The Tie That Binds Blu-ray offers decent video and terrible audio in this mediocre Blu-ray release
A childless couple adopts an abandoned little girl, but the girl's natural parents reappear to reclaim her -- and they're violent outlaws, who live on the run and had to leave their daughter while escaping the scene of a crime.
The Tie That Binds is an unusual collection of one-offs. It's the only feature film directed by
screenwriter Wesley Strick, who wrote Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear and has co-written various projects since then, including,
most recently, the remake of A Nightmare on Elm
Street. It's the sole film from a script by Michael Auerbach, who has since become an editor for
television fare like Dancing with the Stars (go figure). And it was the one and only film to star
young Julia Devin, a nominee for best supporting actress at the Young Artist Awards the
following year for her affecting portrayal of a lost child trying to make sense of a world that even
the Brothers Grimm would find baffling. Devin disappeared from acting after this film, but her
haunting presence is the chief reason (though not the only one) to see The Tie That Binds, even in
this problematic Blu-ray presentation from Mill Creek.
Janie Netherwood (Devin), who we think is about six years old, doesn't lead a normal life. She
spends her days riding in stolen cars, and she often finds herself huddling in the back seat at night
while her parents burglarize random houses. Her mother, Leann (Daryl Hannah), sometimes
sings to her, but Leann is usually too busy helping her husband, John (Keith Carradine), terrorize
the unfortunate occupants of the homes they rob. Sometimes the Netherwoods let people live;
sometimes they don't. But they always record the moment on Polaroids. It's their equivalent of a
family album.
One night, though, the police catch the Netherwoods by surprise. (Exactly how isn't explained,
but it's suggested that they tripped a silent alarm.) Officer David Carrey (Ned Vaughn) spots
Janie in the parked car and tries to remove her, but Papa John attacks him. Officer Carrey shoots
him in the shoulder, forcing John to flee with Leann. Janie is turned over to the appropriate social
service organization, but not before the cops make the mistake of placing her beloved doll in a
plastic evidence bag, provoking a reaction that lets everyone know she's her father's daughter.
Dana and Russell Clifton are a childless couple looking to adopt. Dana's ability to conceive was
lost to cancer, from which she's made a full recovery, and now she's a successful photographer
in the ad business. Russell is a contractor who's currently underwater financially building a self-financed "spec" house in the country. Since, apparently,
neither of them can afford to stay home
looking after an infant, they go to the foster care facility overseen by Maggie Hass (Jennie Gago)
where Janie has been placed, looking to adopt an older child. Janie responds to them immediately
and they to her. Dana and Russell agree to foster Janie, with an eye to eventual adoption.
Janie adapts only gradually to her new, comfortably normal life. She's used to regarding
everything as temporary, and she suffers from nightmares of her parents' (especially her father's)
return. She refers to him as "the Tooth Fairy", which, in Janie's personal mythology, is not a
benevolent being. One day, Dana and Russell are shocked to discover that Janie is keeping a
bread knife under her pillow as a defense against the Tooth Fairy's return. Prompted by a school
psychologist, Janie draws the Tooth Fairy, and it's an excellent likeness of John Netherwood,
though no one would know that other than Janie. At a school play, an elaborately costumed ogre
so terrifies Janie that she bolts from the auditorium and runs out into a street full of traffic.
Dana and Russell are smart and caring enough to understand that Janie's past contains something
terrible, and they persuade their friend, Gil (Bruce A. Young), an assistant D.A., to give them
access to arrest records in an effort to identify her birth parents. But the Netherwoods are already
looking for them. Having recovered from his shoulder wound, John Netherwood is determined to
get his child back. (One suspects from the way Janie stares at Russell Clifton during her first
meal in his home that John is a control freak who would never let any female escape his
domination.) Beginning with the cop who shot him, the Netherwoods systematically trace Janie to
the Cliftons, but Dana and Russell evade them by moving in with Gil and his wife, Lisa-Marie
(Cynda Williams), under police protection. But that only works until Lisa-Marie, who is
pregnant, goes into labor and is hospitalized. Then the Cliftons take Janie to the unfinished spec
house in the country, where the film's final showdown occurs.
