LITTLE GIRL LOST: THE DELIMAR VERA STORY. 8 p.m. Sunday, Lifetime.
SOME STORIES have Lifetime movie written all over them.
Including that of Luzaida Cuevas, who in 1997 was told that her infant daughter, Delimar, had died in a fire at their Philadelphia home.
Cuevas, whose daughter's body was never found, refused to believe she had died, and her faith was rewarded: Somehow, while attending a birthday party several years later, she recognized a young girl there as Delimar, obtained a bit of her hair for a DNA sample and ultimately proved that the child was hers.
They were reunited in 2004, and the following year, the woman who'd been raising Delimar under another name in Willingboro, N.J., was sentenced to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty to kidnapping and other charges.
That's the bare bones of the story that ran in the papers, including this one, at the time, and that's the story they're telling Sunday in Lifetime's "Little Girl Lost: The Delimar Vera Story," a straightforward recap of a tale that's maybe never felt quite as straightforward as it appears here.
Feelings aren't facts, though, and Lifetime seems to be sticking with those that make the prettiest picture.
"Scrubs'" Judy Reyes, who plays Cuevas, manages to make her character's unwavering faith - not to mention her immediate recognition of a child she hadn't seen since she was 10 days old - entirely believable.
But then, who wouldn't want to believe in a mother's love?
Oh, you might wonder, as I did, about how Delimar, who was renamed by her abductor, has adjusted to being reunited with a family she couldn't possibly remember while losing contact with the only mother she'd ever known, but these are the kinds of challenges the movie glosses over quickly, leaving Reyes - and viewers - to revel in a conclusion we're just supposed to take on faith.
Things aren't so easy for "Ugly Betty's" Ana Ortiz, who plays Delimar's abductor.
Ortiz, a University of the Arts graduate (and the daughter of former City Councilman Angel Ortiz), is saddled with a cipher of a character, one whose name has been changed in the movie from Carolyn Correa to Valerie Valleja.
A cousin by marriage of the child's father, she's said to have set a fire to cover up the kidnapping. But while there are suggestions of possible mental problems, her motives remain murky, her methods even more so.
And despite some attempts to portray her as a pushy stage mother, there's no suggestion here that she'd treated Delimar as anything but a beloved daughter.
Nevertheless, that wasn't her daughter she was raising, it was a grieving mother's.
And so Valerie/Carolyn counts as yet another bad-girl character for Ortiz, for whom "Ugly Betty's" Hilda Suarez might have been expected to mark a departure, signaling casting directors to look beyond a string of slutty and/or unpleasant TV roles to the far greater range she's been allowed to show as Hilda.
Maybe they're not watching yet on Lifetime, where only a few weeks ago, Ortiz guest-starred on "Army Wives" - as a would-be blackmailer. *
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