by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This week the Lifetime
channel is “celebrating” Mother’s Day — “celebrating” definitely in quotes! — by showing a whole bunch of movies
about psychopathic mothers and the men (and sometimes women) who get ensnared
by them. Last night they showed a couple of movies, including one in their 8
p.m. “Premiere” slot even though, according to imdb.com, it was two years old: Maternal
Secrets, directed by Lucinda
Spurling from a script she co-wrote with Louise Ascot Byres, also known as
Louise Burfitt-Dons. What Lucinda and Louise (I’m going to avoid having to deal
with Louise’s plethora of last names) came up with is a script so
excruciatingly complex and so defiant of one’s suspension of disbelief it’s
hard to watch past it and realize that Spurling is actually a quite good
director, one who can create exciting suspense and action scenes and also get
between them without letting up the tension or indulging in those ponderous
bits of exposition that mar so many action films — even big-budget ones with
“A”-list directors, writers and stars! The film opens with a chyron title, “Two
Years Before,” and two years before the main action Jackson Lewis (the
surprisingly hunky Sean Stolzen) has just won an election for state senate,
with the implication being that the U.S. Senate is next on his to-do list.
He
chats up the woman who ran his campaign and offers her a job on his state
senate staff. He also invites her to dinner and drinks — the obvious
implication is that he’s hoping the evening will end up with her in his bed —
only when she uses the rest room in the hotel just before they’re supposed to
leave the party together, she suddenly has an attack, gets really sick and
ultimately dies. Jackson is convinced he murdered her because the autopsy found
both alcohol and the prescription medications Jackson takes for his epilepsy.
The attorney and principal backer of his campaign, Richard Outerbridge (LeVar
Hollis), quietly arranges for the incident to be hushed up with the assistance
of attorney Samantha Mason (Brooke Burfitt). Then we flash-forward two years to
the present (though it can’t be that recent a present since a vacation resort
is still functioning!) and Jackson Lewis is on his way to a vacation in the
Bahamas with his new girlfriend, art photographer Aubrey Ross (Kate Mansi,
top-billed). Aubrey is six months’ pregnant with Jackson’s child, but he’s
refused to marry her for reasons which remain powerfully ambiguous until the
end. He’s also declined to let Aubrey see any of his family members, for
similarly mysterious reasons. There’s a nicely amusing scene when they get off
the plane (Jackson flew down in a casual shirt and a nice pair of
salmon-colored shorts) and Aubrey is visibly pregnant while Jackson is carrying
a giant white and vaguely human-shaped balloon that briefly makes him look pregnant — and which turns out to be an
inflatable relaxation device which Aubrey needs to sleep on to get any rest
while she’s pregnant.
Then Aubrey watches by the side of one of the Bahamian
resort’s many swimming pools (the movie was actually filmed there and sponsored
by the Bahamian government, though why they should want to given the
skullduggery it depicts as going on inside a Bahamian resort is something of a
mystery) and drink suitably non-alcoholic fare (she because she’s pregnant and
he because he’s on epilepsy meds that will cross-react with alcohol and become
toxic) as Jackson receives a mysterious letter, tells her he has to go see
someone but he’ll be back soon, and leaves. Needless to say, he never comes
back: instead a white-haired, heavy-set woman shows up and introduces herself
to Aubrey as Jackson’s mother Rose (Kelly McGillis, 37 years after Top Gun — and, not surprisingly, the years have not been
kind). Rose seems to be in league with Jackson’s ex-girlfriend Samantha Mason,
who shows up in the Bahamas and turns up in the room the kidnapped Jackson is
being held in, with zip-ties holding him onto the bed, and virtually rapes him,
insisting that she’s not going to tolerate him being with another woman and the
two belong together forever. Much of the movie consists of Aubrey, sometimes with
Rose’s apparent help and sometimes on her own, getting into more and more
trouble with the Bahamian authorities as she tries to trace Jackson within the
hotel (lying to a number of hotel staff and security people on the way) and
attracting the attention of Bahamian law enforcement. Since the population of
the Bahamas is mostly Black, Maternal Secrets ramps up the frequent Lifetime trope of having
sensible Black people getting the stupid white people out of the scrapes they
get themselves into; in the Bahamas it’s not just one sensible Black person fulfilling that role but
virtually the entire island government.
Rose finally takes Aubrey onto the
water in a motorboat and we don’t know whether Rose intends to save Aubrey or
to drown her and abandon her at sea, and eventually the Bahamian authorities
stop the boat, seize it and arrest both women. For much of the movie’s running
time we’re led to believe that Jackson is a psycho who knocks off any woman who
gets too close to him and starts bringing up words like “relationship,”
“commitment” and “marriage,” but eventually we learn [spoiler alert!] that the real villainess is Samantha, who murdered
the staff aide Jackson wanted to date two years before that and did it by
spiking her cocktail with Jackson’s anti-epilepsy meds so it would look like
he’d killed her. Then she pretended to “protect” him from her family’s efforts
to bring him to justice — there’s a flashback scene in which she arranges a
payoff, funded by Jackson’s political backer Outerbridge after Jackson himself
protests he doesn’t have the kind of money to pay what the family is demanding
— and now she’s after Aubrey because not only has this other woman come between
her and Jackson, she’s about to bear Jackson’s child. Aubrey ultimately gets
bailed out of jail by Jackson and [another surprise!] Jackson’s real mother
(LuAnn d’Agostino, also known as Luana de Lesseps — any relation to the builder
of the Suez Canal?) shows up and she’s dark-haired, relatively slender and
still quite attractive — appears and gives her blessing to Aubrey’s relationship and impending
marriage to her son. (The black velvet-covered box containing the engagement
ring Jackson bought for Aubrey itself becomes a major plot point in the film,
almost a MacGuffin, especially in the earlier scene in which Samantha discovers
it while she’s having her wicked way with Jackson while he’s bound and Jackson
insists it’s a symbol of his relationship with the woman he really loves.)
As far-fetched as Maternal Secrets is — and as deceptive as its title turns out to be
(and we never find out who the grey-haired stocky woman who was impersonating
Rose is or what relation, if any, she is to Samantha) — it’s got a lot going
for it, including a tough-minded and unsentimental performance by Kate Mansi as
Aubrey (and whether she was really pregnant or it was faked in some way, she
certainly looks, moves and acts pregnant) and brilliant work by Brooke Burfitt
as Samantha, the principal villainess. Through much of the movie I was reminded
of one of the quirkier 1940’s noirs, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, which featured Barbara Stanwyck in the sort of role Brooke Burfitt is
portraying here — the fiercely ambitious partner of a handsome but weak-willed
politician (Kirk Douglas, in his first film — and as I’ve written in these
pages before one of the frustrations of Kirk Douglas’ career is how quickly he
became a star and therefore got typecast in heroic roles when some of his most
interesting early films, including Out of the Past, I Walk Alone, Ace in the
Hole and Detective Story, had cast him as villains) who will literally stop at nothing, including murder, to protect and
advance his career. While Brooke Burfitt and Sean Stolzen are hardly in the
class of Stanwyck and Douglas as actors (though both have real potential for
stardom if they can crack the Lifetime ghetto), they deliver the goods and the
scenes between them, charged with relentless ambition and sexual aggression on
her part and desultory attempts at resistance on his, are the best in the film
and indicate real potential not only for the actors but for Lucinda Spurling as
well — if next time she can only co-write and direct a script that makes at
least a little more sense!
