Last night’s Lifetime movie was actually a pretty good one, though a bit disappointing given that Christine Conradt was the screenwriter and I expect better things from her than the Lifetime norm. It was called Mommy’s Little Princess and was slotted into Lifetime’s schedule during a weekend in which they were emphasizing dysfunctional relationships between mothers and daughters — only it’s an ironic context because none of the characters are biologically related as mother and daughter. We see a family of a man, a woman and two girls living together — but the woman, Julianna Mathis (Alicia Leigh Willis), and the man, Greg Trousseau (Jeff Teravainen), aren’t married to each other (despite the implications of his last name!) The two daughters they’re raising are Allie Trousseau (Kelly Whyte), who’s Greg’s biological child but by a previous partner (whom we don’t see; Allie’s real mom is talked about but only to set up the plot point that Allie doesn’t like her and would rather stay with dad); and Lizzy Mathis (Sarah Abbott), whom Julianna adopted after it turned out she’s biologically incapable of having kids of her own. (The official Lifetime synopsis says both Julianna and Greg adopted her but that’s not at all clear in the film itself.) Lizzy is the titular “mommy’s little princess,” and from what we learn about her previous life is that she was the child of a 1-percent woman who was so wealthy she had her own private plane — until she crashed it and died. She was also so, shall we say, “free” with her affections that Lizzy has no idea who her biological father was. The official synopsis says that Lizzy’s real mom was a drug addict and hints that’s why she crashed her own plane, but that’s not at all clear in the film itself.
Lizzy is a big diva around the house even before she learns a piece of
news that sends her prima donna
antics into overdrive: her (adoptive) mom Julianna orders both of them tests
from a genetics company called “Me and My Genes” (an obvious Conradt pun on the
real-life company “23 and Me” — 23 being the number of chromosomes in the human
genome, in case you were wondering), and Lizzy discovers from the test results
that she’s part of the Wittelsbach (called “Wittelsbaum” in Conradt’s script)
family, hereditary rulers of the southern German state of Bavaria. (What you’re
likely to know about the Wittelsbachs is that their most famous member was the
“mad” 19th century King Ludwig II, who built Neuschwanstein — “new
swan castle” — and other insanely designed medieval-style edifices; he was also
Gay and the principal patron of composer Richard Wagner, and he gave Wagner
money, according to his surviving diaries, in the hope that exposure to the
highly heterosexual Wagner’s music would turn him straight.) Lizzy immediately
demands that everybody in the
family, from Julianna and Greg to the sort-of “sister” she’s never liked to her
school acquaintances, teachers and Mila Watson (Benedicte Belizaire), one of two African-American voices of reason in Conradt’s plot
this time (the other is Lizzy’s classmate Finlay Breslin, who’s supposed to be
part-Black and part-Irish — like Billie Holiday! — and is played quite capably
by Jaeda LeBlanc, though “the white” is itself a rather ironic name for a person
of color) and the head of a summer camp Lizzy desperately wants to go to. Out
of all the possible directions she could have taken this story — a spoiled
young girl loses the life of privilege she was raised to expect, ends up in a
relatively ordinary suburban family, dreams that she’s “better” than her
current existence would indicate and finally discovers a piece of evidence that
seems to her to “prove” her superiority — Conradt and her director, her
frequent collaborator Curtis Crawford, essentially turn it into a knockoff of The
Bad Seed. When Lizzy pressures her parents
to enroll her in a week-long “away camp” instead of the “day camp” she’s
already in, and Mila tells her that there were only 10 slots available and she
just missed out, Lizzy plots her revenge. She sneaks a peek at the records of
the students who were admitted
and finds one of them, Bronwyn Greenly (Lillian Sagriff), is allergic to
penicillin — so she grinds up some penicillin her mom was prescribed on a
previous occasion and spikes Bronwyn’s bottled orange juice with it.
