LOSING ISAIAH is a moving and well-acted drama that takes a hot-button issue to an emotionally manipulative level but will involve you to the point of taking sides. Halle Berry plays a crack addict who, one night desperate to get high, leaves her newborn baby in a pile of garbage and when she returns after her mission, finds the baby gone. The baby is rescued and is eventually taken home and raised by a sensitive social worker (Jessica Lange) who decides to raise and adopt the hyper-active, crack-addicted baby as her own. In the meantime, Berry gets clean, wants her baby back and takes Lange to court to regain custody of her son. This is an involving story that provides a balanced account of an emotional issue and if you're really paying attention, you will find your alliance with the protagonists in this story switching from time to time. Lange is solid, as always, and Halle Berry works hard at being convincing as a reformed junkie. Strong support is provided by Samuel L. Jackson and LaWanda Richardson (the real-life spouse of Jackson)as Lange and Berry's attorneys, David Straithern as Lang'es husband, and Daisy Prince as Lange's daughter. No matter how hard you try to remain neutral, this film will suck you in and find you taking sides.

After seeing this I had mixed feelings about it. Nobody could argue with the acting and Halle Berry Fans who may not be aware of this film(it's from awhile ago) may want to see it but (and I have to stop here and out) MAJOR ENDING SPOILER!!!!!

The movie kind of lacks credibility because of the unreal quality of the ending. In real life it just usually would not happen like this. While it's perfectly OK for movies to be unrealistic in this case the movie starts off to gamely tackle a very important REALISTIC issue that a lot of humans go through. The ending was not only unrealistic it was almost implausible.

I was quite young when I first saw this and at the time I was glad it ended as it did because the movie was heartbreaking enough so being young I WANTED a nice cut and dried Hollywood ending.

But now being all grown up and seeing the agony real people go through in this situation I'm not sure the ending was as good as I thought then. Of coarse it would be really REALLY difficult for the writers to end it any other way and thus appear to take sides. So they chose to play it safe. I think the movie would, however have been taken more seriously had it maybe been done a little differently though of coarse that would have come with it's own set of problems.

Maybe Losing Isaiah was a movie that was just to ahead of its time.

I really had no interest in seeing this picture, but I actually had a friend who was in a similar situation. Specifically, she adopted a bi-racial boy, and right before the adoption was "official," the birth father came out of the woodwork with HIS mother saying that they wanted to have him back. Originally, he denied paternity, so he never signed off on the adoption. She kept her adopted boy at the end, but my heart went out to her at the time. The plot of "Losing Isaiah" is of course a little bit different, but it deals with the same emotional issue of having a child that you are raising ripped away from you to be with the biological parent. This of course raises lots of interesting questions, such as, "what defines being a parent?" So because of my own personal experiences, I found the movie very moving and upsetting and I cried at the very end. So I guess the film "worked" for me. That being said, I'm not sure this situation could ever happen in real life. In real life, would Halle Berry's character EVER have had a chance of finding her baby years after she abandoned him in a crack-induced haze? Seems pretty doubtful to me.