by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 9 last night I
watched another “world premiere” on Lifetime, Accidental Obsession, directed by George Erschbamer (by coincidence the
Los Angeles Times yesterday contained yet
another article asking why there aren’t more women directing films and noting
that the percentage of major-studio releases directed by women is actually declining, and after watching two Lifetime movies directed
by quite capable and talented women, Christie Will in Her Infidelity and Nancy Leopardi in Lethal Seduction, it was ironic in light of that article to be
watching a quite inferior one made by a man) from a script by Jeffrey Barmash,
Barbara Fixx and Kley Weber. It begins with one of Lifetime’s deliberately
mysterious and enigmatic openings: blurry footage, partially decolorized to
represent that it’s a flashback occurring well before the film’s main story,
showing a woman with long black hair burying someone in the dead of night.
Later we see the same woman in a mental hospital watching the news reports of attorney
Heather Williams (Josie Davis), who has just won acquittal for her client in a
controversial case. At first I thought the case was the murder trial of the
woman we’d just seen and what Heather had done that was so controversial was
won her an insanity acquittal and thereby sent her to a mental institution
rather than prison or the lethal-injection table. But no-o-o-o-o, though we keep getting additional glimpses of
that flashback it’s not until the movie is two-thirds over that we finally get an explanation of its significance. Heather
has just scored an offer of partnership in her law firm, though that’s
dependent on keeping a mega-bucks client named Eli (whom we never see) happy
with her representation of him (it’s not stressed but there’s certainly a hint
that Heather’s boss, whom we do see, expects her to have sex with Eli if that’s what it takes to keep
Eli’s multi-million dollar account with the firm — or have I just seen too many
1930’s Warner Bros. movies with titles like She Had to Say Yes?). She’s also got an incredibly lovely home with a
swimming pool Busby Berkeley could have staged an Esther Williams number in,
and though she has the annoyance of an ex-boyfriend (he could be an ex-husband, but the writing committee wasn’t
big on nailing down details like that) named Ray Johnson (Sebastian Spence, an
O.K. Canadian actor I’ve seen before in Lifetime movies The Obsession — in which he played a psycho ballet teacher
trying to get into the pants of an underage girl he’s coaching — and Stolen
from the Womb, in which he played the
sympathetic role of the husband whose wife has the titular baby … well, stolen
from her womb, though according to his imdb.com page he was in the reboot of Battlestar
Galactica and science-fiction is his
favorite genre), she also has a dreamboat
of a current boyfriend, Jack Riley
(Marc Menard), a private investigator who was formerly a CIA agent and who does
work for Heather’s firm.
All this starts to unravel when Heather meets Vanessa
(Caroline Cave) when she rear-ends Vanessa’s car; Vanessa pleads with Heather
to pay for having the car fixed so she doesn’t have to deal with an insurance
company or wait for the run-around to have her claim paid. Heather agrees and
the two women strike an immediate friendship — given Heather’s naïveté it’s
obvious she never watches Lifetime
movies! — and when Vanessa pleads that she’s a travel writer but can’t find
work in that job, Heather offers to find her employment either with her own
firm or with Jack’s operation. Only when Heather’s assistant Lisa (Rukiya
Bernard) — yet another
African-American voice of reason trying to save the white characters in a
Lifetime movie from their own stupidities — runs the driver’s license number
Vanessa gave Heather back when they had their accident (you remember), the
license that comes back describes a totally different woman, four inches taller
and with dark hair. Jack Riley offers to interview Vanessa, ostensibly for a
job but actually to check out her story and see if he can use his P.I. skills
to find out who she really is, and eventually it turns out that her real name
is Amanda and she killed her ex-boyfriend and the woman he was going to leave
her for, was caught and put in the mental institution, then escaped when she
saw Heather on TV being interviewed after her big case, and finally assumed the
identity of the woman she killed — the cast list on imdb.com lists Michelle
Martin as playing “Real Vanessa” in that grim flashback of her as a corpse
being buried. In an ending that’s a minor surprise (though not for regular
viewers of Lifetime movies) it turns out that not only was Vanessa’s targeting
of Heather not “accidental,” as the film’s title and the scene setting it up
made it look, but Vanessa — really Amanda, though at one point she’s also referred
to as Carla — specifically went after Heather because they went to high school
together and Heather was successful both with schoolwork and with boys, and
ignored Amanda and made her toweringly jealous, fueling her determination for
revenge now.
In the end Heather and Amanda confront each other in Heather’s
house (to which, early on, Amanda stole the key, so she could let herself in
anytime) after Heather finds Amanda has baked her two pet birds in the oven
(had the rec room in that mental institution contained a DVD copy of Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane?) and is
now determined to kill her with a chrome-plated gun that looked exactly like
the one we’d just seen in Lethal Seduction (the same prop?). Amanda forces Heather to call Jack and invite him
over, and when he arrives Amanda forces him to give up his own gun and seems
determined to kill both of them and then assume Heather’s identity (earlier
we’ve seen Amanda try on some of Heather’s designer outfits — and they fit
perfectly even though Caroline Cave is four inches shorter than Josie Davis).
Amanda shoots Jack in the chest three times and he falls, and then Heather gets
the gun away from her. Amanda tries to club her with a tiki torch from
Heather’s patio, the two stage a fight at the edge of Heather’s pool, and Jack
— not dead after all since he had the foresight to wear Kevlar to Heather’s
party — pushes Amanda into the pool and thinks he’s killed her. Then he calls
the police, but while he’s waiting for them Amanda turns up alive after all for
one final attempt to knock off our leads, and it ends with Heather and Jack
safe and Amanda back in custody, muttering to herself that she broke out of one
mental institution and can always do so again (are Erschbamer and the writing
committee setting us up for a sequel?). After the genuine style with which
Christie Will and Nancy Leopardi staged equally silly scripts in Her
Infidelity and Lethal Seduction, respectively, Accidental Obsession is a return to the slovenliness of most Lifetime
movies. It’s decently acted — especially, not surprisingly, by Caroline Cave as
the villainess — but Erschbamer simply isn’t a good enough director to take the
edge off this movie’s relentless over-the-top absurdity and Accidental
Obsession becomes a chore to watch
in ways Her Infidelity and Lethal
Seduction weren’t. I didn’t think
that watching three Lifetime movies in three days would leave me with an object
lesson in why the movie industry needs to open more directing opportunities to
women, but that’s what happened!
