by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched one of the most compelling movies I’ve
ever seen on Lifetime: Poisoned Love: The Stacey Castor Story. Like the other films they’re showing in their
“Ripped from the Headlines” series on Saturday nights, it’s based on a true
story: in 2009 Stacey Wallace Castor (Nia Vardolos) was convicted of murdering
her second husband, David Castor (Mike Dopud), whom she had met in 2001
following the death of her first husband, Michael Wallace. He was her boss at a
company called “Castor and Son” — we guess it was some sort of construction
firm because David drives around in a pickup truck with the company logo. David
was the “son” and his business partner was his father, who isn’t named on the
imdb.com page for this film but is an on-screen character, often taking his son
out to drink and watch sports events in bars and leaving Stacey alone with her
two daughters, Ashley (Chanelle Peloso) and Bree (Genna Charpentier). One
wonders if Stacey had had a third child she would have given him or her a name
beginning with “C.” The three of them had lived alone, with Stacey raising her
girls as a single mom as they faced teenagerhood, and had formed a seemingly
tight bond, calling themselves the “Three Musketeers” (they even have a family
photo of themselves on their wall with the three cosplaying in musketeer drag)
and hanging out together for weekly “movie nights” with mom picking out the
fare, mostly (inevitably, given that she’s a Lifetime heroine/villainess)
romance films.
They have their own home, presumably inherited from the late
Michael Wallace, until Stacey starts her workplace affair with David — they go
into his private office for quickies whenever they can, and though they can’t
be seen they make enough noise that Stacey’s co-worker Cheryl McGowan (Eunice
Kang), catches on to what’s going on. We start measuring for a coffin as soon
as we realize she’s the protagonist’s African-American best friend, though in
fact she’s still alive at the end of the movie. Over a dinner date the two of
them confess that they’re both tired of waking up without the other in bed next
to them, he gives her a nice engagement ring, and they marry. Then comes a
title, “Three years later,” and three years later Bree loves her new stepdad
but Ashley can’t stand him. It doesn’t help that instead of keeping their own
home Stacey, Ashley and Bree moved in with David (in real life David was a
divorcé with an adult son from his first wife, but in the script by Peter
Hunziker, Cynthia Riddle and Michael Vickerman there’s no hint that he had a
previous family), and David has turned into a domestic tyrant whose basic
attitude towards the kids is, “My
house — my rules.” Both David and
Stacey freak out when they go out of town and Ashley takes advantage of their
absence to have a wild (or as wild as you can make it on basic cable, anyway)
party with a lot of drinking (though all we see them consume is beer), and
which is topped off when two of the boys, Ashley’s boyfriend Mark and one of
his friends, decide to steal David’s prized 1960’s performance car, joy-ride it
around the block a few times, speed and execute spinning turns that get them
arrested and the car impounded. David responds by totally freaking out: he
orders Ashley grounded indefinitely, and when Ashley retreats to her room and
slamming the door behind her, David gets a hammer and takes the door off its
hinges, announcing that from now on Ashley won’t have a door to her room so he
and Stacey can spy on her any time they like.
Stacey gets upset with David not
only because he’s taking such a hard line on their daughter but because he’s
drinking more and more, becoming an alcoholic and threatening to abuse her. In
one chilling scene she pours him drink after drink (it’s a clear liquid I
presumed was vodka) and challenges him that if he’s going to drink himself to
death, he might as well do it quickly, get it over with and put them out of
their misery. In a final confrontation Ashley leaves the house, David throws
something at her, but he misses and the object, whatever it was, hits Bree
instead and causes her forehead to bleed. Stacey abruptly announces that she’s
leaving and taking Bree with her — they’re going to stay with her mom while
Ashley stays with her boyfriend Mark’s family (we never actually see them but
they’re depicted as amazingly nice and supportive, willing to let Ashley stay
with them for as long as she feels she needs to). The three women stay away
from the house, returning briefly only to grab some extra clothes, and when
they finally return they find the back room locked. They call the police, who
break the door down and find David sprawled out over a dirty, unmade mattress,
an apparent suicide. Only the police — notably a woman detective who regards
the crime scene as suspicious from the get-go, and who is regrettably
unidentified on imdb.com (they list neither the name of the character nor the
quite remarkable actress who played her, though the online stories on the
actual case indicate the woman’s real name was Diane Leshinski) — don’t buy it:
they find a turkey baster in the room with Stacey’s fingerprints on it (the
story point is that David wouldn’t have one since he never cooked — we’ve
actually seen him take over from Stacey when the family had pasta, but not any
heavier-duty cooking than that) and, when David’s body is autopsied, his blood
is found to contain crystals consistent with his having been poisoned by
ethylene glycol — i.e., antifreeze.
Detective Leshinski then gets it into her
head that perhaps the death of Stacey’s first husband wasn’t as “accidental” — originally it was ruled
a heart attack and there was no autopsy — so she gets a court order to exhume
his body and, sure enough, those ethylene glycol crystals were in his blood, too. She was already suspicious about David’s
alleged “suicide” because Stacey had mentioned that a week before he died, she
and David had been watching a TV true-crime documentary about someone who
committed suicide by drinking antifreeze, and the show had stressed what a
painful way that would be to die. Meanwhile Ashley’s 18th birthday
is coming up, and coming on like her best bud, Stacey offers her a cocktail of
vodka, orange juice and 7-Up, only Ashley complains that the drink tastes
“funny” but consumes it anyway. A few days later, on the occasion of Ashley’s
18th birthday party, Stacey offers to drink with her again, only whatever is in the drink makes her sick and
she retreats to her bedroom, collapses and is barely alive the next morning.
