by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
A Mother’s Rage —
ballyhooed as a “world premiere” on Lifetime last night — turned out to be a
quite good thriller if you could ignore the sheer preposterousness of the basic
storyline. Directed with a genuine flair for suspense by Oren Kaplan based on a
story by Shane Mathers and a script by a committee (Mathers, Frederick
Cipoletti, Ron Dobson and Alejandro Salomon), it opens with a scene in which
relentlessly overprotective single mother Rebecca Mayer (Lori Loughlin) is
driving her daughter Conner (Jordan Hinson) to Wheatley University for her
first day in college. While Mom is at a gas station she spies a rather sleazy
character — tall, shabbily dressed, bearded — cruising her daughter as Conner
waits in the car. The man is Kelly (Christopher Backus) and he’s both a car
thief and a white slaver; he chases Rebecca’s BMW and freaks her out so much
that she first tries to evade his pursuit, then has her daughter get out of the
car in the middle of a cornfield (wouldn’t that make her more vulnerable?) while she tries to get the police, only
she can’t because the only way she has of reaching them is her daughter’s cell
phone, whose battery has run down. Eventually Kelly ambushes her, blocks her
path, kidnaps her, commandeers the BMW and says he’s going to sell them both,
the car to the car thieves he’s working for and Rebecca herself to white
slavers, or what used to be called white slavers — “human traffickers” is the
term of art now. Only Rebecca manages to get free of the white rope with which
Kelly has bound her and uses it to strangle him to death.
The first commercial
break falls here, and then comes a scene so far removed from what we’ve been
watching at first it seems like Lifetime mistakenly started showing part of a
different movie instead: small-town sheriff Emily Tobin (Kristen Dalton) is
chewing out her daughter Molly (Alix Elizabeth Gitter) for having started
cutting classes and letting her grades go down when she does attend school. It turns out Molly is doing this
because she’d rather play Number One Offspring to her mom’s Charlie Chan and
help her with her cases — she also seems to have decided she wants to follow in
mom’s footsteps and make law enforcement her career, and for some reason the
writing committee never quite explains, mom is against this. Emily’s passions
are her daughter and solving cases before the state police takes them away from
her department. Her deputies find Kelly’s corpse and she determines to get the
case solved before the state police show up — which they duly do in the person
of a quite hunky officer named Lance Jonson (Matt Corboy), and we detect a burgeoning — or at least potential —
romantic interest between the two even though the writing committee doesn’t get
around to nailing that one down until the very end. The link between the two
story threads is [surprise!] that
Rebecca Mayer is really a mental patient who was hospitalized following a
breakdown after the murder of her daughter Conner two years earlier, and who
freaks out anew on the anniversary of the killing. Neither Emily’s department
nor the state police were ever able to solve the crime, though for some reason
they assumed it was “gang-related” (this is a rural area where it’s hard to
believe gangs would be a problem!), but it turns out that though Rebecca, Kelly
and the BMW are real (it belonged to one of the doctors at the mental hospital
and Rebecca stole it from the parking lot so she could make her escape), most
of what we saw during the opening act was only in Rebecca’s imagination — and
her madness causes her to fantasize that her daughter is still alive and needs
her help to arrive safely at her first day in college. Rebecca seduces a
short-order cook and then suddenly turns against him, shooting him first in the
balls to make him suffer and then in the chest to make him dead.
Then she’s
picked up by a nice-looking, unassuming young man named Calvin (Shaun Sipos),
and the writers lead us up the garden path by making us believe that he’s just
a student hitchhiking to Wheatley for his first day in school, until he overpowers Rebecca, ties her up and
turns out to be [double surprise!]
the person who killed her daughter exactly two years to the day before. Emily
and the state police trace him and we think she’s going to shoot Rebecca and
set Calvin free — only she catches on to what’s happening and shoots Calvin
just as he’s about to kill Rebecca by sawing her up with a surgical saw sans anaesthetic. The shock of having met her daughter’s
murderer seems at the end to have snapped Rebecca back to sanity even though
she’s obviously going to have to suffer some legal jeopardy from having killed two people on her
spree — at least she’s finally aware at long last that her daughter is dead —
and at the end Lance sort-of asks Emily for a date and she sort-of accepts. As
preposterous as this story is, and as dependent as it is not only on outrageous
coincidences but an overuse of the Hitchcockian gimmick (though others used it
before he did) of showing events
on screen that merely represent the lies or delusions of the characters rather
than “real” events in the film’s story, this one is actually quite powerful and
well-staged, and the parallel between Rebecca and Emily as single moms dealing
with teenage daughters are made subtly but unmistakably, with Emily learning some
lessons from Rebecca’s fate that will help her be a better parent (and that it
was Molly who beat her mom to deducing the truth about the case certainly helps
her credibility and helps Emily accept that her daughter wants to be a cop and
she should support her instead of opposing her!).
