by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime
“premiere” movie was O.K. but a major letdown in the quality department after
the previous night’s one, Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story. (So far all the Lifetime “Ripped from the
Headlines!” movies have been especially good, and the previous week’s entry, Trapped:
The Alex Cooper Story, about a Lesbian teenager
whose Mormon parents send her to a “rehabilitation” center for eight months,
already has over 1,000 hits on moviemagg. Thank you to all those wonderful people
out there in the dark … or on their smartphones.) The film was called My
Wife’s Secret Life, an obvious pun on the
previous Lifetime titles My Husband’s Secret Life (though in that one the husband’s secret — that he
was really a Russian spy — was given away by the opening credits, in which the
letter “r” in the word “Secret” was printed backwards to make it look Cyrillic)
and My Husband’s Secret Wife, though it really wasn’t about a woman with a dirty little secret (or a
dirty big secret, like being a spy for a foreign country — gee, with a
credential like that she could go to work for the Trump re-election campaign!).
It seems that even on a network that began by advertising itself as “Television
for Women,” women still aren’t allowed to be independent, self-actualizing
agents but have to be either tools or scapegoats in some male villain’s scheme.
The heroine of My Wife’s Secret Life, Laurel Briggs (Kate Villanova), is one member of one of those bizarre
screen couples whose work schedules are so overwhelming, and clash so
frequently, they literally never have any time together. She’s a sort of
lobbying consultant who helps big corporations evade government regulations,
and her husband James (Jason Cermak, medium-height and with the sandy hair
obligatory in an innocent Lifetime husband but at least a bit sexier than the norm) is an attorney apparently
specializing in divorce cases. They have two kids, Daniela (Zoë Noelle Baker)
and Joshua (Calix Fraser), but one wonders how they came to exist because the two
adult Briggses are both such workaholics one can’t imagine them finding the
time to have sex. Years earlier James had a one-night stand with another woman,
and though we’re never told how they got together or why (the writer is Zachary
Valenti, whom I’ve never heard of before, though the director, Jason Bourque — not Bourne! — is an old Lifetime hand), James’s affair
partner makes a brief appearance early on to serve as a red herring. Laurel is
scheduled to go to some sort of convention related to her work, which involves
her in a punishing weekend schedule of meetings, and she leaves for this event
right after she and James have had an argument over where they’re going to take
their next vacation — to visit theme parks in Southern California, which is what
their kids want them to do, or to take off on a weekend getaway in a mountain
resort, just the two of them, with Laurel’s sister Angela (Marnie Mahannah)
looking after the kids while they’re gone. When Laurel arrives at the
convention she learns that someone called in and cancelled her room
reservation, but there’s an open room at the motel two blocks down. At the
convention she “accidentally” bumps into Kent Anderson (Matthew MacCaull), who
isn’t that much hunkier than her
husband but who’s hot enough a) Lifetime’s iconography marks him as the villain
and b) she falls for his well-oiled seduction routine (at first I thought
Laurel’s husband had sneaked behind her back and canceled her room reservation
to get her to bail on the convention and come home for the weekend, but it
turns out Kent did it to get her away from the main hotel and into a motel
where he just “happened” to have rented the room next door to hers).
The two
have a hot soft-core porn scene that’s easily the most entertaining part of the
movie (and even after MacCaull’s character is revealed to be the villain we
still get a lot of hot, sexy mid-shots of him topless and flashing an
impressive basket that moved this old queen’s Lust-O-Meter, though he’s not
actually the sexiest guy in this movie — more on that later), only like the
American adulterous couple Mike Nichols and Elaine May joked about back in 1960
she immediately feels horrendously guilty about having given in to her gonads
and accepted a hot fuck from an unscrupulous man simply because he was
good-looking and, unlike her husband, at least there. Laurel wants nothing more to do with Kent but he
keeps pursuing her not only during the convention but when she gets home as
well — he sends her one red rose along with a note with a stanza of a poem by
Lord Byron, and Laurel’s husband James immediately figures out who his wife’s
mysterious lover was. Years before he had represented a woman trapped in a
marriage with a physically and psychologically abusive husband, and one of his
trademarks was that immediately after beating the shit out of her he’d bring
her a red rose and a note with a stanza from Byron. Unable to get him
prosecuted for spousal abuse, James had done the next best thing and taken the
woman’s abusive husband to the cleaners financially. Alas, that had also left
him nursing a long-term grievance that hardened into a determination to destroy
James. My friend Garry, who was watching this with me, said it reminded him of
the 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy — though in that movie the abused wife, played by Julia Roberts,
escaped her husband not by divorcing him but faking her own death, and when the
husband realized his wife was still alive he focused his revenge plot against her (and the new, nicer boyfriend she’d taken up with)
instead of someone as peripheral to his case as his wife’s lawyer.
