by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a film I recorded off
Lifetime a couple of weeks ago: She Made Them Do It, a pretty clinical and game-giving-away title for
what turned out to be an unusually good thriller, supposedly based on a true
story, in which the “she” of the title is Sarah Ponder (Jenna Dewan-Tatum). At
the start of the movie Sarah is touring the campus of Purdue University with
her boyfriend Rick (the very hot-looking Greyston Holt). She had to drop out earlier but is planning
to re-enroll there in the fall with the $2,500 in cash she’s saved up from the
drug-dealing she and Rick have been doing — though it’s made clear in the
opening that Rick is the drug user in the couple and Sarah the brains of the
operation. Only Rick has opened their home to some ne’er-do-well house guests,
a man and a woman who have stolen Sarah’s $2,500 and used it to buy cocaine,
which they were planning to sell but in the great tradition of bad drug stories
(both fictional and real-life) are using themselves. Furious, Sarah demands
that Rick do something about the pair who’ve ripped her off — and he does so by
getting a shotgun Sarah bought him the day before and offing them. Writer Gary
Tieche and director Grant Harvey show a couple of alternate versions of this
incident later on in the movie — including one at the end that shows Sarah
actually wielding the gun herself — but it’s hard to take that seriously given
that in the next two hours (less commercials) Sarah’s usual modus operandi is to (as the title suggests) get other people to
commit crimes for her rather than to do anything illegal by her own hand. Sarah
and Rick make an inept attempt to flee but they’re caught after Rick makes the
rookie mistake of renting a motel room for them with his credit card — he’s
supposed to be the one with the criminal record but it’s Sarah who’s convicted
of the killings (Rick maintains he shot the pair in self-defense but the cops
don’t believe that, mainly because they didn’t report the crime immediately and
tried to run away instead) after the bodies of the dead pair are found in a
nearby dumpster (where Rick threw them away surprisingly easily given how heavy
a dead human really is and how hard one is to lift).
Sarah gets a 50-year
sentence for killing the male half of the couple and a consecutive 60-year sentence for killing the woman — and she
stays in touch with Jamie (Mackenzie Phillips), whom she met in jail while
awaiting trial and with whom she had a Lesbian affair. Then in prison — this is
in Indiana, by the way — she romances not only one of her fellow female inmates
but also a male guard, Spitler (Nels Lennarson), whom she literally seduces
into helping her escape after her appeals are exhausted. Once she’s out she
goes through all her prison acquaintances — including Farrell (Lisa Marie
Caruk), a young mother of two whose aunt and uncle, who were taking care of her
kids during her incarceration, whose parole she jeopardizes by coming to their
place and asking to stay there; and also Cheryl (Bethany Brown), a butch Black
woman who also looked like one of Sarah’s jailhouse flames. Jamie and Spitler
eventually ended up serving time themselves for helping Sarah break out of
prison, but none of the other people were prosecuted — apparently U.S. marshal
Jeff Harlan (who’s not identified on the imdb.com page for the movie or on
Lifetime’s official site for it even though he’s the principal character in the
second half of the movie) didn’t let up and pursued Sarah with a Javert-like
(or Ahab-like) persistence and ultimately got her case featured regularly on America’s
Most Wanted, which eventually got her
turned in by Bob (Andrew Airlie), a wealthy paper manufacturer who met up with
Sarah when she turned up at the strip club where Jamie worked, looking for a
rich pigeon she could seduce, and at one point Bob set her up in an apartment
and it looked like she was going to be his long-term mistress until he got
tired of her, realized how having her around could jeopardize his marriage — to
which she responded by going onto his computer and looking up undetectable
poisons on the Web (“Is she going to go Double Indemnity on us?” I started to wonder) — and though it’s not
spelled out in Tieche’s script it’s pretty clear we’re meant to think that Bob
was the anonymous tipster who called the law on her and gave up her whereabouts
in order to save his marriage from both a messy divorce and a psycho mistress
who wanted to do his wife in and replace her.
So far there are no comments on
the movie from the imdb.com site but on Lifetime’s site for the movie there are
several, including some defending Sarah. One of them was from Jamie’s husband
(depicted in the film as a fat, grey-haired slob who stole the money Jamie was
holding for Sarah — she had an underground business selling prescription drugs
inside the prison but needed a “banker” to hold the proceeds for her outside —
to buy a Jacuzzi; judging from what happened the last time someone stole a large sum of money from
Sarah, he should have been watching his back!), who wrote, “I can honestly say
that I saw very little truth or facts in most of this great work of fiction.
This movie … is based on a few far-stretched facts and the writer’s
imagination. The truth will come out when Sarah is vindicated and we’ll see if
they want to make a movie out of the REAL story and how the system failed Sarah
and continues to fail others in the Indiana Judicial system. The acting was
good and so was the story, it’s just sad it was nowhere near the truth.” At
least two other posters expressed similar sentiments (including one claiming
that Sarah’s original prosecutor has switched sides and is now on her defense
team) — quite a surprise given that when Lifetime usually does a true-crime
dramatization involving a woman culprit they’re generally criticized the other
way by people who say they’re whitewashing the female and making her look less
guilty than she really was.
Be that as it may — and I say this as someone who
knows nothing about the real case — She
Made Them Do It is quite a good movie, not
a deathless classic but several cuts above the Lifetime norm, made great (or at
least greater than usual) by Harvey’s relentless, fast-moving direction and,
above all, by Jenna Dewan-Tatum’s performance in the lead. Recognizing that an
all-out bravura femme fatale performance like Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity, Mary Beth Hughes’ in The Great Flamarion or Ann Savage’s in Detour would just be laughed off the screen today,
Dewan-Tatum plays Sarah with a kind of relentless, demented perkiness that
probably gave Mackenzie Phillips some uncomfortable flashbacks to the way
Valerie Bertinelli played off her in the 1970’s sitcom One Day at a Time and eclipsed both her and the actress playing
their mom. At one point Harlan complains that he can’t get a handle on Sarah’s
shifting identities — “She’s Manson, she’s Gandhi, she’s Gay, she’s straight” —
in other words, she’s whatever she has to be to survive and maintain herself in
the circumstances in which she finds herself. She Made Them Do It doesn’t try to offer any more than the most obvious
insights into What Made Sarah Run (in both senses of the word!) but it’s still
a fun and gripping movie, even though that out-of-character flashback showing
her actually shooting two people (a version of the crime which Sarah’s
defenders on the Lifetime comments page say no one, not even people who were convinced she was
guilty, say happened — whatever her culpability, it’s clear Rick actually
pulled the trigger) ends the movie on a weird and gratuitously violent note.
Still, it’s a good thriller and especially convincing in depicting the sexual
thrall with which Sarah holds her seducees of both genders and gets them to do
her bidding.
