Movie Review: SOUND OF HOPE: THE STORY OF POSSUM TROT

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / B

Posted: July 5th, 2024 / 02:33 AM

SOUND OF HOPE movie poster | ©2024 Angel Studios

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Nika King, Demetrius Grosse, Elizabeth Mitchell, Diaana Babnicova, Kaysi J. Bradley, Taj Johnson
Writers: Joshua Weigel & Rebekah Weigel
Director: Joshua Weigel
Distributor: Angel Studios
Release Date: July 4, 2024

The true story of what happened in Possum Trot, Texas has been extensively covered in the press and in documentaries. Now, in SOUND OF HOPE: THE STORY OF POSSUM TROT, director Joshua Weigel & his co-writer Rebekah Weigel bring a dramatized version of those events to the screen.

Possum Trot is a small, mostly Black town in rural East Texas. In the ‘90s (and perhaps still), the Bennett Chapel Baptist Church is a center of community life. People look to Reverend C.W. Martin (Demetrius Grosse) and his wife, church First Lady Donna Martin (Nika King), for inspiration and guidance.

Donna serves as our narrator. She explains that she is one of her mother’s eighteen children, which means that there are plenty of siblings and cousins around. Donna and C.W. have two children, preteen daughter Ladonna (Kaysi J. Bradley) and autistic young son Princeton (Taj Johnson). They seem to be a happy family.

But when Donna’s mother dies, Donna’s grief renders her almost immobile. She is brought out of this by her belief that the Lord has told her that she and C.W. should look into adopting children.

C.W. is against this for a few reasons, starting with the fact that the two kids they’ve got are a handful, and that Donna hasn’t been coping well lately. Then there’s the financial aspect.

But Donna’s outreach inspires her sister Diann to adopt. Meeting his new nephew seems to move C.W., and soon he and Donna adopt young brother and sister Mercedes (Aria Pulliam) and Tyler (Asher Clay), whose mother was shot in front of them.

Soon, a lot of other families in Possum Trot are opening up their own homes and families to adopt, much to the joy of hard-working Social Services employee Susan Ramsey (Elizabeth Mitchell).

Buoyed up by enthusiasm, Donna and C.W. actively lobby Susan to place an otherwise unplaceable child with them. Expressing strong reservations, Susan nevertheless sends preteen Terri (Diaana Babnicova) to the Martin home.

Terri has been through real horror in her short life. She has been raped, beaten, subjected to psychological abuse, and her mother murdered Terri’s older sister. After this, Terri has been subjected to some awful foster homes. Donna and C.W. – to say nothing of their other children, especially LaDonna – are not prepared for the ways in which Terri acts out.

SOUND OF HOPE: THE STORY OF POSSUM TROT holds our interest and has plenty of energy. This remains true even when, at about the halfway point, it turns from the story of the town into the story of how the Martins and Terri specifically deal with each other.

The filmmakers deserve a lot of credit for scenes of frank discussions about what is best for Terri, best for the rest of the Martin children, and best for the optics of the larger adoption system, which may be in opposition to each other.

It would be nice to get a broader perspective of how all of this was seen in the wider church community. There is one sequence where C.W. goes for help to a pastor (played by director Weigel) at a bigger – and whiter – church. We can’t exactly tell if we’re meant to understand that what we’re seeing is a clash of financial class, race, a combination of both, or just the other pastor’s general resistance to engaging with the Martins’ mission.

The movie seems on less firm ground when it tries to show Terri’s distress. We get bits and pieces, but not enough of a picture for us to feel like we fully understand her trajectory.

For that matter, there don’t seem to be any problems within the homes themselves – there’s no talk of problematic families (logic suggests there might be at least one or two).

The characters, except for Susan, are highly religious, although there is enough emphasis on practical action and empathy for non-religious viewers to buy how all of this functions.

SOUND OF HOPE: THE STORY OF POSSUM TROT has an extended ending. First, we get some impressive statistics. Twenty-two of the town’s families adopted seventy-seven children altogether, many of them considered hard to place.

We then get a more sobering statistic: there are 100,000 children in need of adoption in 2024.

After this, we meet the real people, as they are in 2024, who are portrayed in the film, and are updated on how and what they are doing.

Finally, now-Bishop C.W. Martin and Donna Martin address the audience, and ask people to adopt and support adoption. It’s a worthwhile cause, although some viewers may balk at their emphasis on helping Christian churches specifically facilitate this. (It’s understandable, given the Martins’ own background, but it seems a little narrow in scope.)

What we come away with mainly, though, is that great good was done. The portrait is a little less nuanced than we might want, but it’s lively and generally engaging.

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A fact-based film about a lot of adoptions

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A fact-based film about a lot of adoptions

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