Dirty Little Secret (Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched a Lifetime movie at 8 p.m. yesterday that hit just a bit closer to home than most Lifetime movies because it was about a mega-hoarder, and my husband Charles and I have got so out-of-hand with our collectors’ mania that our possessions have passed the boundary line between a collection and a hoard. The film’s ironic title is Dirty Little Secret because the hoarder, Joanna Compton (Melissa Joan Hart), is at once a skilled trauma nurse who’s good at her job and a compulsive hoarder who’s literally made her home uninhabitable. She had a husband who left her because at that time she was quite the opposite – a ral neat freak who would go ballistic if one thing she had placed somewhere was moved out of position – and as one of the characters says, “She went from the South Pole of OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] to the North Pole.” After her husband left her and forced her to raise their three kids, son Ryan and daughters Sara and Lucy, as a single parent. She’s also fallen way behind on the household bills, which 17-year-old Lucy (Lizzie Boys) discovers by accident when in the middle of the hoard she’s desperately trying to clean up, she discovers a pile of unopened bills and collection notices and finally realizes why her mom has never taken her on vacation or even authorized her to take a field trip through school.

In a sense Lucy is the real central character of the film, and the intrigue revolves around her attempts to have a relatively normal life in her senior year in high school while also having to sneak into the school gym to shower every morning because mom has filled their bathtub with.junk. (Charles came home from work as the movie was in its final stages and I explained to him, “Her bathtub looks like our couch.”) Things start to unravel for Joanna and Lucy when Lucy’s history professor, an African-American, assigns his stidents t o do a school project in pairs and deliberately pairs them with people they don’t know especially well to get them out of their comfort zone. He assigns Lucy to work with Josh (Wern Lee), an Asian-American student, and of course proximity works its movie-conditioned magic and the two get interested in each other as more than just lab partners. Lucy is also being encouraged by her counselor, Miranda Bennett (unnamed on imdb.com but played by a racially ambiguous woman who presents as Black), to apply for the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City and seek out scholarships to defray at least part of the cost of going out of town to attend college. Not surprisingly, Joanna wants her to stay in town and attend the local community college instead, ostensibly for financial reasons but really because she’s scared of losing her protector and the keeper of her dirty little secret.

Dirty Little Secret is based on a young-adult novel called Dirty Little Secrets (plural) by C. J. Omololu, which created the basic plot line screenwriters Doris Egan,Nancey Silvers (the only one of the three I’ve heard of before) and Annie Young Frisbie followed, though apparently both the book and the screenplay drew enough on the stories of real hoarders that Lifetime advertised the film as “inspired by a true story.” One of the hopeful strands in the plot line concerns Drew (also played by an actor regrettably unidentified on imdb.com), a heavy-set, bearded middle-aged bear type who falls for Joanna and asks her out on dinner dates after she saves his life when she realizes the reason he’s had two failed pacemaker operations was because his body is allergic to titanium, so instead she gets his doctors to put in a pacemaker made of gold instead. He’s understandably grateful but also suspicious that she’ll never let him visit her at home; instead she keeps telling him to text the location of the restaurant or other venue he wants to take her to. Alas, Lucy loses patience with her mom just on the night she’s supposed to have a big date to go to an art-gallery opening with Drew, and in the process of doing some frantic cleaning of the place Joanna drops her asthma inhaler and has a fatal attack after Drew calls and Joanna apologizes and says she doesn’t want to date him again.

I had thought this story would end up with Joanna in therapy, cured of her hoarding disorder and the obsessive-compulsive disorder or whatever lay behind it, and both Joanna and Lucy having good men in their lives who could redeem them from the horror they’ve been living. Instead Joanna dies on her cluttered living-room floor and, after feeling her mom’s neck for a pulse and finding none, Lucy at first goes on a frantic cleaning jag of her own, gets yelled at by a neighbor who’s upset with her for using his dumpster to dispose of her mom’s junk, and finally literally burns her house down. She uses a space heater and throws a blanket over it to set the fire deliberately while still making it look like a household accident (one wonders what the arson investigators will make of it). The reason she does that is shown in a fantasy sequence in which Lucy imagines what the emergency medical technicians would think of her mom’s abode if she called 911 instead of burning the place down first. It reminded me of the ending of David Whitehouse’s macabre novel Bed (2012), in which a man swells up to 600 pounds over 20 years and his younger brother, fulfilling his wish to be cremated when he dies but convinced that there would be no way to get his enormous body out of the house when he finally does croak, burns the place down to give him his desired cremation. Aside from hitting more than a bit close to home, Dirty Little Secret is an unusually good Lifetime movie, well acted by the two women principals and effectively directed by Linda-Lisa Hayber (so the director and all the writers were women: thank you, Lifetime!).