Real simple, people.
Augusta, Gone is the story of... (surprise!) Augusta (Mika Boorem). She's 14 and hates herself. Her parents just don't understand what she's feeling. They think everything's great. And one day, Augusta snaps. It starts with a puff of a cigarette. Then she's drinking her stepmother's leftover wine from the dinner table. Before long, she's doing -- and selling -- drugs. She screams at her parents and threatens death. She stays out half the night. When she is suspended from school, her parents decide to send her to a wilderness camp for six weeks.
Wilderness camp doesn't do much for Augusta, because she's not willing to admit she has a problem. While there, though, she makes a new friend -- Bridget, played by everyone's least favorite teen mother, Katie Stuart. Bridget's there for different reasons from Augusta's, but the two of them bond. After camp, both girls are sent to a special school called Circle Mountain. They quickly get fed up with the restrictiveness, and Augusta and Bridget escape and live on the streets. They're caught and brought back, then forced to stay apart. One night, Bridget overdoses on something and dies. The shock of it all causes Augusta to ponder her life choices.
One thing that confused me about this movie was that it didn't seem to me that Augusta had really changed at the end of the film, at which point she goes home to her parents (after having run away from Circle Mountain for the second time.) Sure, she tells her mom she'll straighten up, but I don't buy it. Not after all she's done. But Augusta, Gone is based on a novel that tells a true story of a real girl named Augusta, and I guess that's how it really went. Hmm, go figure. Maybe the book goes into more detail. I wanted to know why Augusta was ready to change, beyond "I've had a crisis of faith since my friend died." Now that I think about it, Lifetime movies all have unsatisfactory, too-happy endings. Wait a minute... so do most TV-movies! What the hell? Why am I just now realizing this!? And why does this bother me? I've reviewed, like, 35 made-for-TV-movies and this just now starts to get annoying? Maybe I've been doing this too long.
5/28/2006
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