by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the latest Lifetime movie at 8 p.m. last night, a minim
opus called Dying to Be You which starts out with a woman drowning another woman
in a bathtub while the victim was listening to music via ear buds (which sounds
hazardous enough — I wondered briefly if her killer would dispatch her by
pitching a radio into the bathtub, thereby electrocuting her, along the lines
of George Baxt’s A Queer Kind of Death, a pioneering Gay detective story published in 1966 and featuring a
Black Gay detective, Pharoah Love, who would later become a series character).
At the start we don’t know who either of these two women are, but the story
later flashes back to a fourth-grade classroom in Seattle in which the teacher
tells every student that he or she is going to have a pen pal, and she hands
out letters at random from students at a sister school in Fairbanks, Nebraska
and tells each of her students to
write a letter in reply. The teacher looks anachronistically dressed,
especially her frizzy hair (a style that I’m pretty sure was not fashionable for African-American women 15 to 20
years ago), and the whole idea of a pen pal seems a bit dated in the age of
e-mails, texts and social media. But so be it: that’s the plot premise writer
Lisa Di Trolio and director Danny J. Boyle (note the initial — this is not the Danny Boyle who’s won the Academy Award but a
lesser namesake who’s a Lifetime regular) stuck themselves with. The two
weirdly drafted pen-pals are Lily Anderson of Seattle and Molly Cumberland of
Fairbanks, and we get brief glimpses of the fourth-grade Lily (Abbie Magnuson)
and Lily as a teenager (Angela Robertson) before we get to see her as an adult
(Elise Gatien), an aspiring interior designer who works for a nice-looking and
easygoing boss we expect to see
hitting on her — but he doesn’t. Molly has continued to write and has claimed
that she, too, is pursuing a career in interior design, and the two women finally have their first face-to-face meeting when Lily’s
boyfriend, aspiring artist and metalworker Matthew Jansen (Tom Stevens,
presenting the right mix of sexiness and dorkiness for the role), arranges a
surprise birthday party for her and Molly (Natalie Dreyfuss) is the big
attraction. Molly is shorter, has darker and wavier hair, and wears a big pair
of granny glasses — a late-1960’s, early-1970’s fashion that was already out of
style before virtually anyone in this movie was even born — but she’s overall a
fairly similar physical “type” to Lily.
Lily has carefully and almost
religiously saved all the letters Molly wrote her, and Molly’s acknowledgment
that she “lost” her letters from
Lily is Lily’s (and our) first hint that there’s something wrong about her.
There are enough gaps in Molly’s memory of the things Lily wrote her about —
including her failing to remember which ’N SYNC band member Lily got an
autograph from and gave it to Molly — that we’re convinced, long before Lily is, that “Molly” is an
impostor. What’s more, once screenwriter Di Trolio inserts a brief reference to
Molly having a sister named Beth, we can figure out the whole plot right there:
“Molly” is really Beth and the opening scene of one woman drowning another in a
bathtub was Beth killing Molly so she could take her place as Lily’s pen pal
and show up in Seattle for the face-to-face meeting. Beth a.k.a. “Molly”
emerges as a full-fledged Lifetime villainess, seeking to displace Lily at her
job (she flirts with Lily’s boss to get him to hire her), with Matt (whom she
tricks into kissing her neck from behind by wearing Lily’s dressing gown; Lily
discovers them and has the predictable jealous hissy-fit) and her own
apartment. Beth goes out to Matthew’s live-work space and knifes him to death,
stabbing him seven times — we don’t see the gore but we do get a chilling moment in which Lily stops by Matt’s
space, knocks, gets no answer and writes a note she slips under his door —
which is grabbed by Beth and crumpled, following which the camera pans to the
dead Matt, his blood all over the floor — and of course Lily is suspect number
one in Matt’s murder when two typically stupid Lifetime cops (Sam Spear as
Detective Wolf and an unidentified woman as his partner) show up to
investigate. There’s also a dotty old character named Mrs. Blankenship in the
apartment building where Lily lives and Beth a.k.a. “Molly” has been crashing,
who’s been diagnosed with dementia. Lily has been helping her out with minor
chores for years but Beth takes an instant dislike to her, at one point tying
her up and putting a gag over her mouth (though one wonders why she doesn’t
just kill her) to prevent her from alerting any of the other neighbors what
Beth has been up to.
At one point Lily finds the e-mail address of the real
Molly’s and Beth’s parents online and writes to them about their daughter and
her concern that “Molly” needs help — and she gets a scorching all-caps reply
that the real Molly is dead, and if whoever wrote them asking about her keeps
playing the sick joke of pretending she is alive they’re going to call the
police. (Why it never occurs to them that their still-living daughter Beth
might be impersonating the dead
Molly for some nefarious purpose is a mystery locked inside Lisa Di Trolio’s
head.) It ends as you think it’s going to end, with Beth confronting Lily in
Mrs. Blankenship’s apartment, where Lily has gone to rescue her, tying her up and
gagging her mouth while she explains to us What Made Beth Run: it seemed that
as the younger and less cute sister of the real Molly she grew to hate her
because her parents clearly favored Molly over her, and Lily’s parents likewise
gave her a privileged upbringing,
so she determined to kill her real sister and then impersonate her to bring
down Lily as well. Dying to Be You
is an O.K. Lifetime movie — Natalie Dreyfuss does a good job as the psycho
bitch from hell but she’s too pouty and doesn’t bring quite the venom or the ability to keep a game face Ashlynn Yennie did
with her glare-ice mood switches in The Wrong Mommy — and the other actors are O.K., professionally
acceptable without being truly great. So is the movie as a whole; the “other”
Danny Boyle is a perfectly competent director but not an especially interesting
one — though he does give us an
expert dispatching of the villainess via a glass shard slid across her throat
that startled Charles as the most gruesome death scene he’d ever seen on Lifetime. All in all, Dying
to be You is an efficient expression of the
Lifetime formula but little more than that … and I found myself very sorry for the heroine’s sake that her boyfriend
Matt, the film’s most interesting character, didn’t make it to the end, though
there’s the hint of an attraction between her and her boss that seems rather
odd and behind-the-times in the #MeToo era.
