Envy: A “Seven Deadly Sins” Story (T. D. Jakes Enterprises, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” Envy, the second film in their Seven Deadly Sins heptalogy based on the “inspirational” writings of Victoria Christopher Murray, who according to her Web site has won an NAACP Image Award and is working on a series of books based on each of the seven deadly sins, though so far she’s only written Lust, Envy, Greed and Wrath. Stripped of its “inspirational” trappings and the heavy-duty religiosity that implies, Envy is a pretty typical Lifetime script about the mysterious stranger who comes to the family fold, all sweetness and light on the surface but secretly hiding deep, dark-secret plans to steal their money, their lovers, their kids or in this case all three. While Lust was about two half-brothers fighting over the same woman, Envy is about two women fighting over the same man. Gabrielle Wilson-Flores (Kandi Burruss) seemingly has it all: a successful public-relations firm in Atlanta, a hot, sexy husband named Mauricio Flores (D.C. Young Fly – from a stage name like that I thought he would be a rapper, but he isn’t: his imdb.com page lists him as an actor and writer) and a charming daughter named Betty (Angeline Friedlander). She;’s also got an inheritance coming from her father, who just retired after starting a successful trucking business – he worked himself up from one truck he drove himself as an independent to a fleet, and now he’s about to retire with his wife and take it easy over how many days he has left.

The opening prologue shows the half-sister Gabrielle doesn’t know she has, Keisha Jones (played in the prologue as a child by Selah Kimbro Jones and as a young adult by Rose Rollins), whose dying mother gives her a copy of the Bible that contains a letter mom wrote to Keisha’s father, Elijah Wilson, who sired her after Gabrielle through an affair he had with Keisha’s mom. He had sent her away with money for an abortion, but mom double-crossed Elijah, gave birth to Keisha and ducked all her questions about just who her dad was. When Keisha came home from school one day, she asked her mom about something her teacher had said in class that everyone has both a mother and a father, and mom replied, “She’s right. Everyone has both a mother and father … except you.” When mom dies in hospital, the staff gives Keisha her Bible, which contains a letter mom drafted to Elijah but never sent him explaining that she’d gone ahead and had his child anyway. Keisha learns from the letter that her dad is Elijah Wilson and he’s a successful truck-company owner in Atlanta (by no coincidence also the setting for Lust – and at least one character from Lust, the minister who raised the earlier film’s protagonist as her grandfather after both her parents were killed in a car crash when she was eight, reappears here and gives a sermon about, you guessed it, envy).

She looks him up on the Web and finds that he’s just retired but his daughter Gabrielle is a successful co-owner of a public-relations firm with a business partner named Regan (Serayah), and their main client is a rapper named Justus whom Gabrielle briefly dated before she married Mauricio instead. Working with an unseen boyfriend back home whom we never see – we only hear him and Keisha talking on the phone – Keisha determines not only to loot as much money as possible from Gabrielle’s company but to take over her entire life: dethroning her from her role in the company, seducing Mauricio away from her and taking their daughter as hers. Lifetime has done innumerable variations on this plot before, including (as here) a paternity test Gabrielle secretly commissions to determine whether Keisha is really her biological sister or not – the test confirms she is – and with that information, as well as Elijah’s enthusiastic support for Keisha’s claim (he says the only way he can atone for his guilt over having sired her out of wedlock in the first place and then driven her mom away and tried to keep her from being born at all is to admit Keisha as part of his family and give her an equal share of his fortune), Keisha joins the P.R. firm. At first Regan is so suspicious of the newcomer she gives Keisha a desk with a phone but no computer (does this company actually still use a receptionist in 2021 instead of subjecting all callers to the mean, evil, harsh regime of voicemail? If so, more power to them!) and sends her out to get coffee while she and Gabrielle pitch their new marketing plan to Justus. Ironically, the plan – that he launch his new line of shoes by signing 12 pair and hiding them around Atlanta, inviting people to join them in a modern-day scavenger hunt – was suggested by Keisha herself, and she’s naturally put out that she’s barred from the meeting at which her idea is being presented.

Meanwhile Keisha, who’s living in Gabrielle’s and Mauricio’s home, has hacked Gabrielle’s laptop and is embezzling from her bank accounts – though that plot point is raised almost in passing and it’s clear Murray and whoever adapted her book for this TV-movie (its imdb.com page credits Damon Lee as director but doesn’t give any writing credits, not even Murray’s) couldn’t be less interested in such a comparatively tawdry crime as grand theft. Instead Keisha gets a more baroque form of revenge by leaking to a celebrity reporter that Justus is really the father of Gabrielle’s daughter Betty (ya remember Betty?). The reporter crashes the reception at which Justus’s shoe scavenger hunt is being announced and asks about it. Mauricio, who already started to get jealous when he found out that Justus provided the seed capital for Gabrielle to start her business (she’d told him it came from her partner Regan’s well-to-do parents), punches Justus out at the event and then announces that he’s leaving Gabrielle for her (nonexistent) infidelity. Keisha then hacks Gabrielle’s laptop again and sends an e-mail in Gabrielle’s name saying that because the scandal surrounding her has made her name toxic in the P.R. business she’s handing all her accounts to Keisha. Keisha also makes a move on Mauricio, which he virtuously refuses, and when Regan catches on to Keisha’s game and does some online research on her ne’er-do-well background she goes to Gabrielle’s house to confront Keisha. The two women confront each other on Gabrielle’s giant curved staircase, and just when we’re thinking, “Regan! Don’t let yourself get caught on top of a staircase with a Lifetime villainess!,” she lets herself get caught on top of a staircase with a Lifetime villainess and said villainess pushes her down the stairs. Director Lee shoots the scene ambiguously enough that we’re not sure whether Keisha pushed her deliberately or Regan just lost her footing in the struggle, and unlike most of the heroines’ African-American best friends who learn the truth about the villain, Regan survives.

Keisha’s last attack on her half-sister is to kidnap Betty, but Gabrielle, her husband and the cops (yes, this takes place in a never-neverland America in which the cops actually help Black people instead of shooting them) track Keisha down and recover Betty. The cops arrest Keisha (presumably for her financial crimes since everything else she’s done, however immoral, seems at least legal) but Gabrielle and her father Elijah insist that whatever she’s done or tried to do to them, she’s still family and they’re going to stand behind her. Frankly, I’d rather see a typical Lifetime movie in which the villainess is an unmitigated killer (though I like Christine Conradt’s knack for giving her evil characters understandable motives) rather than this softer incarnation of one. LIke Lust, this film even ends with a Bible verse (a denunciation of envy from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians), affirming Murray’s “inspirational” message and her willingness, rare in a Lifetime writer, to forgive the bad girl for her sins. But however nice that is from the standpoint of humanity, it weakens the story as drama – and it also deprives us of the soft-core porn that has made a lot of Lifetime movies entertaining even if their plots were so melodramatic they were just silly!