One of the film's most effective devices is the liberal use of fairy tale themes and imagery,
exemplified by the Tooth Fairy and the characters in the school play. Julia Devin's Janie often
looks as if she could have stepped out of the pages of a storybook, and she behaves like the
classic child heroine who finds herself in a strange land with only her own courage and
determination to sustain her. Unfortunately, in the last ten minutes or so of the film, when a
thriller should be hurtling toward its conclusion with maximum efficiency and nary a wasted
second, director Strick and his screenwriter err gravely by introducing unnecessary plot
mechanics solely to make the fairy tale elements as literal as possible. (I'm being deliberately
vague to avoid spoilers.) The end of a thriller is precisely where one should never risk jolting the
viewer into thinking, "Oh come on!", but that's exactly what happens, several times, as The Tie
That Binds winds up its story.
This is another of those Mill Creek Blu-rays that is incorrectly labeled as "1080p" when it is
really 1080i. Fortunately, in this case, the interlaced format did not appear to have a negative
impact on image quality; I did not detect obvious instances of combing or other forms of video
noise associated with interlaced presentations. Overall, the image was reasonably detailed and
filmlike, and the colors were decently saturated and natural, consistent with the usual look
achieved by cinematographer Bobby Bukowski. Occasionally, though, director Wesley Strick
seemed to be reaching for a touch of Scorsese-style subjectivity in his use of color, as in a scene
where Dana runs after Janie, who is wearing red, and the light briefly glows red as each of them
passes through a hallway.
Compression, artifacting and other digital errors aren't an issue, but the source material does
have a few moments with significant print damage, and that's something that probably would
have been fixed if the film had remained with the studio instead of being farmed out to Mill
Creek. Any such flaw is jarring, and the worst one occurs during the film's tense finale, which is
especially unfortunate.
The DTS-HD MA 2.0 track (incorrectly labeled "2.0 Dolby Digital", as is typical of Mill Creek)
is the disc's greatest failing. The film was released in Dolby Digital and, given the "Spectral
Recording" logo that appears in the end credits", almost certainly had a 5.1 track. The 2.0
mixdown that appears on the Blu-ray is one of the worst I've ever heard from a 5.1 track (either
that, or it's the worst Dolby Surround mix ever made at a time when even novice technicians
should have been experts at creating 2.0 surround). Voices are sometimes indistinct, and
individual words can be hard to make out -- an especially galling issue on a disc that doesn't
include subtitles or closed captions. Graeme Revell's score remains embedded in the speakers
and never projects out into the room to surround the listener. It also sometimes has a warbling
quality, as if it were being played back on an old reel-to-reel tape machine with excessive
amounts of wow and flutter.
Perhaps the most serious of the track's sins is a recurrent surround artifact of which the origin is
unclear, but it adds a kind of "whooshing" sound at all sorts of inappropriate moments, as if
someone were running a vacuum cleaner in reverse. Odd sounds are routinely used in thrillers to
put an audience on edge, but this one simply distracts and annoys.
The Disney organization has every right to license out its second- and third-tier properties to an
organization like Mill Creek, just as Sony is sending much of their back catalogue to Image
Entertainment. But Disney ought to send Mill Creek proper elements for both audio and video.
And if Disney is doing so, and it's Mill Creek who is making the short-sighted and foolish
decision to provide degraded 2.0 audio on these titles originally released in 5.1, then they should
wise up and get a clue. Even a lossy 5.1 track that sounds like the original is preferable to a
lossless remix that sounds terrible.
Despite the letdown of an ending, The Tie That Binds is worth seeing for Julia Devin's
performance, for Keith Carradine's scary turn as John Netherwood, and for the low-key but
effective chemistry between Vincent Spano and Moira Kelly as they attempt to learn how to be
parents. But don't buy Mill Creek's Blu-ray. Rent it, or write them a polite letter insisting that
they remaster it with a proper soundtrack.