With her other daughter Bree looking on, Stacey calls 911 and acts the
desperate, concerned parent, pestering the ambulance crew and later the
hospital staff and pleading with them to save her daughter’s life. Only when
her daughter comes to, Detective Leshinski and her male police partner are
there to interrogate her, especially about the note she supposedly wrote and
left before she went to bed. Ashley doesn’t know what they’re talking about,
but it’s an alleged suicide note in which Ashley supposedly says she killed David by feeding him “antifree” and she’s
going to take responsibility and pay for her crime by taking the stuff herself
— only Leshinski picks up on the fact that the note spells “antifreeze” as
“antifree,” which is always the way Stacey Castor pronounces the word. (I’d
previously picked up on that but thought it was merely an affectation, not the
key to Leshinski’s solution of the case.) The cops immediately place Stacey
Castor under arrest, and rather than risk a battered-wife defense (which might
have actually worked for her!) Stacey sticks to her story that Ashley was the
real culprit.
There’s genuine suspense about how the jury is going to decide,
but eventually they find Stacey guilty. Ashley makes a tortured victim-impact
statement in court — apparently cribbed by the writing committee from the real statement Ashley made in court — and the judge
sentences Stacey to 51 years, which given her age amounts to a life sentence. I
had little hope for Poisoned Love
based on the movie trailers — indeed, given Nia Vardolos’s most famous credit
as writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I was joking that they could have called this one My
Big Fat Greek Murder — but the film turned
out to be way above the Lifetime
average, mainly due to the incisive writing and marvelous acting, especially by
the two women in the leads. Director Jim Donovan overdirects in spots —
particularly when the trial is about to start and everything is all slow-motion
and with dire underscoring — but for the most part he keeps out of the way of
an incisive, if committee-written, script and two excellent performances by Nia
Vardolos and Channelle Peloso. As I commented in my post about Lifetime’s last
“ripped from the headlines” feature, Chris Watts: Confessions of a
Killer, the real trick in telling a story
like this is to make sure your central character isn’t just a monster. We’ve conditioned by at least a century
of mass entertainment to see the human race as divided into heroes and
villains, and to think that we can easily recognize and pick out the heroes
from the villains — but, arguably even more than Chris Watts, Stacey Castor
comes off as a warm, lovable human being in some scenes, particularly those
“movie nights” with her daughters where they look like any perfectly normal,
mutually loving single-parent family. Nia Vardolos’s acting, marvelously
enigmatic and understated, makes Stacey Castor a truly chilling character
driven by messy conflicts of love, sex, duty, desire and independence,
Elena
Nicolaou’s recent posts on Oprah Winfrey’s magazine’s Web site (https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/tv-movies/a30715508/stacey-castor-true-story-facts-poisoned-love-lifetime/
and https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/a30718474/ashley-wallace-stacey-castor-daughter-now/)
sniff at the movie’s suggestions that Stacey was a victim of either physical or
psychological spousal abuse — “Poisoned
Love suggests that David was a controlling spouse, though this
may be a fictional embellishment,” she writes — but it works as drama and makes
Stacey seem almost sympathetic, a woman trapped in a bad relationship that’s
threatening the welfare of the only people she really cares about, her
daughters. Then both reality and the writing committee threw us a curveball and
suggest not only that Stacey has done this before — eliminated a hard-drinking
husband by spiking his drink with antifreeze — but she’s demented and evil
enough not only to poison the older daughter she supposedly loves more than
life itself but set her daughter up as the fall girl. And Channelle Peloso is
fully Vardalos’s match as Ashley, with a marvelously mobile face — at the start
of the movie she seems chiseled out of stone as she stoically reacts to her
mom’s new relationship in a way that tells us from the get-go she does not approve; later she lightens up a bit but then freezes
again as the realization that her mom tried to poison her and faked it to look
like suicide just to avoid responsibility and punishment for her actions. This
should be a star-making performance for Peloso even though her rather homely
appearance, which made her ideal for this film, is going to be difficult in
terms of persuading casting directors she can play anything else — much the way
Macaulay Culkin’s chiseled, rather craggy appearance was absolutely perfect for
his film Party Monster (also a murder
movie based on a true story) but didn’t exactly make him look like leading-man
material for future adult roles.
The movie ended about 10 minutes before the
time slot expired and the producers filled it with a mini-interview with the
real Ashley Wallace, who as of 2018 was reportedly “engaged to be married” (to
the real-life prototype for Mark or to someone else?) and who appeared on
screen (as considerably more a “woman of size” than Channelle Peloso) and
talked briefly in a matter-of-fact voice about the emotional roller-coaster of
learning that her mom murdered her father and stepfather and
tried to kill her as well and frame her for her crimes. She hasn’t wanted to be
more forthcoming about what she’s done since or how she’s living now, and
though this is mentioned in the film only in a final title, Stacey Castor died
in prison in 2016, supposedly of “natural causes” — ironically, her death was
ruled a heart attack — when she was only 48, and understandably neither of her
daughters had ever visited her — though Stacey’s own mother (portrayed in the
film but once again unlisted on imdb.com) fiercely maintained her belief in
Stacey’s innocence. The real Ashley Wallace credited the prosecutor in the
case, William Fitzpatrick, as being a mentor and surrogate father to her
through her ordeal (his role in the movie is called “O’Malley” and is played by
J. Douglas Stewart, and his main function is to protect Ashley from a withering
cross-examination by her mom’s attorney) and as having helped her get through
it with her sanity more or less intact. Despite some promos that made the film
seem far more melodramatic than it is, Poisoned Love is actually quite a good movie, transcending its
Lifetime-aimed origins and offering two chillingly effective performances as
well as an unusual degree of moral ambiguity and a refreshing disinclination to
offer some facile sort of “explanation” for What
Made Stacey Run.
