by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “world premiere” Lifetime movie last night was The
Perfect Daughter, a title which led me to
assume Christine Conradt wrote it and it was another in her series of “The
Perfect _____” movies (as opposed to her “_____ at 17” movies and her “The
_____ S/he Met Online” movies). Wrong on both counts: it was directed by Brian
Herzlinger from a script by Brian McAuley, and was originally shot as The
Carpenter’s Daughter until someone at
Marvista Entertainment or Lifetime itself decided to give it a moniker that
would include the word “Perfect” to fit it into their long-running occasional
series. The first 40 minutes or so were pretty disappointing, as we get to meet
good little high-school senior Natalie Parish (Sadie Calvano) and her dad
Martin Parish (Brady Smith, a better-looking man than usually plays a
teenager’s parent in a Lifetime movie). Martin has a two-person building
contractor business with his former brother-in-law, Nick Barnes (Johann Urb,
who despite some formidable competition struck me as the sexiest man in the
film), and he’s also been raising his daughter as a single parent since the
death of his wife Sarah years earlier — long enough ago that Natalie has no
living memory of her mom and the only evidence we see of her is a framed photo
of the three of them taken while Natalie was still an infant. At the start of
the film Natalie is running for student body treasurer against the
ultra-popular Kalie (Lorynn York) and she fully expects to lose — only she wins
(oddly, Herzlinger and McAuley depict Kalie’s class speech but not Natalie’s, keeping us in suspense for an act or two
as to how the election turned out), and as a result Sam Cahill, Kalie’s
boyfriend, dumps her and invites Natalie to the school hockey game that night
(he’s the school’s star hockey player and is counting on his skill in that
sport to get him a scholarship to college) and to a party at his place right
after. Complicating things is that Sam’s father, attorney Brian Cahill (Parker
Stevenson, who 40 years ago was Shaun Cassidy’s sidekick on the Hardy
Boys show), just arranged for Martin and
Nick to get a major remodeling job at a home in Deer Hills (we see a sign
identifying the community as Deer Hills several times but it’s unclear whether
that’s the name of the whole town or just the most affluent section of it)
which involves building a pergola — and one of the few comic-relief moments in
McAuley’s script shows the two agreeing with their prospective client that they
can build him a pergola when they clearly have no idea what a pergola is.
(Fortunately, it’s the 21st century and they can always look it up
online: according to Wikipedia, “A pergola, arbor, or arbour is a garden feature forming a
shaded walkway, passageway, or sitting area of vertical posts or pillars that
usually support cross-beams and a sturdy open lattice, often upon which woody vines are trained. The origin of the word
is the Late Latin pergula, referring to a projecting eave. As a type of gazebo, it may also be an extension of a
building or serve as protection for an open terrace or a link between pavilions. They are different from green tunnels.”)
Alas, the
next time Martin sees his daughter she’s in the middle of the road, clearly
pretty much out of it, and she admits she drank too much at the party. Dad gets
her into his truck and takes her to the emergency room, where she’s admitted,
diagnosed with alcohol poisoning and also discovered to have had sex. She
insists that she consented and that Sam Cahill was her partner — the party
ended abruptly when the other guests caught them at it and left — but Dad is
convinced she was raped and demands that police detective Schaffer (Drew
Rausch) investigate the case as a rape. Schaffer accordingly calls in Sam
Cahill for an interrogation, which naturally makes his father angry. Meanwhile Natalie is sitting at home
alone and moping a lot, rejecting her dad’s attempts to get close to her, and
this makes dad more and more convinced she was raped since the signs of her mental state seem to
match those in a pamphlet Schaffer gave him called Symptoms of Sexual
Assault. The melodrama ramps up even more
when Natalie gets something that looks an awful lot like morning sickness and
she gives herself a home pregnancy test, with her school friend Tess (Blaine
Saunders) for moral support — and she finds she is indeed pregnant with Sam’s
baby. (“Oh, no,” you go, “not another
infallible pregnancy at a single contact.”) When they find out — Natalie breaks