Kent sends
an assailant to accost James outside his home — the plot is to goad James into
taking a swing at the guy, thereby getting himself arrested — and James has
Laurel call Paul Scheffler (Zak Santiago, a hotter-looking piece of man-meat
than either Matthew MacCaull or Jason
Cermak), a private detective who works with his law firm (essentially his Paul
Drake) to investigate Kent Anderson … who turns out to be a man named Ray
Peterson who as a kid witnessed his dad go after his mom with a knife and
apparently determinedf from then on that that’s how men were supposed to treat
women. Ray a.k.a. Kent posed as an executive to crash Laurel’s convention even
though he’s been unemployed for a year and a half. He also romances Laurel’s
sister Angela — who, it’s already established, has an absolutely wretched taste
in men — and his plan appears to be to knock off both James and Laurel and marry Angela so he’ll be the
“father” of James’ and Laurel’s kids. He eventually kidnaps Laurel and takes
her to a deserted mountain cabin (another deserted mountain cabin in a Lifetime movie? This is getting to be one
of their most annoying conventions!) to which Laurel’s husband James and his
investigator Paul just happen to have the address to because it was part of the community property in
the divorce case and was one of the few assets Ray’s ex actually allowed him to
keep. Rather than have the cops come in on the case and start shooting
everyone, James and Paul decide to trace Ray a.k.a. Kent on their own and find
the cabin; Kent has been wielding a gun and gets the drop on Paul surprisingly
easily (especially since we’ve been told he’s an ex-cop and therefore one would
expect him to be harder to ambush than he is) but James hits Kent with a shovel
from behind, the two collapse to the ground and fight, Kent lets go of his gun
and Laurel grabs it and puts Kent out with two shots straight to his heart.
(For someone who as far as we know has never handled a gun before, she’s sure
an awfully good shot. At least Alfred Hitchcock, in the opening of the 1934 The
Man Who Knew Too Much, established that Edna
Best’s character was an accomplished markswoman so we could believe that at the
end of the film she was able to pick off the gunman who was holding her
daughter hostage without harming the daughter.)
James and Laurel end up back
together and forgive each other their transgressions against the sacred vow of
monogamy that’s supposed to be part of the marriage contract, which reminded me
of Andrew Sullivan’s prediction in his 1990’s book on same-sex marriage that
the social acceptance of Gay couples marrying each other would break down the
expectation of sexual exclusivity that he felt hamstrung many straight couples in their marriages. Instead, the opposite
has happened; Gay men in relationships have faced the same expectations of
sexual exclusivity that has been the stated norm (though honored more in the
breach than the observance!) for straight couples, and Gay people like San
Diego school board member Kevin Beiser who present themselves as married and
with (adopted) kids but really trick around get publicly pilloried for it. My
Wife’s Secret Life isn’t really the movie we
might have expected from the title (Lifetime had already done Secrets of a
Sex Addict, which was closer to what
I expected from this title — a woman who, like the heroine of Anaïs Nin’s
marvelous novel A Spy in the House of Love, had a series of extra-relational sex partners and rigidly separated
that part of her life from her existence with her husband and family) and the
affair isn’t much of a “secret” since she confesses it to her husband about
one-third of the way through the film — it’s decent Lifetime fun and thrills
but not what it could have been if writer Valenti and director Bourque had
brought a little more imagination to it!
