Bad Behind Bars: Jodi Arias (Cineflix Productions, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Saturday, January 22 I spent the evening watching a trifecta of Lifetime movies: Bad Behind Bars: Jodi Arias, The Plot to Kill My Mother and Catfish Killer. Bad Behind Bars had first aired Saturday night as part of their true-crime series, and like Lifetimeps previous movie about Jodi Arias, Dirty Little Secret (which I’ve already commented on at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/08/jodi-arias-dirty-little-secret-city.html), it turned out to be surprisingly good. I’d deliberately avoided the true-crime hysteria about Jodi Arias’s case while heer trial was still going on (and was being aired gavel-to-gavel on CourtTV), so when I came to the story “fresh” Jodi Arias reminded me a lot of the heroine of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly. Both Butterfly and Arias had the misfortune to fall deeply in love with men who regarded them merely as sexual conveniences and looked forward to marrying a woman of their own class and social and religious background. Both even tried converting to their lover’s religion to show how serious they were about the relationship. And both men ultimately left them for the “real American wife” or “real Mormon wife” they’d always said they really wanted (though Arias’s partner, Travis Alexander, went Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton one better – or worse – by actually telling Jodi to her face that she was just a sexual outlet for him and not a real marriage candidate). The only difference was at the end Butterfly killed herself and Arias killed Alexander instead.

Bad Behind Bars begins in the Maricopa County, Arizona jail when Joe Arpaio was still the sheriff (a name I would have been content never to hear again in my life!) and the central characters are not Jodi Arias, but two fellow prisoners, Donovan Bering (Tricia Black) and Tracy Brown (Lynn Rafferty). Donovan narrates the story as an extended flashback as she’s hooked up to a loe detector because she’s agreed to be polygraphed to prove toi the rest of the world that, however strenuously she defended Jodi Arias in public, she’d had nothing to do with her crimes. Donovan and Tracy are Lesbian lovers, and it’s made clear from about the midway point that Donovan, at least, was a Lesbian before she was incarcerated; she recalls having been bullied and teased as a “dyke” when she was growing up. When Jodi Arias (Celina Sinden) is put in the mix and becomes Tracy’s cellmate, Tracy takes an instant dislike to her and is convinced she’s a police snitch put there to get the other women to make self-incriminating statements. Donovan suggests to Tracy that she ask Jodi to do something illegal, which she wouldn’t do if she were a snitch. The illegal thing they ask Jodi to do is tattoo Donivan; it’s against the jail rules for the prisoners to tattoo each other but Jody agrees quickly. In fact, Jodi tattoos her own name on the arms of both Donovan and Tracy, thereby getting them into a lot of unnecessary and unjust trouble later on. Donovan and Tracy are serious enough about each other they even go through a mock wedding, complete with a white strip of cloth they tie around each other’s arms to symbolize their union, but someone rats out their relationship to jail authorities and Tracy is sent to solitary confinement. Donovan deliberately acts up to get herself sent there because at least that way she’ll be able to see Tracy for a minute or two each day.

Jodi convinces Donovan of her innocence and tells her Travis was murdered by two masked intruders, a man and a woman, and she fled before they could kill her too. Once Donovan serves her time and is released, she becomes a public advocate for Jodi’s innocence, including running her social-media accounts – it’s already been established that Jodi was doing a lot of media interviews from jail – and coordinating with other Jodi Arias supporters around the world, including a German computer expert named Lukas and an attorney in Florida who gives her legal advice. Donivan also befriends Jodi’s parents – who for some reason are getting death threats themselves – and she throws herself whole-hog into supporting Jodi’s cause. In fact, she spends so much time on defending Jodi in public, she gets fired from the job her paro9le officer set up for her. Donivan’s other consideration is the welfare of Tracy, who has been transferred to state prison and into a much rougher environment. Donovan knows it will take up to 10 years for Tracy to serve her sentence and be released, but she waits patiently for her. Donovan’s disillusionment with Jodi begins when she attends her trial, and to her shock Jodi’s attorney announces that Jodi killed Travis Alexander but did so in self-defense. Then Jodi takes the stand in her own defense, and Donovan hears her testify that her parents regularly beat her when she was growing up and her mom had a wooden spoon with which she bear her so hard one day it broke, after which mom started using a belt on her instead.

Donovan’s B.S. detector goes off big-time when she hears that, not only because Jodi’s account of her childhood in jail had stressed how normal and pleasant it was but because Donovan recognizes the story as one her partner Tracy had told her and Jodi when they were in jail together. Ultimately Donovan turns against Jodi and changes all the passwords on her social media accounts, freezing Jodi and her support network out of them, and she gets it from both sides> a thug hored by one of Jodi’s supporters breaks into her home and threatens her, while she’s still being vilified by the anti-Jodi forces as well, one of whom writes the word “DIE!” in red spray paint on her outside wall. Ultimately the film has a sort-of happy ending – Donovan and Tracy reunite after Tracy’s release from prison and the two of them get legally married in Arizona in 2018 – though apparently they had only a few years left because the film closes with a title, “In loving memory of Tracy Brown Baring.” Bad Behind Bars is powerfully directed by Rama Rau, a Canadian woman who’s already made independent feature films even though most of her credits are for TV series or movies like this. She definitely deserves a chance at the big time, and so does this film’s writer, Kim Barker, who manages to humanize Donovan and Tracy and make what could have been a cheesy exploitation title a worthy and even noble film. The acting is solid, and Lynn Rafferty’s performance as the hard-bitten Tracy is exceptionally good. I keep watching Lifetime in hopes of finding gems among their usual output, and Bad Behind Bars – despite its terrible title – is truly a fine one.