In Ursula Macfarlane’s riveting “stranger than fiction” documentary, a man who was kidnapped as a baby and found two years later starts to question whether he is, in fact, the child or the parents who raised him. The investigation he begins as an adult is as compelling — and as full of twists and as heartbreaking — as the Oscar-nominated doc Three Identical Strangers.
In October 1964, a newborn baby was kidnapped from a Chicago hospital.
A woman disguised as a nurse walked out with the baby and was never seen again. The distraught parents, Dora and Chester Fronczak, made frequent pleas to the kidnapper to return the baby. The news slowly subsided from the headlines, until a toddler was found abandoned two years later in New Jersey. After efforts to find the parents failed, investigators realized this might be the missing Fronczak child.
When the FBI took the child to meet the Fronczaks, Dora confirmed that this was, in fact, her missing son, Paul.
Paul grew up not knowing about the kidnapping, until he was about 10 and came across some newspaper clippings. His mother quickly confirmed that yes, he had been kidnapped as a child and told him to forget about it.
Naturally, something as earth-shaking as that is not something you can just forget about. Paul grew up, moved away, joined a band, and started acting. But it wasn’t until he had his own daughter that he realized the question of his real parentage was still nagging at him.
He asked his parents to take a DNA test with him. They agreed, but then immediately changed their mind. They didn’t want to open that Pandora’s box. But Paul would not be satisfied until he knew the truth, even if it meant alienating his parents.
Much of the story was told in Paul’s 2016 book, The Foundling. But the documentary takes up several new lines of investigation, with many of them playing out on-screen.
Paul becomes so obsessed with finding the truth, his own wife leaves him.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of other documentary subjects’ search for the truth: The triplets in Three Identical Strangers; in Wormwood, the son of the CIA agent who fell to his death under mysterious circumstances; and The Witness, where the brother of Kitty Genovese tries to determine the facts of her often-misreported case decades after the fact.
At some point, each of the subjects questions whether the elusive truth is worth all the sacrifices it takes to get it. Or if the truth can ever fully be known, especially after so much time.
Digging up the past opens up a lot of wounds, old and new, for Paul and his entire family. But we’re right there with him, rooting for him to get the answers he needs.
While I won’t spoil the revelations made in the film, I will say that as I was streaming it and saw there were only 20 minutes left, I was begging, “Don’t end yet!”
The movie does not tie up everything neatly in a bow, although it does go much farther than Paul was able to on his own.
This is a don’t-miss documentary that I hope is not the end of the story.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
* * * * *
Produced by Ross M. Dinerstein, Courtney Sexton,
Amy Entelis, Alexandra Hannibal, Gagan Rehill
Directed by Ursula Macfarlane
Featuring Paul Fronczak
