by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the latest
Lifetime “premiere,” a film called The Girl in the Bathtub which Lifetime has
been heavily hyping all week with an inventive trailer showing the titular
heroine, Julia Law (Caitlin Stacey), in one of those maddeningly vertical videos beloved of
smartphone users while her voice-over narration boasts that the day she died
this video got 2 million hits online. Yes, that’s right: like the masterpiece Sunset
Boulevard and the messterpiece Scared to Death, this is one of
those movies that’s narrated from beyond the grave by a central character who’s
dead at the outset of the film. The story is framed as an extended set of
flashbacks showing, day by day, the last week of this 27-year-old Philadelphia
paralegal’s life. It was both written and directed by Karen Moncrieff, who
seems on the evidence of this to be a talented filmmaker but also a rather
scattered one who, like her heroine, needs to learn to discipline her gifts.
It’s supposedly based on a true story, but the only people in it who have the
same names as their real-life equivalents are Julia and her boss, defense
attorney A. Charles Peruto (played by a middle-aged Jason Patric who looks
oddly like John Travolta did at his age — 52 — and for those who remember Jason
Patric from his hot-young-man roles in films like The Lost Boys and Rush, apropos of which I wrote
that Patric “got his 15 minutes of fame
more for dating Julia Roberts briefly than for any of his actual films,” seeing
him bigger, heftier and with a more bloated face but still pretty good-looking
is going to induce one of those moments in which you realize that the extent to
which he’s aged is indicative of the
extent to which you have too). Everyone else has their name changed, and
according to a Philadelphia Inquirer story blasting the film (http://www2.philly.com/philly/entertainment/television/julia-law-girl-in-the-bathtub-chuck-peruto-philadelphia-doctor-who-20181004.html), one particularly nasty incident in which
Julia is slipped a date-rape drug in a bar and raped by a man she later
recognizes in a drugstore and humiliates publicly is totally fictional. Julia
Law’s actual story, as chronicled months after her 2013 death by Lisa DePaulo
in Philadelphia Magazine (DePaulo’s piece is given “in part” based-on credit in the film), gets
turned by Moncrieff into a cautionary tale about a 27-year-old woman who’s
clearly (as someone once said about self-destructive jazz genius Charlie
Parker) burning the candle at both ends and holding a blowtorch to the middle.
Julia is an alcoholic, a prescription drug abuser and a woman with at least three lovers (not
counting the bar guy who date-rapes her). She’s got a bland, boring boyfriend
named Paul (Paul Campbell), but she’s also allowed her boss Chuck Peruto to
seduce her and she tells us
that the real love of her life is Nick (played by Adrian Holmes, the drop-dead
gorgeous Black actor whom I first saw in the 2006 TV-movie Cries in the Dark, in which he played a police detective and
played him so well I wrote in an imdb.com review that he should have been Christopher Meloni’s
replacement when Meloni left Law and Order: Special Victims Unit). We get a couple of blessedly intense
soft-core porn scenes between Julia and Nick and a lot of shots of Adrian
Holmes’ back in which we get to see his glorious musculature — maybe Jason
Patric’s looks have deteriorated over the years but Adrian Holmes’ have
definitely not! — and he’s
not only by far the most physically attractive man in this movie, he’s also its
most talented, authoritative actor and he’s playing the story’s only sympathetic
character. Of the three (main) men in Julia’s life, Nick comes off as the only
one who truly cares about her and wants to support her in overcoming her
addictions — alas, he’s already got a wife, Grace (Kate Isaac), and three
children (whom we never see), so our admiration for him and his role in Julia’s
life is tempered by the fact that he’s cheating on his wife to be with Julia
and he can only get away and be with her when he’s not encumbered by family
responsibilities. The story shows Julia not only figuratively but literally
being torn apart by the men in her life and her biological family — mom, an older sister
and a brother — and on the crucial last weekend of her life she’s been invited
to spend her birthday weekend with her relatives and to attend a big party Chuck Peruto is
throwing. In the middle of all this we also learn that she’s seeing a
psychotherapist and occasionally going to A.A.; at one point she determines to
quit drinking once and for all, to the point of pouring out the liquor in all
her bottles at home (a scene that’s been a staple of alcoholism movies at least
since The Lost Weekend), only the therapist tells her that it’s physically dangerous to go
cold-turkey and she says she should have someone with her for her first weekend
detoxing. Julia asks Nick, who tells her that he’s busy with his kids that
weekend but next weekend he’ll
be free to give her all the time she needs.