Bronwyn
duly succumbs to an allergic attack and so Lizzy gets the slot in week camp —
which she’s particularly after because a TV crew is scheduled to film the
camp’s student play, the play is Cinderella and she’s determined to portray the lead since the
news from Me and My Genes that she’s related to a German noble family makes her
feel like she is Cinderella, the
girl who’s been plucked from a humble background, magically transformed into a
princess and ultimately married off to Prince Charming. There’s even a real
Prince Charming in the story, a member of the Wittelsbaum family back in
Germany who’s being written up in their media as Germany’s most eligible
bachelor. She wants Julianna to dump Greg and marry the German Wittelsbaum so
the three of them can live there and Lizzy can finally be accepted as a
princess in her own right. Lizzy sees her mom’s chance to marry the German
prince and the three of them to become literally a royal family when the Wittelsbaums announce that
they’re having their annual house party at the castle to which anyone in the
world is invited … in two weeks. Julianna and Greg actually decide to make this
a vacation — Greg is an aspiring painter who’s just sold a big commission but
it’s clearly Julianna, a hospital administrator, who’s the breadwinner in the
family — but obviously it’s going to screw up Lizzy’s plan to “royalize” her
mom if Greg and that pesky Allie come along. So she decides to pour vinegar on
Greg’s newly completed painting to ruin it and force him to remain home and fix
it (in a day-camp art class Mila had helpfully explained to her that vinegar
ruins paint) and impregnate Allie’s clothes with poison ivy. (The setting is
Philadelphia, in the 215 area code.) Lizzy gets into the week-long “away camp”
but has arguments with Mila, demanding the role of Cinderella in the camp play
and attacking her, leaving her alone in the bushes, when Mila tells Lizzy
she’ll have to audition for it like everyone else. With Mila unavailable to direct
it, the camp play is cancelled and Lizzy has a hissy-fit about that. Eventually Lizzy gets so impossible that the other
girls get Drew Frommer (Jonathon LeRose, the only genuinely sexy man in the dramatis
personae), the camp counselor who takes
over from the missing Mila, to expel her.
When she gets back home she learns
that Mila was discovered in the woods and she didn’t die — she’s in a coma but
expected to recover in a day or two — and, convinced that Mila will report her
as her assailant when she comes to, Lizzy decides to run away. She grabs her
plane ticket to Germany and hails a cab driver to take her to the airport. He’s
a little nonplussed that he’s getting that instruction from an unaccompanied
10-year-old, but Lizzy says, “My mom is meeting me there.” Mom reports Lizzy
missing and, among other things, the police send an alert to all cab drivers,
instructing anyone who’s picked Lizzy up to drive her home. The cab driver
tells her he’s under a legal obligation to do that, but Lizzy escapes and hides
out in a pizza parlor — where mom and Allie stand outside the (gender-neutral)
restroom and try to coax Lizzy out. Eventually they succeed, and now that
Lizzy’s princess pretensions have been exploded by reality — a friend of
Julianna’s from work who’s an amateur genealogist found that while Lizzy really
does have Wittelsbaum blood in
her, it’s too far removed to qualify her for a title — the four dysfunctionals
we met at the beginning become a truly integrated family at last. Mommy’s
Little Princess is essentially The
Bad Seed lite — though Sarah Abbott plays
Lizzy devastatingly and even captures the same self-satisifed little smirk
Patty McCormick had on her face in the 1956 film of The Bad Seed whenever she offed somebody (suggesting she’d have
been a better choice for Lifetime’s recent Bad Seed remake than McKenna Grace), Christine Conradt
carefully frames the story so that Lizzy never actually kills anybody. Both
Bronwyn and Mila merely get hospitalized from her attacks on them, and
apparently both Mila and Bronwyn’s family are understanding enough that they’re
not going to press charges. Mommy’s Little Princess is actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie,
though the ending is too saccharine and I wanted Lizzy to go full Bad
Seed on us and finally face a legal
comeuppance for her actions! I love you, Christine Conradt, but I know you can do better than this …
