Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, part 2: The Mother (A&E Networkis, Lifetime, 2022)

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

LLast night at 8 Lifetime aired the second installment of what they’re ballyhooing as a five-part mini-series called Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, based on the fifth and final novel in the so-called “Dollanganger Saga” begun by writer V. C. Andrews that began with Flowers in the Attic (1979), in which a demented old woman named Olivia Foxworth (played in the previous films in the cycle by Ellen Burstyn) locks her two grandchildren in the attic of her large mansion, Foxworth Hall, for years. They grow up to be an incestuous couple mainly because they’re brother snd sister who come to sexual maturity in a settingi where there’s literally no one else available, and the title comes from the paintings of flowers the young boy and girl print on the attic walls to simulate the outdoors they’ve never consciously known. Andrews wrote three other stories in the cycle – Petals in the Wind (1980), If There Be Thorns (1981) and Seeds of Yesterday (1984). Andrews planned a fifth novel, Garden of Shadows (1986), that would be a prequel to the whole cycle explaining how Olivia became such an evil bitch she could do that to her grandkids. Alas, Virginia Cheo Andrews the person died on December 19, 1986 after a long battle with cancer, and her publisher, deciding the name “V. C. Andrews” was too commercial a property to be allowed to die with her, assigned Andrew Neiderman to complete Garden of Shadows and continue to write and publish more “V. C. Andrews” novels, thereby making him literally a ghostwriter. Garden of Shadows was the basis for Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, which like most of Andrews’ works centers around an evil man and the terror through which he puts the women in his life.

LThe man is Malcolm Foxworth (Max Irons), who married an independent-minded woman named Olivia Winfield (Jemima Rooper) he met in New York where he had gone on business. Olivia was an extensive reader and imagined her new husband as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice or Rochester in Jane Eyre, but he turns out to be an amoral monster who rapes and impregnates any woman nearby. That includes not only Olivia – who bears him two sons, Mal (Buck Braithwaite) and Joel (Luke Featherston) but then loses the ability to conceive anymore – but also his stepmother Alicia (Alana Boden), who shows up on the arm of Malcolm’s father Garland (Kelsey Grammer, who no doubt would have had a field day with the Foxworths’ madnesses in his most famous role as the psychiatrist on Frasier) with a kind of dewy-eyed admiration for hmi. After she has a son by Garland, Christopher (Callum Kerr), Malcolm rapes her and kills his dad when Garland catches him in the act. This results in a pregnancy which can’t be attributed to Garland since he’s been dead too long to be the father, and so Olivia works out a scheme in which she will pretend to be pregnant while Alicia will be locked in the east wing bedroom until she gives birth, whereupon the child will be passed off as Malcolm’s and Olivia’s while Alicia will go to Pittsburgh with Christopher. Olivia hoped by doing this that she could spare her from being raped by Malcolm again, but through a secret door she didn’t know about he enters her room anyway and does the dirty deed again.

LEventually, the baby is born and it’s a daughter, whom Malcolm insists on naming Corinne after his late mother (who seems to be the only person, other than himself, Malcolm ever actually loved). Only Olivia eventually learns that Malcolm also raped Nelly (T’Shan Williams), their Black servant, and thereby fathered her daughter Celia (Evelyn Miller). And if all this raping isn’t enough, Malcolm is also a regular patron of the local whorehouse in Charlottesville,Virginia (where all this is taking place), and when 16-year-old daughter Corinne sneaks off to a dance and comes back pregnant, Olivia arranges for her to have an underground abortion through the whorehouse madam. Mal, Malcolm’s older son, becomes engaged to Helen (Carla Woodcock), only on their wedding day Malcolm forces himself on Helen as the price for releasing Mal’s inheritance, money he knew Helen was after. In the middle of all this Olivia discovers a secret garden on the Foxworth grounds filled with poisonous plants, and to paraphrase Anton Chekhov, if you establish a garden of poisonous plants in act two someone has to get poisoned with them in act four. Malcolm duly gets poisoned with them but unfortunately survives, and he blames Mal for trying to kill him to get his hands on his inheritance. In fact, the true culprit is Corinne, who has just turned 16 (about a third of the way through this movie it suddenly jumps 15 years forward in time) and has no doubt noticed that her own dad is eyeing her with lascivious eyes as she dresses after a shower. But Malcolm sneaks some of the herbs from the poisonous plant into Mal’s marijuana stash (one nice thing about this movie - and there aren’t many – is it shows how the demi-monde is nothing new and things like pot-smoking, rape, incest and homosexuality occurred in the 1930’s as well) and Mal gets in a car accident with Corinne and dies. The Gay angle comes in when Malcolm’s younger son Joel starts hanging around the garage on the Foxworth estate, interested first in the blues music the Black mechanic Henry (Jordan Peters) plays in a portable phonograph and then in Henry himself.

LIf the first Flowers in the Attic: The Origin episode starts at 11 and worked its way to 15, this one started at 15 and worked its way up to 20 or even 25. It’s a farrago of silliness and it doesn’t help that neither Max Irons nor Jemima Rooper are all that interesting – or that Irons doesn’t get visibly older-looking despite the 15-year sudden jump in time in the story and at times it’s hard to believe he’s really the father rather than the son of Buick Braithwaite. (In my earlier post on the first Flowers in the Attic: The Origin film I mistakenly identified Braithwaite as playing the elder Malcolm, and even more erroneously identified Celia as Nelle’s mother instead of her daughter. That’s an index of how confused the relationships are in these films, in which we’re supposed to believe that Henry the Black Gay mechanic is somehow related to Nelly and Celia; I think Henry was supposed to be the son of Nelly’s stepfather, but we never meet this man in the action.) With the possible exceptions of Nelly, Celia and Henry, all African-Americans, there aren’t any people in Flowers in the Attic: the Origin we actually like, and the film ends abruptly when Alicia Foxworth returns to the action on the day of Mal’s funeral with a gasoline can with which she intends to burn down the poisoned garden (ya remember the poisoned garden?) and we in the audience wondering, “Why are we wasting my time with such silliness?”