Rumor Has It...

I can't get over the movie Rumor Has It... with Jennifer Aniston that I saw months ago. It's beyond infuriating.

Here's a plot summary:

 Sarah Huttington, recently engaged, goes home to Pasadena with fiancé Jeff for a family wedding. She hears a rumor that "The Graduate" (book and movie) are based on her family. Did her grandmother and her mom have flings with the same man just before her parents married? Is she a strange man's child; does this explain why she doesn't fit in? Was her mother happy? Is she too facing a loveless marriage? Where can she seek answers: her mother's dead, her father's a pleasant naïf. Ask her salty grandma? Better to ask the man in the triangle, the real Benjamin Braddock. With Jeff's blessing, Sarah heads for San Francisco, looking for the key to her past and to her future.

So far, so good, right? Much is made of her desire to find her real father and connect with him. Her quest is shown with a lot of sympathy.

Well, what happens next is this: she finds BB, her potential father, and he tells her that he can't be that because he's infertile due to a football injury. So they too have a fling which makes her the third generation of women in her family who's done that.

The next day, however, she meets BB's son, which naturally shocks her, and she confronts her once more potential father with it. He says he wasn't lying, he really is infertile, and his son was donor conceived, but he doesn't know it, and shouldn't find out now. Sarah promptly promises to keep this secret.

What's wrong with this picture? Why am I so angered by it that I find it hard to collect my thoughts?

In short, it makes me feel like a second-class person. Or make that third-class person: second-class persons are those who don't know their fathers and are looked down on because of that, but at least their desire to know is not denied. The donor conceived have no rights to facts or feelings.

The dc boy is shown as a clueless, spoiled, arrogant brat. He certainly ought to be grateful to have been created and even loved and accepted by BB, one is inclined to feel. And he certainly couldn't handle the truth - he's so obviously inferior to Sarah in her quest zest.