by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Actually, Girlfriend Killer looked like a masterpiece compared to the truly weird movie Lifetime
showed immediately after it, The Good Nanny, which seemed like a deliberate attempt by
writer-director Jake Helgren to reverse the formula originated by Christine Conradt
in her first Lifetime script, The Perfect Nanny (2000). Whereas that one, the first in Conradt’s
long line of “Perfect _____” scripts, had given us a basically decent suburban
family set upon by a seemingly perfect but actually psycho woman they hire as a
nanny, Helgren’s script gave us a woman who isn’t even a professional nanny —
she’s an interior designer, Summer Pratt (Lifetime veteran Briana Evigan),
who’s been hired to decorate the home of Travis and Lily Walsh (Peter Porte and
Ellen Hollman) and ends up agreeing to look after their rather squirrelly
daughter Sophie (Sophie Gurst). Summer is at liberty to do this because her own
fiancé, Hefner (David Tillman), is out of town because he’s just been hired to
do lobbying for the company Travis and Lily Walsh own — and though they Skype
each other regularly she’s getting restive as his absence gets longer and
longer. Summer’s other big problem is that she has a medical condition that
makes it difficult to conceive, and since she wants children more than just
about anything else in the world that bothers her probably more than it should.
(I’ve known many straight people of both sexes who would have loved
to be able to have sex with each other without having to bother with either the
risk of pregnancy or the affirmative steps needed to avoid it.) When she starts
filling in as Travis’s and Lily’s nanny, Summer has a hard time getting through
to Sophie because she literally
doesn’t speak — our first intimation that she even can speak is when Summer hears Sophie talking to an
apparently imaginary friend named “Sasha,” and though both the voices are
Sophie’s they carry out an audible conversation in which Summer can hear both
Sophie and “Sasha” exchanging misgivings about how the new nanny doesn’t like
them any better than the last one did. Helgren shows a certain flair for the
Gothic, though his effects with low-keyed lighting, offbeat camera angles and
doomy music seem to be playing against his relatively straightforward story and
he takes his own sweet time explaining to us just what’s wrong with this
picture — why Sophie seems so
alienated from her parents, why they seem to regard her as a burden and Travis
in particular makes it pretty clear he doesn’t want her around at all.
Eventually, with the help of her friend, African-American pediatrician Dr.
Monica Thorne (Tatyana Ali, the only cast member here I can remember seeing, or
even hearing of, ouside the corridors of Lifetime) — the usual Lifetime Black
person whose plot function is to serve as the voice of reason and try to steer
the white characters away from all the stupid things they have to do for this,
or any other Lifetime movie, to have a plot at all — Summer finally catches on
that “Sasha” and Sophie are actually the same person. Her real name is Sasha
Carter and she’s the daughter, not of Lily, but of her scapegrace sister Tara
(a nicely slatternly bad-girl performance by Kym Jackson), who’s been a
fugitive from justice ever since she stabbed her abusive husband (the father of
Sophie a.k.a. Sasha) to death. Unfortunately Summer’s efforts to trace Tara
succeed all too well; after risking her job in a restaurant kitchen by taking
Summer’s call at work, Tara determines to crash Travis’s and Lily’s lavish
Southern California home and steal back her daughter. Lily, it seems, took
Sasha in the first place because she visited her sister and found the girl
being neglected, but her interest in parenting beyond just providing food,
clothing and shelter was virtually nil — and when Tara shows up to retrieve her
daughter she’s carrying a gun. She uses a kitchen knife to stab Travis to
death, intending that Lily will be blamed for this and Tara won’t be suspected,
and all this leads to a final big confrontation on a beach (this is southern California, after all) in which Tara
kidnaps Sasha, Summer and Lily get Sasha a.k.a. Sophie away from her, Tara
shoots down her sister Lily and then demands that Summer give Sasha back to
her, and Summer approaches Tara, seemingly about to return her daughter, only she has a knife on her and uses it to stab Tara and save
the girl from her mom’s clutches. The Good Nanny is an annoying movie — the ending is powerful, if
unusually melodramatic even for Lifetime (and where, oh where, is official law
enforcement? In Lifetime’s earlier days it was actually fairly frequent for
their movies to end in a free-lance bloodbath, but more recently there’s
generally been some police
involvement in the denouement
even though it remains more common for Lifetime’s villains to be killed than to
be arrested at the end), but it’s been a long, hard slog to get there.
There are some neat touches to The Good Nanny, including one in which Travis is getting out of his
swimming pool (and yes, the sight of Peter Porte’s great bod clad only in swim
trunks is an aesthetic delight!), sees Summer and invites her to join him —
“I’m sure Lily has an extra bikini … if you feel you really need one,” he says
— and later Summer tells Lily about her concerns about Sophie and the way she’s
growing up, mentions her encounter with Travis as an aside, and all Lily cares
about is, “You mean Travis came on to you?” There’s also a preposterous ending
in which, with just about every other adult in her life dead, Sophie a.k.a.
Sasha ends up with, you guessed it, Summer and her boyfriend, who’ve given
themselves the challenge of raising her and trying to get her to be a normal
kid after all she’s gone through. But Helgren also supplies one of the most
blatant “cheat” sequences in Lifetime history — as often in Lifetime movies, we
first get an opening “teaser” scene and then a flashback to the main body of
the film, but in this one the “teaser” turns out merely to be one of Summer’s dreams which express her anguish at not being able to have
a child of her own. If there’s a worthwhile element in The Good Nanny, it’s the fascinating performance of Ellen Hollman
as Lily; she begins the story as a virtual Stepford wife, amazingly and almost
annoyingly chipper, but as the story progresses and we see how sick all the adults in it are except for Summer and Dr.
Thorne, Hollman’s acting rises to the challenge of the character and we realize
that she and Tara are nowhere nearly as different as we thought when Tara first
came onto the action (though by a glitch in the casting Kym Jackson looks more like
Briana Evigan than like Ellen Hollman, and so we’d more likely believe that
Tara and Summer were sisters than Tara and Lily!). Other than that, though, The
Good Nanny is a pretty dreary and draining
Lifetime non-epic whose attempts to “spin” fresh variations on the basic
Lifetime formulae only come off as desperate and draggy.
