The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate (Indy Entertainment, Quint Pictures, Daro Film Distribution, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched what looks like it’s going to be one of the last Lifetime “Premiere” movies for a while because of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate. Tonight they have another “Premiere” scheduled, Her Deadly Sugar Daddy (listed on imdb.com simply as Deadly Sugar Daddy), but after that they’re going to show several weeks of reruns of their “Deadly Cheerleader” movies (“cheerleader” being one of those buzz words, like “sorority” or “escort,” the people running Lifetime use in their titles to lure straight men to watch their channel by promising them glimpses of hot young nubile female flesh in scanty clothing) and in October they’re launching a cycle of holiday-themed movies under the rubric “It’s a Wonderful Lifetime.” (That slow rumble you hear is Frank Capra turning over in his grave.) I’d like to watch the one being promoed by a shot of two nice-looking young men kissing each other on the lips, but for the most part Lifetime’s holiday movies are appallingly treacly and I just wait them out until they go back to neo-noir thrillers in January. The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate was originally titled just The Surrogate, until no doubt somebody at Lifetime realized they’d already used that title back in 2013 for the film that introduced the Whittendale University “universe.” So Lifetime stuck a new title on it that contained three buzz words for audience appeal -- “secret,” “celebrity” and “surrogate,” the last appealing to the kinky thrill stories about women carrying other women’s babies still seems to have for viewers turned on by this disgusting rent-a-womb practice.

In this story, directed by Mark Gantt and written by Courtney Henggeler (whose last name sounds like a Game of Thrones character but who supplies a surprisingly Conradtian level of depth and complexity that puts some meat on the usual bones of typical Lifetime characters), the rent-a-womb belongs to Olivia Bolton (Carrie Wampler, who’s blonde on her imdb.com head shot but is dark-haired in the actual film), who at the start has just about every life-unhinging plot compilation Henggeler can throw at her: her parents died just before the film begins, we first see her in bed with her boyfriend when she gets a series of frantic phone calls from the owner of the coffeehouse where she works -- she throws on some clothes and dashes there but even before she gets there her boss calls her and tells her she’s fired -- her roommate kicks her out for not paying rent for six months, and when she returns to her boyfriend’s place he’s already got another woman with him. “I have a drawer here!” Olivia protests -- “So do I!” says the other woman -- and so Olivia posts a message to her social media saying that she’s desperate for a job, any job, preferably one that will get her out of New York City. She gets an offer from a mysterious woman named Cassidy (Jordyn Aurora Aquino) who’s the personal assistant to fading movie star Ava Von Richter (Brianne Davis) and her husband, Hayden Von Richter (Carl Beukes). We get the impression that Hayden was her manager or producer and launched her career -- and we’re told outright that her last three films have bombed (we see a billboard for her latest one, Love Love Bang Bang, and it’s labeled “For Your Consideration” -- as if its producer actually thought a movie like that would be in line for Academy Awards!) and she’s recovering from a broken ankle she suffered while doing Dancing with the Stars.

Ava desperately wants a child of her own but she can’t carry a pregnancy to term herself, and rather than do the Joan Crawford solution of adoption (apparently a lot of female stars in the 1920;s, 1930’s and 1940’s adopted when they decided they wanted kids, largely to avoid the interruption of their careers a pregnancy would entail, and in her autobiography Ingrid Bergman said that when she arrived in Hollywood in 1939 with her daughter, Pia Lindsrom, the actresses she met were astonished that Pia was actually her and her husband’s biological daughter) she’s decided to look for someone totally rootless and without any family members or significant others to carry her child to term. The deal is that Olivia will receive $150,000 for her services as well as room and board throughout the pregnancy, only the deal starts to unravel when the Von Richters show all the typical indicia of spoiled Hollywood celebrities: they drink, they do drugs, they have nasty arguments that sometimes result in physical violence, and of course they also hit on the help sexually. Indeed, when Hayden Von Richter makes a pass at Olivia I thought the schtick was that Ava was totally infertile and therefore if Olivia was to get pregnant Hayden would have to do it the old-fashioned way -- you know, the fun way. (As things turned out, I was wrong -- but close.) The Von Richters take total control of Olivia’s life, confiscating her cell phone so she can’t call out, forcing her to walk for a half-hour each day, keeping her essentially captive in their homes (a Hollywood estate and a Palm Desert “vacation home” that’s at least 20 miles from any other sign of civilization -- the real Palm Desert is remote but I didn’t think it was that remote!) and stipulating everything she eats. Their menu for her includes eggs every morning (she can’t stand eggs, and this hit home for me because I can’t either: I can almost never have a breakfast “out” because just about every item on a restaurant’s morning menu includes eggs) and a total avoidance of sweets, though Olivia falls in love with the Von Richters’ cook Peter (Kenneth Miller) and he occasionally sneaks her a brownie.