But Julia can’t wait that long:
instead she gets her therapist to prescribe her benzodiazepine and Valium (that
therapist should be reported to the medical board for giving an already
addiction-prone patient two highly addictive drugs!). She ends up spending the
last Saturday night of her life alone in Chuck Peruto’s beach house, taking the
pills to ward off the hallucinations she’s having from alcohol withdrawal and then jumping off the wagon big-time and hitting
Chuck’s multiple liquor cabinets because the drugs are making her nervous. She
ends up in Chuck’s bathtub — an elaborate Italian antique Chuck tells her he’s
never used — where the combination of alcohol and pills causes her to lose
consciousness and drown. That’s the single biggest “cheat” of this movie:
through the entire film we’re led to believe it’s going to be a murder mystery
and the suspense is largely built up on the whodunit premise of which of the creepy people in Julia’s life did her
in — but in the end Julia’s death turns out to be accidental, which is what the
police ruled it in real life: they investigated Peruto but decided they didn’t
have enough evidence to charge him with Julia’s murder, and the movie Peruto
complains that the cops are only investigating him because the criminal-justice
system has lost so many big cases to him. The Girl in the Bathtub had the potential to be a better movie than
it is: if Moncrieff had thrown out Julia’s beyond-the-grave narration we would
probably feel more sympathetic towards her because the narration makes her come
off as a ditzy Valley Girl messing up her life and throwing us one
rationalization after another for doing so. It also struck me that Julia Law as
depicted in this film is showing all the signs of classic bipolar disorder, and
one wonders why that horribly incompetent therapist never noticed them or even suspected that Julia’s extensive self-medication was
due to an underlying mental illness. (One wonders if this was true of the real
one as well.)
It’s a haunting film but also an excessively annoying one that
doesn’t really get us that close to What Made Julia Run, and she’s too
self-absorbed to become a truly tragic character. The actors basically do the
best they can with what they’re given: Caitlin Stasey handles the task of
playing someone hurtling towards self-destruction well enough and it’s
Moncrieff’s fault, not hers, that the character doesn’t have more pathos. Jason
Patric is good at playing the slimy, self-righteous man who has some flashes of
goodness but is also too self-absorbed for his own good — at one of his parties
Julia is confronted by Peruto’s ex-wife, who warns him that he will never marry
again no matter how many times he tells his current girlfriend de jour that she’s “the one” (she also runs into
Nick and Grace and has to pretend she doesn’t know Nick already) — though it did occur to me that this character might make a
good lead in a TV series, a modern-day Perry Mason in which the star defense attorney wins his
cases despite (or maybe because of) his personal lack of any sense of morality.
Adrian Holmes stands out among the cast members not only for sheer sexiness but
for power and authority as an actor, making the basically decent character’s
self-inflicted conflict between Julia and his family live in a way very little
else about this movie does. One gets the impression there was a better movie in
Julia Law’s story than the one we got (in some ways there’s a parallel between
her and the female murder victim in the 1948 crime classic The Naked City, also a much-altered refraction of a true
case), and we’re frustrated because this one is pretty good on its own merits
(actually better than average for Lifetime, despite that exploitation title
meant to tie it in with previous Lifetime productions Girl in the Box and Girl in the Bunker — though since the victimized heroines of
those films survived their experiences and cooperated with the productions,
there was less room for fictionalization than there was here) but so much more
could have been done with this story!
