by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Escape from Polygamy, a production of something called “Indy
Entertainment,” directed by Rachel Goldenberg from a script by Damon Hill —
whose original working title for the film, Ryder and Julina, indicated that the obvious parallels he was
inserting to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet were deliberate. Julina (Haley Lu Richardson) is a
17-year-old girl who’s been brought up in a breakaway sect of the Mormon church
that still allows (and even encourages) polygamy, though apparently her father
never took more than one wife, Julina’s mother Leann (Mary McCormack, the
remarkable actress from the USA Network series In Plain Sight playing a very different sort of role). After
Julina’s dad croaks of a heart attack in front of her, the head of their sect,
“prophet” Ervil Barlow (William Mapother — Tom Cruise’s cousin; “Mapother” is
the original family name), orders Leann to become the fourth wife of one of the
key figures in the cult, Merril (Sam Hennings), and to move onto the cult’s
main compound. Julina is unused to the regimented lifestyle at cult central and
is electrified when she meets a hunky young man named Ryder (played by the
truly drop-dead gorgeous Jack Falahee, whom I’d definitely like to see more of)
who turns out, much to Julina’s astonishment, to be the Prophet’s only son and
chosen heir. Ryder starts cruising her in spite of the cult’s strictures
against any men and women not
only getting together and doing the down ’n’ dirty before the Prophet marries
them but also against people selecting their own marriage partners: all the
cult couples, singular or “plural” (to use Joseph Smith’s own euphemism), are
paired by the Prophet. Julina is pleasantly surprised that the Prophet is a
reasonably decent-looking man instead of the grizzled old codger she’d
expected, but (in a plot twist that suggests Damon Hill’s reading list extended
not only to Romeo and Juliet but
Schiller’s — or Verdi’s — Don Carlos
as well) she’s quite unhappy when
the Prophet announces that he’s selected her as his next wife. So is Ryder, who like Don Carlos is understandably miffed that the woman he loves is about to
become his stepmother.
Oddly, the Prophet doesn’t seem to be married to anybody
and never has been except to Ryder’s mother, who mysteriously “disappeared”
from the cult several years previously — though that hasn’t stopped him from
having sex with anyone on the compound he wanted, including raping Julina’s
overweight, learning-disabled 13-year-old friend Esther (Presley Henderson) and
getting her “with child.” When Esther’s water breaks and she’s about to give
birth, Julina’s mom Leann, who trained as a nurse in the outside world so she
could help the cult’s women give birth without the intervention of the medical
establishment (needless to say, Ervil doesn’t want outside doctors coming onto
the compound and he’s even less thrilled about sending anyone out for medical
care), takes charge of the case and delivers a healthy baby girl but is unable to
save Esther’s life. This is just fine with the Prophet, as it turns out, not
only because he was the father of Esther’s child but because he was worried
that if she’d lived she’d have “outed” him as her rapist and her kid’s dad.
Ervil expels his son Ryder from the camp and turns him out in the middle of the
desert; Ryder manages to make it to Las Vegas and hook up — platonically — with
his former friend Micah (Jake Weary), who was similarly expelled from the cult
for not following the rules. Micah is blond, goes around shirtless, and leads a
dissolute lifestyle involving drinking, drugs and male sex partners — though
it’s not clear from Hill’s script whether Micah is “really” Gay or a basically
straight boy who’s willing to hustle and have Gay sex for money. (In one scene
in their hotel room he puts the moves on Ryder, who given that despite his
expulsion from the cult he’s still a good little Mormon boy at heart is
appalled, but it’s unclear whether Micah is actually trying to seduce Ryder or
is just “showing him the ropes” of how to come on to men for pay.) In the
film’s most powerful scene, the newly arrived Ryder goes into total culture
shock when he’s turned loose on the Vegas strip — director Goldenberg, whose
work in the rest of the movie is blessedly straightforward (without the
music-video effects, flanging or other stupid tricks some Lifetime directors
have used), gives us some incredible point-of-view shots as the lights of Vegas
dazzle Ryder both literally and figuratively, symbolizing a whole sort of life
he’d never dreamed even existed
before: his only intimation of Vegas had been a photo of the famous “Welcome to
Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada” sign Micah had sent him earlier. Anyway, despite
the temptations of Vegas in general and Micah in particular, Ryder — who’s
already done a D.I.Y. marriage ceremony with Julina reminiscent of the ones in Lucia
di Lammermoor and the 1933 film Safe
in Hell — resists and at the end is
determined to return to cult central and get Julina out of there.
There’s a dramatic
suspense ending with a few mind-numbing reversals as the film intercuts between
Ryder’s and Micah’s invasion of the cult compound, the preparations for Ervil’s
marriage to Julina, and Julina’s tearing her wedding gown into strips so she
can hang herself with them, since she’s been imprisoned in a room with a locked
door and barred windows and can see no other way out. Eventually Julina’s mom
Leann insists on seeing her and they discover her hanging from the ceiling,
apparently dead, and Ervil agrees to lead an impromptu funeral. He also catches
Ryder on the property and beats him to within an inch of his life, leaving a
picturesque scar across his forehead inflicted with a lead pipe (no, that was
actually Professor Plum in the library!), and as in Shakespeare’s play it looks
for a while as if both our young
lovebirds are a-goner — only, this being a Lifetime movie instead of a literary
masterpiece, it turns out that Julina and her mom faked her suicide, Ryder recovers from his injuries,
someone else in the cult (it might be Leann’s husband Merril, but we’re not
sure) shoots Ervil and thereby saves our lovebirds from his vengeance, and the
film ends with Ryder and Julina getting the hell out of Dodge while Leann stays
behind with Merril, the new cult leader, because “my life is here.” Merril
preaches a sermon announcing that Ervil has gone to Mexico to start a branch of
the cult there, a twist reminiscent of Ervil LeBaron, the real-life polygamist
cult leader who in the 1970’s ordered the murders of several people, including
his brother Joel, whom he thought were threats to his power (obviously Damon Hill got the first name of his “Prophet” from
this real-life one), and who traveled back and forth between the U.S. and
Mexico (where his father, Alma Dayer LeBaron, Sr., had fled in 1924 to practice
polygamy away from the mainstream Mormon church’s ban) and reportedly killed
people on both sides of the border. (Indeed, according to the Wikipedia page on
Ervil LeBaron, he continued to order killings even after his own death in
prison in 1981; he supposedly left a 400-page manuscript called The
Book of the New Covenants in which he listed
people he wanted his remaining followers to murder, and some of those people
were indeed killed over the next decade.) Escape from Polygamy is a pretty predictable movie but it’s well made,
well cast (William Mapother and Jack Falahee look enough alike they’re actually
believable as father and son, a rarity in any movie), well directed and decently written within
the conventions and some of the forced Romeo and Juliet parallels. It’s not as intense, dramatic or
thrilling as Baby Sellers — the “original
Lifetime movie” premiered the previous weekend — but then few things on
Lifetime are that good.
