Its “After School Special” meets “Degrassi” in this PSA dressed as a short film. Though it tries again and again to veer away from such entrapments, from the very beginning you can’t help feel as if the director and basically the writer are trying to tell all the young teen girls out there something about pre-marital sex. I mean, hey, there’s nothing wrong with informing young girls about it, I’m all for sex education and letting kids know how to have safe sex, but when you take a PSA and dress it as a short film, you tend to feel as duped as I did. Luckily, I’ve never slipped one past the goalie, and I don’t intend to for a while, but the problem with “Carrie’s Choice” is its never sure what it’s trying to be. Is it a nostalgic drama? A sweet slice of life? A tragic romance? Or a PSA to young girls? I was never really sure because the writing takes us in to all sorts of directions from the very beginning, and we basically know the outcome since our two main characters appear from the get go.
Carrie is a high schooler who meets a guy and gets pregnant. Carrie has the possibility to be a great artist, but now this baby is in the way and she’s deciding what she wants to do with it. The problem is the situations are never taken seriously enough to keep our attention, and the writing doesn’t examine the characters enough for us to feel for them. We go from Carrie’s flashbacks in 1987 where she’s trying to find a way to deal with this, back to modern times where she’s pregnant, and is on the way to the hospital. She’s excited in one scenario where she’s also successful, and she’s not in the other. “Carrie’s Choice” could have been an entertaining imitation of “Now and Then”, but it’s much too preachy to be taken lightly. Is life always this easy? I doubt it, but the writing usually paints it that way. Things end too easily and unresolved, and there’s never enough reality drawn in to both situations for us to care about it. Though the production qualities are pleasing, everything else fails because it’s scattered in different directions never focusing on one theme.
