Seth Margolis' novel becomes middle-of-the-road drama about a white woman and her husband fighting a black woman in court over the custody of the black woman's baby son, whom she left in a dumpster two years prior to cleaning up her life as a homeless crack-addict. Uninventive presentation plays like a dulled-out TV-movie, and the two leading actresses (Jessica Lange and Halle Berry), while well cast, can't do much more than fill these stock roles with their individual charisma and personalities (they can't invest much heart into the proceedings when the screenplay is all processed emotion). The outcome of the case (and the reasons for the outcome) seem dated already, and the concluding events are standard, predictable scenes of coming to terms. ** from ****