Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 2000’s All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story! It can be viewed on YouTube.
In 1996, a 34 year-old teacher named Mary Kay Letourneau decided that she had fallen in love with someone who was not her husband.
A 34 year-old deciding that they are no longer happy in their marriage and subsequently deciding that that they’ve found love with someone else is hardly an unusual or even surprising occurrence. What made Mary Kay Letourneau’s case a national scandal was that the person that she decided that she was in love with was a 12 year-old student named Vili Fualaau. Mary Kay started her affair with Vili when she was his sixth grade teacher. When she was arrested and charged with two counts of second-degree rape of a child, Letourneau was pregnant with Vili’s child. Even after being arrested, Letourneau insisted that she and Vili were soulmates. After giving birth to Vili’s child, Letourneau was sentenced to six months of prison and somehow managed to avoid having to register as a sex offender. After serving her sentence, Letourneau was promptly arrested again with Vili and was sent back to jail, where she gave birth to Vili’s second child.
All-American Girl opens with Mary Kay Letourneau (Penelope Ann Miller) in jail, insisting that everything that happened between her and Vili was consensual and that their love is real. The majority of the film is shown in flashbacks. Some of those flashbacks deal with Mary Kay, her husband (Greg Spottiswood), and Vili (Omar Anguiano). Watching the flashbacks, I couldn’t help but notice that the film really did seem to be on Mary Kay’s side, to an almost ludicrous extent. Her husband is portrayed as being a soulless sociopath, even before Mary Kay starts sneaking around with Vili. As for Vili, he is presented as being the one who initiated his relationship with Mary Kay, flirting with her in class and comforting her when she starts crying in a school hallway. The actor playing Vili looked, acted, and sounded considerably older than just 12 years old. At times, he appeared to be nearly as old as Penelope Ann Miller. And I’ll admit that it’s totally possible that Vili could have looked older than his age and maybe he did have a surprisingly mature vocabulary. But still …. he was 12 years old! Apparently, Letourneau cooperated with the film’s producers and that’s pretty obvious from the first minute we see Vili giving Letourneau a wolfish smile in the 6th grade.
The flashbacks dealing with Letourneau’s childhood are a bit more interesting, if just because Letourneau was the daughter of a congressman who ran for president in 1972. (One of her brothers served in the first Bush White House. Another served as an advisor to the 2016 Trump campaign.) At one point, she taunts a group of protestors that have gathered outside of her family’s home and her father praises her courage. The film hints that it was the twin traumas of her brother’s death and the discovery that her beloved father had fathered two children with a mistress that led to Letourneau’s subsequent instability. Perhaps that’s true, though I think the film is a bit too eager to accept that as an all-purpose explanation.
You may have guessed that I had mixed feelings about this film. Penelope Ann Miller gave an excellent performance as Mary Kay but the film’s attempts to portray May Kay as being even more of a victim that Vili were undeniably icky.
As for the real Mary Kay, she married Vili four years after being released from prison. They separated a year before Mary Kay died in 2020. Their relationship inspired several films, most recently May/December.
