Secret Life of a Pastor's Wife (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 13) Lifetime showed a movie called Secret Life of a Pastor’s Wife, and the title and the Lifetime synopsis (“Angie, the wife of a charismatic pastor who extols family values yet maintains an icy demeanor toward his own, seeks solace from her marital woes in the arms of her recently hired pool boy, a fling which quickly upsets the idyllic façade of the community, reigniting old jealousies, and leaving no one's secrets safe”) had me wondering if writer Ashley O’Neil had based her script on the recent (2020-2022) scandal involving Rev. Jerry Falwell, Jr., his wife and their pool boy, Giancarlo Granda. Granda said he would have sex with Mrs. Falwell while Mr. Falwell watched, and Mr. Falwell said he knew about the affair, stumbled in on them one time and said he was “traumatized” by the sight. O’Neil threw a couple of mild hints in the direction of the alleged Falwell affair (in both senses) but mostly stuck to the Lifetime formula, except for one big surprise twist about 50 minutes into the movie’s running time (including commercials; the reveal would come considerably earlier on a “streaming” viewing without them). In this case, the pastor is Jim Martin (Andrew Fultz), who’s written a book called Learning to Be a Godly Wife and whose sermons are so sex-obsessed I’d forgive his parishioners for wondering if he could ever talk about anything else. His wife is Angie Martin (Jennings Rice, top-billed), and the pool boy is Jason Rich (Mike Manning). Jason has taken over as their pool boy by either buying out or murdering the previous one, Rodney, and taking over his business, “Bottom Feeders” (a name which evokes Ashley O’Neil’s rather obvious sense of irony and cynicism). It’s lust at first sight between Angie and Jason, and before long they’re having at each other in a typically hot soft-core porn scene from director Danny J. Boyle (not the Danny Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, but a capable filmmaker in his own right even though all I’ve seen from him is Lifetime movies and he’s all too faithful to their tropes).

Jim and Angie have a daughter, Leila (whose name is pronounced “LAY-luh,” like the “Layla” in Eric Clapton’s song; my stepgrandmother’s name was Leila, but she pronounced it “LEE-luh”), who turns out [spoiler alert!] biologically to be Angie’s daughter but not Jim’s. Angie conceived Leila during a one-night stand with an anonymous man and Jim offered to marry her and act as a father to her child, but he’s too cold and forbidding to offer much emotional support either to Angie or Leila. Midway through the movie Jason is actually murdered at the motel where he lives, and the story becomes a whodunit with a number of suspects: Jim himself (the police have surveillance footage of him skulking around outside the motel on the night Jason was killed); Jim’s friend Nathan (Nick Checket), who once approached Jim after a sermon and offered to do anything for him in what definitely sounded, at least to me, like a homosexual advance (or was I just reading too much into it after noting the Falwell connection?); Nathan’s wife Desirée (Janet Carter), who’s also having an affair with Jason and who’s writing a manuscript, Peyton Place-style, about the small-town secrets of fictional “Eastbridge” (probably in California, since the license plates on the cars look at least vaguely Californian) where all this takes place; and Angie’s confidante Sarah (Harley Bronwyn), who’s been sort of the voice of reason through all this. My mind was running along two tracks, at least after the character of Angie’s sister Catherine, generally called “Cath” (McKensie Lane), is suddenly introduced two-thirds of the way through. Cath is older than Angie and is – or at least says she is – genuinely perturbed at the way Jim has driven a wedge between her and Angie and forbidden Angie from being in touch with the rest of her family. Part of me was thinking Jim murdered Jason out of jealousy, not only because Jason was having an affair with Angie but because Jim wanted him himself (as I said, I was probably reading way more Gay connections into this story than Ashley O’Neil intended!); part of me was thinking O’Neil was going to make Cath the killer, driven by jealousy and hatred of the ultra-religious Eastbridge community.

The idea that the killings – not only Jason but Desirée, who’s found dead, an apparent suicide from an overdose of Ambien (a prescription-only sleep medication) that it’s been revealed in a previous scene that Jim is taking – are some sort of retribution for the community’s religious hypocrisy is reinforced by the anonymous notes various people in the town have been getting, all handwritten on a two-toned brown card stock with messages about sin and retribution and hints that the writer knows about all the sinning that’s going on in the town, particularly the extra-relational sexual activity. Cath gives Angie an old photo of Jim and Jason together when they were both college students – which seemed like a plot hole to me because Mike Manning looked young enough to be Andrew Fultz’s son and the two did not look like they could have been college students together (although Jim Martin could have gone back to school as an adult to get his divinity degree). There’s a woman in the photo who turns out to be the late Victoria Edgerton. She was the wife of one of Jim’s and Jason’s professors, Matthew Edgerton. She was having affairs with both Jim and Jason simultaneously; Matthew found out about it and supposedly killed her out of jealousy. He was convicted and is still in prison for the crime, but he’s maintained his innocence and it turns out at the end [second spoiler alert!] that Jim killed her and drowned her in the Edgertons’ swimming pool (action we saw at the beginning of the film in a prologue which we didn’t understand because we didn’t know who either of these people were),then killed both Jason and Desirée to cover his tracks. Cath misses a date with Angie at a local bar simply called “BAR” (which reminded me of the similarly named establishment in the 1960 film The Leech Woman, which when it was parodied on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 one of the cast members joked, “Let’s go to BAR, order SANDWICH and have DRINK!”) and she turns out to have been in a car accident.

At least that’s what we think happened to her; later she escapes from the hospital wearing a surgical gown and unplugs her own IV, which had me wondering if she was going to turn out to be the villain after all and had merely been faking that her injuries were worse than they were. But no-o-o-o-o; with the aid of a police detective in another city that also happened to be an ex-boyfriend, Cath had got Jim’s DNA tested from a hair sample Angie had collected for her, and that had matched Jim to the scene of Victoria’s murder. (There’s a brief flashback scene showing Jim actually killing her, in which she’s played by Mackenzie Hughes.) At the end, after Angie has killed Jim in self-defense, she, Cath and their mother (unidentified on imdb.com) reunite and celebrate the reunification of their family. Secret Life of the Pastor’s Wife is one of those frustrating Lifetime films that could have been a good deal better than it is, especially if O’Neil had followed up on the hints she dropped that Jim was actually Bisexual and involved sexually with both Jason and Nathan. Even without going that far, she could have made a stronger story with the material she had if she hadn’t kept falling back on Lifetime clichés to help her out of awkward story situations. O’Neil and director Danny J. Boyle both deserved better than a potentially provocative and exciting story premise that devolves into a not-very-interesting whodunit.