the news to Sam at the Cahill home, where she’s fled because daddy has become so angry and judgmental she can’t live with him
anymore, and Sam’s mother Julie (Meredith Salenger) overhears them and tells
Sam’s dad — Bruce Cahill offers to arrange an abortion at a clinic where they
do the procedure simply by prescribing pills. Natalie goes to the clinic with
Sam and they get the pills (they’re in a state with a parental notification law
but Bruce Cahill, as an attorney, is able to get a judge to sign a bypass
order) but Daddy confronts them there and Natalie flees the scene by stealing
Sam’s car. Martin and Sam try to track her down, first at a lake where Martin
had taken his daughter fishing and she’d been bored (which reminded me of the
day my dad tried to take me
fishing, and I was equally bored) until she actually caught something, and then
at the Pink Motel. It seems that Natalie’s mom Sarah had been seeing another
man and meeting him for trysts at the Pink Motel (which really exists; they
shot at a monumentally tacky-looking one in Santa Monica) and had planned to
leave her husband for him until she got sick, her boyfriend dumped her and she
returned to her husband so he could take care of her while she was dying. It
also seems that Julie Cahill was an ex-girlfriend of Martin’s — they dated
until they broke up, she married Bruce and Martin married Sarah — one good thing about McAuley’s script is it shows just how
closed-in a small-town environment can be and how it’s as much of a bad thing
as it is a good one that everyone seems to know everyone else.
For the first
hour or so The Perfect Daughter
is the sort of movie that makes you wonder why you’re bothering to watch it — if
you stick with it you’ll get angrier and angrier at Martin and think he, not his daughter, is the irresponsible one — but
about midway through this film clicks into high gear. It becomes obvious that
Herzlinger and McAuley want you
to think of Martin as the villain — indeed, aside from Julie Cahill, virtually all the adults in the movie act irresponsibly and
crazily and it’s Sam and Natalie who, having made their one big mistake
(getting plastered at that party and having sex without “protection”), are far
more responsible than the grownups in dealing with the aftermath and making
competent, sensible decisions instead of letting their emotions run away with
them — down to Natalie’s cold-blooded calculation that she and Sam (who have to
work together anyway since she’s the student body treasurer and he’s the
president) should indulge in as many public displays of affection as possible
so her classmates will realize she wanted to have sex with him and he was not a rapist. A movie that seemed
unbearably larded-on in the first half suddenly acquires real emotional heft
and power, as McAuley’s writing improves and his characters take on multiple
dimensions and become believable as human beings instead of stick figures in a
Lifetime melodrama. He even dares an inconclusive ending: it ends with Natalie
clutching the bottle of abortion pills (incidentally the “A”-word is never used
on the soundtrack — this is still American television, after all) but unsure as
to whether she wants to take them or carry the pregnancy to term and have the
baby. (Given that I got my girlfriend pregnant when I was 24 and she was 18,
and she had an abortion — thereby costing me the only child I will ever
conceive because eventually I came out as Gay and haven’t had sex with a woman
in over 33 years — Natalie’s and Sam’s dilemma strongly resonated emotionally
with me.) For the first half of this film you might be tempted to turn it off
or change the channel in mid-stream, but stay with The Perfect
Daughter and it will provide you a wrenching
emotional experience, hammered home not only by the subtlety of McAuley’s
writing (for once a Lifetime movie does not come to a pat, easy conclusion; also, for once in a
Lifetime movie, the characters grow, change and learn something about
themselves over the film’s running time, especially when daddy Martin realizes
that the reason he’s been so relentlessly overprotective of his daughter is
fear that without a tight leash, she’d grow up like her mom and become sexually
adventurous with multiple partners) but the quiet strength of Herzlinger’s
direction and fine acting by a well-assembled cast — notably Smith as Martin,
Stevenson as Bruce Cahill and Reiley McClendon, a stocky young man with a
facial resemblance to the young Elvis, as Sam — he’s nice-looking but not so
overwhelmingly attractive you’d wonder why half the girls in school aren’t
carrying his kids!
