accept this though, you might also allow yourself to believe the daft storyline, which involves ghosts, reincarnation and visions of the past all muddled together randomly in a crazy, clashing potpourri. Beyond silly. There's a signposted-a-state-away love storyline that doesn't ring true for a second. A cameo from the gorgeous Alejandro Rose-Garcia as the intriguingly evil brother Julien is enjoyable but we see too little of him. New Orleans is the other draw – I'd never been interested in going there but this has changed my mind – it looks stunning. Unfortunately, neither is enough to warrant your wasting your time on this movie. Scarily unscary.

To anyone who read the book, you will not like this movie...to those who saw the movie without reading the book will not want to read it!! The characters were not well developed, Declan's background was limited to one past relationship & there was hardly anything about his family up north. Lina's character was limited as well and didn't show how she achieved in her life from such difficulties. The relationship between Declan & Lina did not seem genuine or believable.

Faye Dunaway was spectacular as always, but sadly not used to her full potential.

I'm sorry I watched it since I read the book. I'm not sure if I would have liked it any better if I hadn't read it.

***SPOILERS*** Ghost story by Nora Roberts about the deep south that covers some 120 years and at least four generations of the New Oleans Manet family.

It's when young collage student Declan Fitzpartrick, celebrating Fat Tuesday, saw this ghostly young woman outside Manet Hall that he was determined in buying the long deserted mansion. Some eight years later and now having a very successful law practice in Boston Declan was now able to buy his dream house feeling that he had some strange and unearthly connection to it. Declan, in hiding his real intentions, plans on using it a law center for the local's in the area. It's then that Declan meets Lina Simone who's descendants once owned Manet Hall and whom he's connected to through the distant past-reincarnation-in ways he, who doesn't believe in the supernatural, could never have imagine!

The supernatural angle in the movie is a bit hard to follow in that were given two entirely different stories to what happened with Lina's great great great grandfather Lucian in the abandonment of him and is infant daughter by his wife, Lina's great great great grandmother, the former Manet Hall maid Abigail. We get most of this confusing story from Lina's Grandma Odette who seems to have supernatural powers herself in her knowing things, especially about Declan, that she has no way of coming up with.

The movie,almost by accident, really starts to heat up when Lina's junkie mom Marie Rose shows up from Huston needing quick cash, $10,000.00, to pay off her drug suppliers back in Texas. Trying to blackmail Declan, for her drug money, who has since fallen in love with her daughter-Lina-Marie Rose ends up getting into even deeper trouble, with the local sheriff, then she ever was with the drug dealers back in the Lone Star State. It's Marie Rose guilt, that lead to her drug addiction, which in fact activated the strange events that happened over 100 years ago leading to Abigail's mysterious disappearance.

What really saves the movie is the events that happened back then in the late 1890's, at Manet Hall, that somehow found their way back to the present-2009-with both Declan and Lina.****SPOILER ALERT****It's not only the difference between some 120 years but the reality in what happened back then as well as the change of identities of the major characters in the film that set up the movies unexpected, to everyone involved, as well as surprise ending!

I may take an unlimited amount of time but the "Wheel of Life"-Reincarnation- eventually makes amends for the mistakes made by those of us,all of humanity, who are art of it. Even if it in the end it takes as much as a dozen lifetimes for it to eventually correct them!

When will movie makers understand that people people from New Orleans do not speak with that generic Gone With The Wind southern accent? Most people in Louisiana do not sound like that these days. And referring to a "loaf" of cornbread, seriously? If you're going to throw in details based on where the story is set, do better research. I realize that's kind of nitpicky, but it seems like too many movies and television shows get details about Louisiana and New Orleans wrong. Don't even get me started on True Blood. Love the show, but there's something in almost every episode that makes me shake my head.

Other than those problems, it was a fairly decent adaptation. Better than some of the other Nora Roberts movies.