Just saw the film and was very pleasantly surprised, but I have questions about the Martin character. In the insurance film, he was shown wearing glasses but not blind...was he really blind at the end or had he just quit wearing his glasses? Had Martin and Stella/Julie gotten married? Did Martin kill Stella/Julie to keep her from saving her sister, or did she kill herself?
shareI had the same questions. Also, there's a scene on the insurance video where it looks like Martin is leading Stella to a car and opening the door for her. I'm wondering, who the hell is going to be driving the car if Martin is almost blind. He also looks up at the camera at that point - as if seeing the photographer.
I also don't understand why Aidan Quinn didn't call Kelly Preston's character the minute he found the child. He could have driven the child over to the D.A.'s office and had the parents him them there. The film never seems to create a real sense of the ticking clock in the last minutes.
Yes, big issue was that look to camera he does. And then at end he's blind again? I wish the filmmaker would hop on here and let us know what that was about. I'm thinking he was not blind at the end but nothing would really let us know that for sure, just a guess. :(
shareI think that he was near-sighted at the time of the video and his sight worsened over the time and he became almost blind.
shareI think he was not totally blind at the end but still could not see well and perhaps the glasses did not do any good anymore at that point so he quit wearing them. He stated to Frank earlier when they were walking through the hall of the school to see Stella/Julie that only about 30% of the students at the school were totally blind. He may have had some vision that could not be corrected with any type of lenses so he wasn't wearing glasses then.
It was never explicitly stated he and Stella/Julie had ever actually gotten married--just the lawyer Kennan said she had met someone, changed her name and moved away. When the police officer Charbonic brought her clothes to the school to give to Martin the officer said he had his wife's clothes but that is the only reference made to their actually being married in the version I saw.
Even though it was never really expounded on, Frank intimated Martin killed Stella/Julie and made it look like a suicide to keep the truth from coming out. Frank remembered the sound on the playground as being the sound he had heard in the background on the phone call he received when no one would speak. He presumed then it was Stella/Julie calling him wanting to tell him the truth but could not bring herself to speak it at that point. Martin obviously loved their "daughter" very much and he did not want his world to be disrupted anymore than it already had been by Frank bringing Charlotte back into the forefront of their lives. It would be a very plausible conclusion to come to believe that Martin had killed her and staged a suicide since Stella/Julie did not seem to be a weak minded person who could not stand up to the truth; Martin probably realized she would eventually tell someone even if it came out too late to save her sister. If the truth came out his world would crumble as the child they had raised as their own would inevitably be returned to the true parents and he and Stella/Julie would be going to prison.