At one point the Von Richters try to get Olivia to have a three-way with them and Ava calls her a “party-pooper” when she declines, and this plus the regular alcohol and drug abuse, along with the domestic violence, convinces Olivia that the Von Richters are not fit parents and the sooner she gets out of there and takes the kid, the better off both will be even though Olivia still doesn’t have a home or a job. Olivia gets so disgusted with her gilded cage and the prospect of loosing the Von Richters on the daughter (we know the sex by then) she’s carrying that at one point, seven and one-half months into the pregnancy, she steals a “Freshies” food van that has come to make a delivery and tries to escape -- only in the meantime the Von Richters call a press conference to announce that their surrogate has run off and her drinking and drug habits are endangering their child. (The needles they show are Hayden’s; he said he needed them to inject insulin because he’s diabetic, but at this point we’re thinking, “Yeah, right.”) She tries to report herself as a kidnap victim to the police, but by the time she gets to see anyone at the police station the Von Richters’ press conference has aired and, after Olivia attempts to grab a phone from a woman who’s obviously Transgender, the cops arrest her. Olivia gets returned to the Von Richters, only now the lock her in a room so she can’t make another escape attempt, and when she resists further they end up cuffing both her hands and her feet. Eventually Cassidy, who until then has been shown to be a basically decent person but one with total loyalty to the Von Richters, helps her escape after Hayden Von Richter leaves his wife and announces he’s going to file for divorce, which leads Ava to decide to have the baby aborted even though it’s been nearly nine months and you’d have to be a really hard-core pro-choicer not to question the ethics of a highly dangerous abortion then. Cassidy helps Olivia flee the Palm Desert redoubt but she gets lost in the desert when she drives out of cell-phone range and her GPS conks out.

Ava follows them, drives her two recalcitrant employees off the road, forces them out of the car and pulls a gun on them. Olivia grapples with her and gets the gun out of her hand, and during this confrontation Cassidy reveals the truth about Olivia’s pregnancy: not only could Ava not bring a pregnancy to term, she couldn’t even start one because she can’t produce fertilizable eggs. So Hayden and his doctor, Dr. Gregory (Hank Rogerson), extracted one of Olivia’s own eggs and fertilized it in vitro with Hayden’s sperm -- meaning the baby she’s been carrying is biologically hers -- and at the end Cassidy shoots Ava to keep her from killing Olivia and then dashes across the desert … whereupon director Gantt cuts to Olivia in the hospital having just given birth to a daughter and Peter the cook,who got fired from the Von Richters’ kitchen for helping Olivia try to escape, turning up as a sort of stepfather ex machina even though he doesn’t have any money or a place to live either. (Also for some reason Peter has lost the small but attractive and well-trimmed facial hair he had in the rest of the movie; when he shows up at Olivia’s bedside he’s clean-shaven, which makes him look dorkier and considerably less sexy -- though that may be the look Kenneth Miller prefers because his imdb.com head shot is also clean-shaven.) Though I couldn’t help but imagine a sequel in which Hayden Von Richter sues them for custody and says that because he has scads of money he’d be a much better parent to raise the girl (who after all is biologically his child as well as Olivia’s!), The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate was actually one of the better Lifetime movies I’ve seen recently. Writer Henggeler manages to create multidimensional characters out of these people instead of falling on Lifetime stereotypes (though she’s guilty of the flaw of a lot of Lifetime screenwriters in going insanely over-the-top at the end); Ava in particular comes off as a figure of real pathos, stuck in a toxic marriage, a downward career spiral and deep-seated feelings of inadequacy as a woman because she can’t reproduce au naturel -- though when her dark side comes out I couldn’t help but think that if someone were remaking The Wizard of Oz the Wicked Witch of the West would be a perfect comeback role for her. Gantt manages to get some genuine Gothic atmosphere out of the situations and the moderne environments they take place in (though Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1934 film The Black Cat remains the most convincing movie ever made in terms of reproducing a Gothic atmosphere in high-tech modern architecture!), and despite its ridiculous title this film is surprisingly entertaining, well acted throughout and several cuts above Lifetime’s norm for this sort of story.