by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night the Lifetime channel ran two dramatically
contrasting movies, one which was pretty typical of its usual fare and one
which was extraordinary, telling a fact-based tale and telling it effectively
through strong direction, skillful writing and two glorious performances in the
leading female roles. It was called Love You to Death, a title which in the Lifetime context would
probably lead one to believe you’d be watching a film about an obsessed male
stalker threatening the life of the innocent young woman who wouldn’t or
couldn’t love him the way he loved her. Almost nothing could have been further
from the truth: Love You to Death
riffed off a real-life case of a woman named Dee Dee Blanchard who
psychologically dominated her daughter, Gypsy Rose Blanchard (an almost too ironically appropriate a name given that what her
namesake Gypsy Rose Lee is most famous for today is being the subject of the
musical Gypsy, about her
relationship with her
neurotically controlling mother), and convinced her she was desperately ill
with cancer, in constant pain and needed a wheelchair, when in fact the
daughter was perfectly healthy. In Love You to Death the mother is named “Camile Stoller” and is played
by Academy Award-winning actress Marcia Gay Harden — a far more illustrious
name than one’s used to seeing in the cast of a Lifetime movie — and her
daughter is called “Esmé” and is played by Emily Skaggs, whom you probably haven’t heard of but, if there’s any justice in the
entertainment business, you will. Love You to Death premiered last Saturday and the Sunday showing was
billed as a “special edition,” which meant that in between the movie and the
commercial breaks there were segments with Harden and Skaggs talking about the
movie and the acting challenges it posed for them. Love You to Death begins with the police coming to the home where the
Stollers live and finding signs of a fatal struggle, including blood spatter,
though screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski and director Alex Kalymnios carefully
avoid showing us who killed whom. The film then flashes back to 2013, when the
events started happening, and we meet Camile Stoller and her daughter Esmé at
the clinic where Esmé, in a wheelchair and bald, is being treated for cancer.
For the first third of the movie we are led to believe it’s a story of a
put-upon caregiver having to deal with a patient from hell — a premise that was
sort of a busman’s holiday for me! — until about a third of the way through we
get a voice-over from Emily Skaggs announcing that we’ve seen her mom’s version
of events and now we’re going to see hers. (This rather wrenching bit of
exposition is the one weakness in Jaswinski’s script; Love Her to
Death might have been even stronger if it
had used the Citizen Kane-style
narratage technique and had the story narrated by the participants and the
people who were peripherally involved in it. But it’s still quite good, moving,
intense drama as it is.) We begin to suspect something is wrong about Camile’s
behavior when she reacts strongly to the help of a neighbor couple, Alan (Kurt
Ostlund) and Denise (Kayla Deorksen) — visually Alan’s a stereotypical biker
but he has a heart of gold — who have made Esmé a long-haired blue wig for the
princess costume she wants to wear to a local Comic-con-style festival. Mom at
first forbids Esmé to go — she gave Esmé a laptop and software to play video
games but had no idea her daughter had registered to attend a festival and had
got her neighbors to make her a costume — but later she relents. There Esmé
meets up with a young man named Scott (Brennan Keel Cook) whom she’d met before
at a county fair (they’d been in a shooting contest and she was hopeless
because she’s virtually blind, but he gave her the tickets he’d won to claim a
Rapunzel doll — appropriate because one of the symbols of mom’s dominance over
Esmé is a scene in which she shaves Esmé’s head and hair thereby becomes a
symbol of her enslavement to her mom), who takes her away from mom’s
ever-present supervision and corners her in a room. We see Esmé alone in the
room, looking shocked, and mom takes her back into custody. Then we hear the
voice-over from Esmé instructing us that what we’re going to be seeing after
that is the events from her point of view, and while the first presentation of
this scene made it look like Scott took her into that room to rape her, it
turns out she went with him willingly and they made love as best they could
given that she was in a wheelchair, though they stopped well short of the actual down-’n’-dirty. Also
complicating the situation is that Esmé’s former doctor, a woman, left the
clinic where she was being treated and was replaced by a Black man, Dr. Price
(Garfield Wilson), and Camile is worried about this.
At first we think it’s
simple racism, since all this is happening in the South (Esmé was born in
Shreveport, Louisiana and her mom moved them to her own original home town,
Joplin, Missouri, after she and Esmé’s dad broke up), but as we see events from
Esmé’s point of view and learn that she doesn’t really need the wheelchair —
she can get up and walk perfectly normally any time she wishes and can get away
with it — it dawns on us that what’s really going on here is the awkwardly
named mental illness “Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy,” in which a person causes
another person harm and then comes along to “help” them out of it. It’s usually
been dramatized in characters who are both arsonists and firefighters who get
off on putting out the fires they themselves set, but in this case it’s a woman
deliberately making her daughter sick, forcing her into a wheelchair and giving
her powerful drugs, so she can pose as a concerned caregiver without whom the
daughter would be helpless. The plot proceeds as Scott takes an interest in
Esmé that’s both romantic and carnal — he plays up to her fantasies of the
prince who will rescue her from the wicked mom — and reaches a climax one night
in which Scott arrives to take Esmé out of the house, mom tries to stop them
with a gun, Esmé flees the room and Scott and Camile have a struggle which ends
up with mom dead. (We don’t like Esmé for running instead of helping either her boyfriend or her mom, but we understand it even
though it’s possible that had Esmé stayed and witnessed the struggle, Scott
could have won an acquittal on grounds of self-defense.) Scott and Esmé have a
beautiful but troubled idyll as they flee in Scott’s red car, and there’s a
remarkable scene in which Scott and Esmé are skin-diving in a motel pool at
night in a driving rainstorm when they witness red and blue lights shining down
on them into the pool. The lights, of course, are those of the cars being
driven by the police there to arrest them for Camile’s murder. In the
denouement, Esmé is visited by a public defender who tells her that if she
pleads guilty she can get a reduced sentence (though it’s not clear from what
we’ve seen that Esmé knew in advance that Scott would kill her mom, and if she
didn’t one would think she’d be in the clear legally), and when Esmé protests
that she’s only 17 and therefore shouldn’t be put in adult jeopardy, the
attorney tells her that she’s really 21 and her age was just one more thing her
mom lied to her about.
The one good thing that happens to Esmé at the end is
she reunites with her biological father Travis (Tate Donovan), whom mom had
told her was an abusive monster but who turns out to be sensitive and caring,
and he makes it clear that when she’s released Esmé will be welcomed into his
family along with his second wife and the two daughters he’s had with her. Love
You to Death is a triumph on every level:
sensitively directed, effectively written and well acted not only by Harden
(which we’d expect) but by Skaggs and Brennan Keel Cook as her morally
ambiguous boyfriend — though enough scenes take place in supermarkets watching
this movie would have been as much a busman’s holiday for Charles as it was for
me! It was interesting to hear the comments from Harden and Skaggs, including
Skaggs recalling that Harden was genuinely sensitive and helpful to her — the
opposite of their characters’ relationship in the film — and that Skaggs had to
wear a cap to make her look bald for 15 of the 18 days she worked on the movie.
(The cap is totally convincing, though it’s possible they used some sort of CGI
to blend it more perfectly to Skaggs’ real head than it would have looked on
its own — and it did save Skaggs
the trouble and aggravation of having to shave her head for real.) The only
problem with Love You to Death
was that it was so profoundly moving and disturbing it was almost a relief to
return to the standard Lifetime fare afterwards!
