Amy & Isabelle (2001)

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Television release (ABC): March 4, 2001.This original Oprah Winfrey Presents production, based on the best-selling novel by Elizabeth Strout, stars Elisabeth Shue as Isabelle Goodrow. Isabelle is a lonely and extremely proper single mother of Amy (Hannah Hall), her shy and reclusive 16-year-old… More Television release (ABC): March 4, 2001.This original Oprah Winfrey Presents production, based on the best-selling novel by Elizabeth Strout, stars Elisabeth Shue as Isabelle Goodrow. Isabelle is a lonely and extremely proper single mother of Amy (Hannah Hall), her shy and reclusive 16-year-old daughter. Amy and Isabelle live in the small New England mill town of Shirley Falls, in a carefully constructed life of compulsive routine and forced normality. Isabelle works diligently at the local mill, with no friends or social life to speak of, deeply dependent on the friendship of her isolated daughter. Amy is a self-conscious teenager, living in the shadow of her mother's anxiety and repression while enduring the trials of tribulations of high school. When Amy meets Peter Robertson (Martin Donovan), her new math teacher, her lonely world is shattered forever. Peter is a charming and seductive rebel who quickly challenges the intellectual young girl. What begins as a schoolgirl crush quickly develops into a sexual relationship as Amy begins to experience her own burgeoning sexuality for the first time. Their secret is eventually revealed, and Isabelle is forced to face an imperfect reality that prompts her to face her own shameful past and deeply buried family secrets. This atmospheric portrait of small-town life in the early 1970s, filled with local characters played to the hilt by Conchata Ferrell, James Rebhorn, and Viola Davis, among others, is a moving and sensitive depiction of one woman's deliverance from her self-inflicted loneliness.