Jane Kaczmarek does a fine acting job as the deeply troubled mother of a teenager who has fallen in love with a physical abuser. It's basically the same old story about a guy who saw his mother abused when he was a child and is continuing his ways. Kaczmarek is the same mother who finds fault with her niece's involvement as well as the break-up of her sister's marriage troublesome but is unable to recognize what her daughter is experiencing first hand. Both she and her husband are intelligent, thoughtful parents but were unable to see what was really going on until the situation escalated. Apparently, teenage battering has become a major problem and this film aptly showed it.

For a TV movie, this was pretty good. Though I don't have any experience with these kinds of situations, it seemed realistic. It was also very intense and pretty creepy at times. I actually felt myself becoming frightened for the different characters from time to time. I also learned quite a bit from this movie. I don't think I'll easily forget the signs that one is in an abusive relationship, or what to do if I suspect someone else is in one. I definitely hope I never make the same mistake that Lizzie did, though, and I hope a lot of people won't, after they see this. All in all, the acting, writing, and directing were all above average for this movie, and I would recommend it.

This is one excellent movie. The characters have been stretched from real life people towards easily recognizable stereotypes that create an emotional tension which invites audience participation (what would you do?) and which heightens the issues and of teenage infatuation, 'love' as ownership, being overly agreeable as an unworkable position, and the traps that girls fall into by caring too much (among others). The writers were women, so the characterization of the female characters was outstanding, but they clearly don't understand the emotional conflicts experienced by males (who does, actually?), so the male acting was unpotentiated which, if it had been with more emotional beef would have made this a first class movie.