In 1994’s Cries Unheard: The Donna Yaklich Story, Jaclyn Smith is miscast as Donna, a naive young woman who is charmed by a cop named Dennis Yaklich (Brad Johnson). The film is told in flashback and, for some reason, it was decided to have Jaclyn Smith (who was 49 when this film aired) not only play the middle-aged Donna but also to play her where she was just supposed to be in her 30s and looking for a husband.
Anyway, Dennis starts out charming but he soon turns out to have some problems. He is easily angered. He spends all of his time lifting weights. He’s possessive. He pops pills and shoots up steroids and, by the end of the movie, he’s grown out one of those madman beards that crazy men in movies always end up with. When Dennis discovers that Patty (Hillary Swank), his daughter from his first marriage, is pregnant, he flies into a rage. Donna does some research and comes to the conclusion that Dennis murdered his first wife. When she confronts Dennis with this, he just laughs.
Donna is too frightened to grab her toddler son and run away from home, despite the fact that Dennis is hardly ever at home. (In fairness, Dennis is a cop so he would definitely have the resources to track her down if she did leave.) Instead, Donna hires two no-good trailer park boys to shoot Dennis when he comes home from work. Dennis dies in his driveway, still holding the toy truck that he hoped to give his son. It’s also raining when he dies because that’s the type of movie this is.
Donna made the mistake of hiring the dumbest people possible to carry out the crime and soon, she is getting arrested and being put on trial for murder. Later, she tells her story to her now-teenage son, Denny (David Lascher). Denny is angry because he had to grow up without a dad but he still assures his mother that she’s a wonderful person and the he can’t wait to pick her up from prison in 40 years.
Watching Cries Unheard was an odd experience for me. By all logic, I should have been on Donna’s side but I found myself getting pretty annoyed with her. Some of it was because Jaclyn Smith was totally miscast in the role. Donna is supposed to be naive and meek and easily gaslit by her husband but Jaclyn Smith seemed as if she had just returned from a Paris shopping trip. The other problem is that the film, which was heavy-handed even by the standards of a made-for-TV movie from the 90s, tried too hard to pretend as if hiring a hitman is something that anyone would have done in Donna’s situation. The film ends with a Jaclyn Smith voice-over in which she points out that husbands who hire hitmen to kill their wives usually get a shorter sentence than women who do it and I really wanted to throw a shoe at the TV. Regardless of the circumstances, hiring a hitman is an extreme step to take. Most people will go through their entire life without ever hiring a hitman. Most people don’t even know anyone who they could hire to be a hitman. So, don’t sit there and act like this is the equivalent of women not getting paid as much men for the same amount of work. I did a little research and discovered that this film was based on interviews that Donna gave in prison. Dennis’s other daughter– who was not portrayed in the film — called the film a complete fabrication.
I should note that this film was directed by Armand Mastroianni, who also directed some of the best episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series and the classic slasher film He Knows You’re Alone. (That film was also Tom Hanks’s feature debut.) His direction embraces the melodrama but it can’t overcome a weak script and a miscast lead.
Through the Shattered Lens 