by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyight © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The third Lifetime “Mommy
Madness” movie I caught last night turned out to be the best of the three by a
pretty wide margin — as I guessed it would from the moment I looked it up on
imdb.com and found that Christine Conradt had written it. (The director was one
of her usual collaborators, Curtis Crawford.) It was called My Mom’s Darkest
Secrets — though apparently the working
title for Conradt’s script was The Mother She Met Online — and the central character is Ashley Beck Ford (Nia
Roam). She was adopted in Pennsylvania by a Lesbian couple, Kelly (Dawn
Lambing) and Maricella (Amanda Martinez), who are about to celebrate their 25th
anniversary and are expressing their joy that the state of Pennsylvania has at
last allowed them to marry each other. The state of Pennsylvania has done one
other thing that helps drive the plot of this movie: they’ve recently passed a
law unsealing formerly closed adoption records, and Ashley uses this law to unseal
the records of her own adoption and find out who her birth mother is. She does
this absurdly easily in the space of one commercial break — real-life adoptees
I’ve talked to, including Patrick McMahon (whom I interviewed for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine in 2011), have told me this is
generally a much harder and time-consuming (and money-consuming) process than
this — and she finds out that her biological mother is Sara Hillman (Laurie
Fortier), who’s currently married to a wealthy and successful man named Trevor
Hillman (Scott Gibson). When Ashley gets Sara to come visit her and meet her
adoptive mothers I joked — referencing the infamous children’s book Heather
Has Two Mommies — that Conradt could have
called this script Ashley Has Three Mommies. The only problem is that, while Trevor and Sara
never had children together, Trevor had a daughter from a previous marriage,
Amy Hillman (Hannah Gordon), who has never got along with Sara (“All she does
is spend my dad’s money,” Amy tells Ashley) and takes an instant dislike to
Ashley as well. Meanwhile, Trevor has a scapegrace alcoholic brother named
Michael (Ash Catherwood), whom Trevor has been bailing out of various crises
with money, shelter or what have you. Michael is married to a woman named
Kelsie (Sophie Gendron) who seems way too good for him. Then Trevor is suddenly found murdered in his home
and Sara, who has a whole medicine chest full of psychotropic drugs, claims she
heard nothing because she had taken three very powerful red-and-black sleeping
capsules and slept through her husband’s murder.
Though Ashley and Amy have
every reason to hate each other — especially once Sara announces that she’s
going to rewrite her will, disinherit Amy and leave all Trevor’s fortune to
Ashley — they’re both too decent to want to see Sara, whom they’re both
convinced was innocent, get convicted and executed or imprisoned for life for
Trevor’s murder. Eventually they realize that Trevor was having an affair with
his sister-in-law Kelsie, and that Michael had found out about it and responded
by hiring a hit man named James Wilson (Michael Coady, who in accordance with
Lifetime’s casting practices is the hottest-looking guy in the movie: he’s
middle-aged and balding but he’s still in excellent physical shape and what
hair he does have is blond, which
at least to me makes him sexier) to kill Trevor and set Sara up for the crime.
Ashley gets one of her adoptive parents, Maricella —who’s a branch manager for
a bank — to run a check on Michael’s financial records, and they learn about his
payments to Wilson (and Trevor’s payments to him, so in a typical bit of
Conradtian irony Trevor was actually financing his own murder) and the deserted
mountain cabin he owns, where he’s gone to hide out while he figures out how to
deal with the pesky teenagers who are after him. Only when they get there, with
no weapons and no clear idea of what they intended to do, Michael easily
overpowers them, holds them hostage and is prepared to kill them when James
Wilson shows up, picks off Michael through the cabin window with a sniper rifle
(hey, if he was so good why did he have to kill Trevor at his home with a
knife?) and hopes to escape detection by shutting up the one witness against
him — but Ashley and Amy have their cell phones out to record Michael’s dying
declaration, confessing all and naming Wilson as the actual killer, and though
Wilson escapes the cabin the girls learn that the police caught him less than
an hour later. The finale consists of Ashley, her two adoptive mothers, her
biological mom, her new friend Amy and Ashley’s boyfriend Ben Green (Kitaro
Akiyama) as the only male in the gathering, all uniting and going forward as a
family.
My Mom’s Darkest Secrets
— the title refers to the dissolute life Sara led before she married Trevor:
she was a heavy alcoholic and drug user and worked as an “escort,” which is how
she met Trevor in the first place (so at some time in her life Christine Conradt had seen Pretty
Woman!) — is an engaging film, suffering a
bit from Conradt’s tendency towards melodramatics but benefiting from her
ability to create truly multidimensional characters and keep us in at least
some degree of suspense as to how we’re supposed to feel about them. More than
any other Lifetime writer, Christine Conradt is able to create ambiguous
characters; her heroes have flaws, her villains at least act for understandable
motives instead of just to be evil or kick off a murder plot; and she’s able to
make us feel for the people she creates instead of just seeing them as puppets
to enact a thriller plot. And most of the actors in My Mom’s Darkest
Secrets are good enough to take full
advantage of Conradt’s script complexities to create multidimensional
characters (though I was a bit disappointed she didn’t do more with the Lesbian
couple who raised Ashley — Amanda Martínez has one brief character conflict,
whether to uphold the law that bank accounts are confidential or give her
daughter the information they need to track down Michael — but Dawn Lambing as
Kelly is pretty much just there —
and though the two women don’t show much physical affection beyond one kiss, I
didn’t mind that so much because they’ve supposedly been together for 25 years,
as have my husband Charles and I, and we don’t slobber over each other as much as we used to, either!). I was
especially haunted by Hannah Gordon as Amy; she’s had a short but impressive
career and is currently set to play a prosecutor on a TV series called A
Higher Loyalty and is in post-production on
a film called The Craft — a
remake of a 1996 film I saw at a San Diego screening some time ago — in which
she plays Ashley, the leader of a coven of teenage witches. I’d definitely like
to see more of her, and I suspect I’ll like her more as an A.D.A. than a witch!
