by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was the first of two films
in a row based on shorter true-crime stories by Ann Rule, who made her bones as
a true-crime writer by penning (or, more likely, typewriting or
word-processing) a book called The Stranger Beside Me, first published in 1980, inspired by her experience
dating Ted Bundy in Washington state in the early 1970’s and only later
learning that he was a serial killer with dozens of known victims. It was a
huge success and inspired Rule, who’d briefly worked in law enforcement and had
also written stories in True Detective under a male pseudonym (“Andy Stack”). The Bundy book launched her as
a true-crime writer, which she continued to do until her death in 2015, and she
once told an interviewer, “To choose a book subject, I weed through about 3,000
suggestions from readers. I'm looking for an 'antihero' whose eventual arrest
shocks those who knew him (or her): attractive, brilliant, charming, popular,
wealthy, talented, and much admired in their communities — but really hiding
behind masks.” Sleeping with Danger,
the movie Lifetime showed last night, and A Murder to Remember, the one they’re showing tonight, are both based on
crimes Rule didn’t think merited a whole book, so she saved them for her story
collections that presented short accounts of actual crimes: Sleeping
with Danger came from a Rule collection
called Mortal Danger and deals
with Grace Jewell (Elisabeth Röhm, who was a “regular” on Law and
Order from 2001 to 2005 as prosecutor
“Serena Southerlyn”) a flight attendant in the 1990’s (which explains something
that bothered Charles about this movie: no one in it used a cell phone!) who’s
dating a pilot but the two are almost never in the same city.
Feeling run-down,
she sees an alternative-health physician named Dr. Paul Carter (Antonio Cupo)
and he draws her blood for lab tests himself instead of having a nurse or
technician do it — our first intimation that his interest in Grace is
personal rather than professional. Eventually he puts her on an entire
nutritional regimen from a company called “Nutristave” for which he’s a
multi-level distributor, and he also gets her to have sex with him. She
instantly falls in love — or at least lust — with him even though, not
surprisingly given not only its origins in a true-life case of spousal abuse
but also the hints of classical domestic abuser patterns he’s dropping right
and left, she’s going to be letting herself in for a miserable time. He breaks
her relationship with her close friend Sherry (I think that’s how it’s spelled, though neither she nor her
character’s name appear on imdb.com — a pity, since I quite liked boththe
character and the actress playing her, who does so with an appealing mixture of
superficial niceness underlying a deep degree of concern) and gets her to cut
back on her number of flights so she can join him in business as a Nutristave
distributor. Eventually they move to a lovely house in the country — far enough
away that she can’t leave without a car and, while he has one of his own, he
takes hers away and leaves it in town for unnecessary “repairs” — and he puts
her through the all too familiar roller-coaster ride real domestic abusers drag
their victims on, hitting her, then being all apologetic and gooey-sweet until
the next time something she does, however innocently, sets off the glare-ice in
his nature and turns him violent again. At one point he makes her a five-course
meal while she’s returning from one of the few outside assignments he allows
her to work, and when she protests she’s too tired to make it through a full
meal, he tips over the table and starts smashing things. At another point he
tells her that he’s bipolar and it’s the “other” Paul Carter, the depressed
one, that abuses her, but he’s going to see a therapist and get on meds and she
won’t have anything to fear from him again. He also ups his alcohol consumption
(writers Richard Blaney and Gregory Small could have made more of the irony
that he’s supposedly a health-food freak and therefore he should not be
drinking at all) and, not
surprisingly, gets far more dangerous when drunk.
Grace actually gets away from
him long enough to stay with her friend Sherry and attend a support group for
abused women, but she’s still in denial — the group leader shows her a poster
listing all the signs of being in an abusive relationship, and Grace says none
of them apply to her when from what we’ve seen in the movie so far all of them do. Like a lot of other spousal-abuse movies
(including the grandmommy of them all, the 1991 Julia Roberts vehicle Sleeping
with the Enemy), this one works best when
it dramatizes the sheer terror an abuse victim lives under, the alternation
between love (or at least the appearance of love) and terror abusers put their
victims through and the persistence of the bonds that hold a victim to a
relationship even though rationally she’d be much better off leaving. (And not always “she,” either:
both straight and Gay men have been victimized by abusive partners, as have
Lesbians.) Ultimately she comes back, then she tries to run away — with him
having once again taken her car away from her, she tries to hitchhike but the
only person who picks her up is him — and in a twist the writers never quite
explain, he goes totally off the
rails and takes a gun (he had one earlier and shot at her through their bedroom
door, then he promised to get rid of it but either didn’t or replaced it with a
small arsenal), ties her to their bed, rapes her and announces he’s going to
kill her. While he’s out of the room preparing to do this (and burning all the
court records of his previous instances of domestic abuse) she manages to
loosen the bonds and flee. She also calls the police, and they arrive in time
to rescue her but not to catch
him. She stays in communication with a Seattle police detective — a hard-edged
butch woman who’s as anxious to see this jerk busted as Grace is (or we are)
—and traces Paul to the home of his friend Harvey, who’s putting him up and
helping him hide out — but once again Paul escapes.
Then Grace traces Paul’s
daughter, who took over his job with Nutristave, and of course it’s hate at
first sight between them — but, it being December, Grace steals a Christmas
card sent to Paul from his latest girlfriend and tries to trace her so she can
warn her he’s an abuser and is likely to kill her. Alas, she’s too late: by the
time the cops trace Paul’s current whereabouts he’s had a final confrontation
in which he’s killed his new girlfriend, an Asian-American named Steve who was
his financial backer in a new nutrition-products venture, and himself. (In the
real case, profiled on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Web site at https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/kathy-ann-jewells-story-inspired-the-lifetime-film-sleeping-with-danger,
the Asian friend and backer survived the shooting even though John William
Branden, the real-life equivalent of “Paul Carter,” and his girlfriend Turid
Bentley both died. Also the real Branden was 62 and Bentley was 66, considerably
older than they’re portrayed in the film.) Though burdened by some of the usual
Lifetime clichés and plot devices, Sleeping with Danger is actually one of their better films, tautly
directed by David Weaver and ably acted, especially by the two leads: Röhm,
whom we’re used to seeing as a figure of power and authority, expertly catches
the vulnerability that makes Grace a potential victim, and Cupo is absolutely
right as the abuser, nailing the glare-ice shifts in his nature and giving us
both the character’s superficially charming and charismatic exterior and the
vicious, evil abuser underneath.
