Drunk, Driving and 17 (Swirl Films, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Saturday, April 15) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime ”premiere” with the salacious title Drunk, Driving and 17 – though the film turned out to be considerably less raunchy than the title and promos for it made it seem. Oddly, there were two pages for it on imdb.com, each listing people in the cast and crew not in the other, and I did my best to fuse them to get as complete a lsit as possible even though neither one listed an actor for Joey Portillo, a pivotal character, though the actors playing his father Jack (Frnaco Castan) and his girlfriend Nikki Marcos (Sydney Bullock) are listed. Drunk, Driving and 17 tells the alcohol-fueled descent of “good girl” Kimberly “Kim” Summers (a quite capable actress named Savannah Lee Smith), an African-American high-school senior who’s never had a drink in her life until one fateful night. One quite remarkable thing about Drunk, Driving and 17 is its frank acceptance of the mixing of white and Black people in contemoprary American suburbia; I’m old enough to remember what a big deal it was for Blacks to move into a white neighborhood and an even bigger deal for white and Black peole to get married and have kids, but Kim is obviously Black, her boyfriend Dan Wright (Antonio Davis) looks mostly white and only slightly Bl;ack, and Dan’s parents Tim (David Shae) and Martha (Michael Michele – yes, the cast list features not only a woman named Michael but a woman named Sydney!), look basically white despite a bit of nappiness in Tim’s hair.

Kim’s downfall begins when Tim and Martha Wright decide to let the local high-school kids have a drunk-fueled party in their home, evidently on the idea that if the kids are going to be drinking anyway at least it’s better if they do it under responsible adult supervision. Only Tim and Martha are anything but responsible: though Martha makes a few stabs at trying to persuade her husband to put brakes on the festivities, Tim couldn’t care less and tells his wife to leave the kids alone and let them have their fun. There are chilling scenes showing the two of them in bed together and Martha is attempting to alert her husband that the party is getting out of hand, but Tim brushes off his wife’s suspicions and at one point plugs a set of headphones into his laptop so he can listen to music in bed and not be bothered either by his wife or their guests. Martha has insisted as a condition of allowing the party that the attendees surrender their car keys and stay there overnight if they get too drunk to make it home safely, but she leaves the keys to their own car hanging on a rack next to the front door – a plot point that becomes important later. Kim, who’s never drunk alcohol before in her life, goes off the rails big-time when she catches Dan Wright in the bathroom making out with another girl, Heather, and she immediately demands a drink, and then another and another and another until she’s chug-a-lugging with the rest of them. She’s also getting herself filmed by the other kids on their smartphones; the video is immediately posted to social media sites by other kids who want to take Kim down a peg because they’re tired of her goody-two-shoes image.

Kim finally realizes she’s overdone it and tries to call her mom Robin (Chantal Jean-Pierre) to come pick her up and take her home, but Robin works the night shift at the local hospital’s ER and can’t pick up Kim’s call. So Kim grabs the keys to the Wrights’ car and uses it to get home, only in the middle of her trip she blacks out, loses control and plows into another car being driven by Joey Portillo. Kim comes to in the ER and realizes she was involved in an accident; she has just a few cuts and bruises but Joey, a star basketball player at the high school before the accident, is paralyzed and ends up in a wheelchair. (There are a few lines of dialogue about how well he’s progressing in rehab, but he’s still using the chair at the end of the movie and it’s left open whether or not he’ll ever be able to walk again.) What makes Drunk, Driving and 17 both more interesting and more frustrating than your average Lifetime movie is the fact that there’s enough blame to go arond: is Joey’s predicament and the collapse of Kim’s life’s ambitions over one stupid mistake. It’s obviuosly Kim’s fault for getting so plastered and stealing a car to try to make it home under the influence,b utit’s also Dan’s fault (as he later acknowledges) for having stage-managed this breakup with Kim by having her catch him with another woman instead of telling her straight-up that it was over between them. It’s also the fault of Tim and Marha Wright for agreeing to host a party at which teenagers wiould be drinking and not doing enough to stop them.

In a way, it reminded me of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – also a story whose tragic outcome is built on a set of coincidences and near-misses – and even more than the play itself it reminded me of a peculiar list of the 10 alleged mistakes that drove the plot of Romeo and Juliet. It was a preface to a versio of the play I read in high school and the first item on the list was that the authorities in Verona waited until the fourth example of violence between the Montagues and the Capulets to ban their feud (the list writer said they shoulde have acted after the first incident) and ends with both Romeo’s and Juliet’s suicides, in which case the bad outcome was that they were “damned” and what they should have done is remained alive and true to each others’ memories. Drunk, Driving and 17 is a lot mroe morally and emotionally complex than msot Lifetime dramas, but Charles put his finger on it when he said it reminded him oef one of the old ABC Afterschool Specials taht regularly aired during our childhoods. Like Drunk, Driving and 17, these were highly didactic and moralistic stories, though since they were only an hour long less commercials they had to be didactic to make both the educational point they wanted to make and a compelling story in which to make it un well undr an hour’s worth of actual running time. The makers of Drunk, Driving and 17, director Russ Parr and writers Amber Benson and Richard Kletter, had a full two hours (actually about 93 minutes) to tell their story and make their didactic points, which in some ways only made the obviousness of the lessons that much more annoying. Still, Drunk, Driving and 17 tells a quite moving story and Savannah Lee Smith vividly brings the character of Kim to life.