Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, part 1:The Marriage (A&E Studios, Lifetime, 2o22_

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

Alas, the next Lifetime movie on the channel last night, Flowers in the Attic: The Origin: Part 1: The Marriage, was a piece of overblown garbage that makes one wonder why they bothered. It was based on a novel called Garden of Shadows, attributed to “V. C. Andrews,” a hack writer of romantic fiction with Gothic twists who died in 1986, one year before Garden of Shadows was published. No matter: deciding that the name “V. C. Andrews” was too valuable a property to be allowed to die with its original owner, her publishers simply hired another writer, Andrew Neiderman, to keep cranking out “V. C. Andrews” novels, some of them based on outlines she’d left behind, some (especially later on, after he ran out of Andrews’ own material) his own inventions in her style. Garden of Shadows was the fifth and last book in the Flowers in the Attic cycle, in which a crazy old woman named Olivia Foxworth (played in Lifetime’s earlier adaptation of Flowers in the Attic by Ellen Burstyn, in one of those performances in which an old pro seems to be pushing aside the younger actors and saying, “Here, let me show you how it’s done”) locks her grandson and granddaughter in the attic of her old, crumbling Southern mansion in Charlottesville, Virginia. The two reach sexual maturity and become incestuous lovers simply because they’re both horny and there ls literally no one else. (I'm tempted to argue that among stories of brother-sister incest, at the top is Wagner's Die Walküreand at the bottom is Flowers inth8e Attic.)

Flowers in the Attic kicked off a string of three other sequels plus a prequel, Garden of Shadows, which was supposed to show how Olivia got so crazy she would do such a thing. In this version, set between 1918 and 1920 (we know that because the end of World War I and the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the vote happen during the show). Olivia Winfield (Jemima Rooper – a white girl named Jemima?) works in an office as a business assistant to her father. He’s determined to find her a husband, while she is reluctant until she meets Malcolm Foxworth (Buck Braithwaite), eligible bachelor from a super-rich family in Charlottesville, Virginia. Though she wonders what the darkly handsome bachelor could see in her – her idea of love and marriage has come from reading books like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, and she hopes Malcolm will be her real-life Darcy or Rochester – they ultimately marry. Only it turns out that Malcolm is almost literally a monster: he’s constantly tearing off on mysterious “business” trips, and when he finally has sex with his new wife, instead of giving her any sort of thrill he merely rapes her. They conceive two children in this manner, both boys – much to Malcolm’s disgust because he really wants a girl whom he wants to name Corinne, after his mother, who abandoned the family when Malcolm was five and didn’t return to his life until years later, just before she died.

Malcolm’s long-lost father Garland (Kelsey Grammer, of all people) shows up with a young bride named Alicia who's about Olivia’s age, and the two of them have another child – also a son instead of a daughter. Malcolm, bound and determined to father a girl, rapes his stepmother Alicia, and when his dad catches him in the act, Malcolm strangles and kills him. Malcolm justifies this by saying that Olivia failed in her duty to give him a daughter – she was told by Dr. Curtis (Peter Bramhill) after the birth of her second son that she could not bear any more children – and therefore this gives him the “right” to force h himself on any available woman. There are at least two servants in the Foxworth household, a white battle-axe whose family has been there for generations and who makes Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (a tale this one owes quite a lot to, as it does to The Heiress and the British 19th century classics it name-checks) seem warm and fuzzy by comparison; and Nelly, a Black woman whom Olivia makes her confidante until Malcolm decides they’ve gotten too close and fires her. In the final scene Olivia agrees to keep quiet about Malcolm murdering his dad, in exchange for several conditions: she demands that Malcolm set up a $2 million trust fund for both their sons; that Alicia be allowed to stay in the house until her second baby is born, whereupon Malcolm and Olivia will raise it as their own; and that Nelly be rehired – despite the reluctance of Nelly’s mother Celia (Evelyn Miller) to let her go back to Foxworth Hall. (Nelly and Celia essentially become the Lifetime stereotypes: the voice-of-reason Black characters who try to talk the white people in the story out of doing the stupid, obnoxious or evil things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all.)

Amazingly, Lifetime is doing Flowers in the Attic: The Origin as a five-part miniseries, which means there’ll be four more two-hour movies on this theme to suffer through running every Saturday night until the cycle ends. It reminds me of the way Peter Jackson and his writers squeezed three movies out of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit – not at all a long book – to create a cycle that would match the earlier one he made from the three books in The Lord of the Rings, each of which is at least twice as long as The Hobbit. I remember when Charles and I got the boxed set of all six of Jackson’s Tolkien movies I more or less suffered through the three Hobbit films – they seemed relentlessly overblown and inflated (but then this is the man who expanded the Beatles’ Let It Be from 90 minutes to six hours, and also made a 190-minute remake of King Kong when the 1933 original was near-perfect at 100 minutes).

I’m not sure whether I’m going to keep watching the rest of the installments of Flowers in the Attic: The Origin; I liked bits and pieces of this first episode but for the most part it was pretty much an endurance test, with the characters speaking ultra-stilted dialogue that was the screenwriters’ attempt to make this sound like it was taking place at the start of the 1920’s, and the cinematographers making it look like they were shooting it through Vaseline to give a similarly “distant” gauzy air of the past. It also doesn’t help that, though Jemima Rooper is appealingly spunky (but then she never convinces us that a woman this feisty and independent would want to get married, especially to such a creep), Buck Braithwaite as the villain is simply a drip. I had thought while watching Alissa Filoramo in Nightmare PTA Moms that she was going through the motions of playing a Lifetime villainess, but compared to Braithwaite she was electrifying. Whether he’s being superficially charming or unleashing the beast within, Braithwaite is simply boring: he’s dull and has no charm whatsoever, and one doesn’t have to go back to Laurence Olivier, Colin Clive or Orson Welles as the characters Olivia name-checks to see what could be done with a character like this. One only has to go back to any number of previous Lifetime dramas which featured far more magnetic and intense performances by actors playing villains than this!