Natalee Holloway (DVD)

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"Natalee Holloway" is the kind of made-for-TV movie that's hard to watch, because it's every parent's nightmare: your child turns up missing and is presumed dead. But one gets the feeling that this movie was made, in part, to get the word out to parents and their teens to keep such things from happening to others.

Holloway, you may recall, was the Alabama high school senior who went to Aruba with more than a hundred classmates and too-few chaperones to celebrate graduation. She partied and drank too much at Carlos 'n' Charlie's in Oranjestad, then got into a car with three local men, one of whom pretended to be a visiting student from the Netherlands. She was last seen that night of May 30, 2005.

As the police and everyone on this little Dutch island in the Caribbean told her mother when she flew there to look for her daughter, "It's a peaceful island. No one has ever been seriously hurt or killed here. She'll turn up. " But she didn't.

Part of the pain in watching this story comes from knowing what's going to happen before it happens, because details were in every newspaper and on every news broadcast. Aruba came under fire for its indifferent and sloppy handling of the case, and Natalee's parents at one point tried to drum up public support for a boycott of this little tourist-dependent nation. Nothing worked. What happened to Natalee and the disposition of her body is still a mystery.

But it's also painful to watch because, in a way, Natalee Holloway died of stupidity. This was a smart girl who was on track to go to college and med school who did what 17- to 21-year olds do all too often: either drink so much that it affects their judgment in profound ways, or fail to be wary of strangers. In bars smart people often do stupid things. But seeing the way that this little trip was framed by the filmmakers, it's hard not to conclude that it was just as stupid to let a large group of students that age go to a tropical country were the drinking age is 18, without enough chaperones. I've taken students abroad, and 20 can be a handful for two adults. We never are told how many adults were part of Natalee's group, but we only see one--the organizer--and he's not present the last night of the trip when the kids were letting it all hang out. Personally, I can understand an academic trip with social time built in, but a completely "fun" trip for high school students to celebrate their graduation? Even without knowing this tragic story, it sounds like a recipe for disaster.

A grown-up Tracy Pollan, who played Alex's girlfriend Ellen on "Family Ties," does a nice job as Natalee's mother, Beth Holloway Twitty. Because of the subject matter, it's probably both an easy piece of method acting and an impossibly difficulty one. Though Beth is supported by other adults in her life--her husband, Jug (Grant Show) and best friend Carol (Catherine Dent)--everything really falls on her. Apart from Natalee (Amy Gumenick), who's on-camera in the beginning and in flashbacks with the three men who pick her up-Joran Van Der Sloot (Jacques Strydom), Deepak Kalpoe (Clayton Evertson), and his brother Satish-the main focus is on Beth and her attempts to get to the bottom of what happened. As she tries to investigate, Joran's father (Sean Cameron Michael) tries to obfuscate, and the local detective (Sean Higgs) drags his feet.