by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched yet another Lifetime movie in their
“Mommy Madness” series, Remember Me, Mommy?
It turned out to be surprisingly good even though the title and the previews
were “spoilers” in that they gave away the key plot point writers Adam Rockoff
and Zachary Valenti were careful not to reveal until the very end of the movie.
The story takes place at the exclusive Clark Academy all-girl prep school,
where Rebecca Barton (Natalie Brown) attended years before as a scholarship
student (the discrimination faced by scholarship students from the ones whose
parents paid their way to Clark is very much a part of the story and recalled
to me George Orwell’s essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys … ”, about his own days
as a scholarship student in one of Britain’s elite “public schools”) and where
she now teaches. She isn’t married (the school dean carefully refers to her as
“Miss Barton”) but she, a creative writing teacher, is dating and having a hot
affair with Jason, an English teacher at the same school (Kristopher Turner). A
new scholarship student, Elana Johns (Sydney Meyer), arrives for her senior
year at Clark having previously gone to public schools (in the U.S. meaning of
the term) and won her way into Clark through writing a killer essay that
impresses everyone with the depth of its insights, that seem more like those of
an adult than a teenager (hmmm, there’s a clue there … ) and thus impressing the scholarship board.
Once Elana gets to Clark she’s assigned to room with a Black student, Grace
Walker (Taveeta Szymanowicz), who’s also there on a scholarship. Elana gets
bullied by a trio of girls The Outsiders writer Sue Hinton would have called “soc’s”, headed by Jamie (Jenna
Warren) — though the imdb.com page calls her character “Lily” — whose blonde
tresses compared to the dark hair of Rebecca and Elana seem in themselves to mark
her as a villainess. Among the nasty tricks Jamie pulls on Elana are presenting
her with a candy box full of worms and squirting a flammable chemical on her
work station in chem lab.
When Rebecca disciplines Jamie, the next morning she
finds her car vandalized with the words “BITCH” and “LIAR” in huge letters with
white spray paint, and Jamie’s school I.D. under her front tire. Of course
Rebecca assumes Jamie is the culprit, while the little blonde bitch insists
that someone stole her I.D. to frame her. Then writers Rockoff and Valenti take
the story in a dramatically different direction as they start dropping hints
that Elana isn’t all “there” mentally. We learn that the address she gave the
school was just the latest of a long series of foster homes she lived in ever
since her real mom gave her up just after she was born, and in at least one of
those homes she used the name “Claire Bigelow.” Grace, Elana’s roommate, finds
an I.D. for her with the “Claire Bigelow” name and finds that the foster
parents of a girl with that name were killed in a car accident, and she’s
convinced that Elana is mentally unstable. She even sees Jamie bullying Elana
and tells her that Elana is too dangerous to be playing those sorts of games
with, and she also asks the school to move her to a different room.
Unfortunately, just before she moves out she decides to take a shower in the
bathroom she and Elana were sharing, and anyone who saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (which Grace apparently hasn’t) could guess what
happens next: Elana comes into the shower and, instead of stabbing Grace,
strangles her with a bath towel because she wants the killing to look like —
and be written off as — an accident. It turns out that years of being
mistreated in one foster home after another turned Elana bitter and drove her
crazy, and she plagiarized an essay from an adult author and used it as a way
to get into Clark Academy because she’d traced her parentage through the
Internet and discovered that Rebecca Barton was the biological mother who abandoned
her to the untender mercies of the foster-care system just after she was born.
There’s a typical Lifetime climax in which Elana, with an expression of grim
determination on her face, corners Rebecca and is about to kill her with a
kitchen knife (one gets the impression she picked that rather than a more
imposing weapon because she wants to torture Rebecca and kill her slowly and
painfully as part of her revenge) when an unexpected dea ex machina arrives in the form of Jamie, who clobbers Elana
with a backpack and knocks her out long enough for the cops to arrive.
Remember
Me, Mommy? — the very title is a “spoiler”
and the alternate title, Daughter Dearest, wouldn’t have been much better (as well as riffing off Christina
Crawford’s long-forgotten memoir of her adoptive mom Joan Crawford, Mommie
Dearest — Joan Crawford’s fame endures but
Christina’s 15 minutes expired long ago) — is actually better than the common
run of Lifetime movies; Rockoff and Valenti manage to give the characters some
of the complexity and multidimensionality Christine Conradt brings to her Lifetime scripts, director Michelle Ouillet stages
it effectively; but what really “makes” this movie is the extraordinary
performance of Sydney Meyer as Elana. While Natalie Brown is little more than a
barely credible typical Lifetime “pussy in peril,” Meyer as the pussy
imperiling her is absolutely brilliant, nailing all the changes in her
character as she comes on like a nice little girl we’re rooting for against the
bullies and make it fully believable
when she is revealed as a serial murderer (she’s knocked off a number of her
foster parents and has always been savvy enough to make the killings look like
“accidents”) and especially at the end, when Elana confronts the wounded
Natalie (she’s collapsed while fleeing down the stairs of her two-story
apartment and tripping) with the grim, expressionless impassivity with which
Bette Davis consigned her inconvenient husband, Herbert Marshall, to oblivion
by withholding his heart medicine from him in The Little Foxes. There’s no comparison between the grim intensity of
Sydney Meyer here with Audrey Whitby’s utterly unconvincing turn as the same
sort of character in last night’s The Perfect Mother — evidence enough that even in a genre as ruthlessly formulaic as the Lifetime movie (the
very name “Lifetime movie” has entered the language, and Lifetime even did a
short-lived series called My Life Is a Lifetime Movie about real-life stories similar to Lifetime’s
classic plots) having talented people to execute it still matters: Remember
Me, Mommy? was gripping and genuinely scary
while The Perfect Mother seemed
to be just a time-filling blip.
