by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime film
was one of their “world premieres,” something called Are You My Daughter?, which turned out not only to be very much to the
Lifetime formula but a near-exact remake of A Wife’s Nightmare, a 2014 production Lifetime recently re-ran and
which was a good deal better than Are You My Daughter? Are You My Daughter? begins with a scene on the Seattle wharf, where
up-and-coming attorney Laura Paddington (Brooke Langton), wife of doctor
Richard Paddington (Mike Dopud), has taken her three-year-old daughter Zoë
(Bailey Skodje) to play. Only while she’s taking an all-important call from
work — this is yet another one of those stories in which a woman professional
is torn virtually in two between her obligations to her career and to her
family — Laura momentarily loses sight of her daughter, and the girl
disappears. Flash-forward 16 years to the present: Laura now has her own law
office (which apparently handles private investigations on the side) and is
representing a young man with a British — or at least British Commonwealth —
accent who’s turning state’s evidence against a particularly vicious motorcycle
gang. She’s also dating Jacob Nyholm (Peter Benson), whom she met in a support
group for people whose close relatives mysteriously disappeared; she’s only
known him for six months but he’s already insisting that they get married. As
for Laura’s dad, he became a physician for a Doctors Without Borders-style
group and he’s currently on assignment for them in Bangladesh; they’ve stayed
in touch but the strain over Zoë’s disappearance predictably (at least by the
standards of Lifetime screenwriters — this movie was written by Gemma Holdway and
directed quite effectively, given what she gave him to work with, by Jason
Bourque) broke up their marriage and she hasn’t been “serious” about anybody
since until the advent of Jacob.
After about 20 minutes of exposition giving us
all this, the plot kicks into high gear when Laura reports to a homeless
shelter for something to do with one of her cases, and there meets Rebecca
(Stephanie Bennett), a 19-year-old who according to her own account escaped an
abusive “aunt” and her molesting boyfriend, who lived well outside the law and
used her as cover for their crimes. Rebecca looks enough like Laura that she’s
strongly convinced she is her long-lost Zoë, and when she looks at the back of
her neck and sees Zoë’s trademark birthmark — a grey blotch that looks like two
crossed hearts — she’s certain of it. The case involves both the local police
and the FBI, and the FBI agent, Michelle Canning (Catherine Lough Haggquist),
is convinced Rebecca is Zoë. “It’s very rare we have a happy ending in this
work!” she exults as she congratulates Laura on regaining Zoë. But the local
detective, Garwin (Jerry Wasserman), who’s been on the case since he was
assigned to investigate it 16 years earlier when Zoë first disappeared, is
convinced that hard-edged Rebecca couldn’t be the missing girl — to him, she just doesn’t seem like the sort of
person Richard and Laura would sire. Even when a DNA test from a reputable
private lab comes back with a result indicating that Rebecca is Laura’s daughter, Garwin is not convinced. After about
two-thirds of the movie we’re starting to get more convinced, especially when
we see Jacob giving Rebecca some displays of affection that don’t seem at all
(step)fatherly, and Laura catches them — not actually kissing (or worse), but
with Jacob’s hand stroking Rebecca’s back in what seems like a gesture between
two people who are sexually involved with each other. About half an hour before
the end Laura finally does
what she probably should have way back in the backstory when Jacob first
started coming on to her: she does an Internet search for his supposedly
missing sister and finds no hits, indicating that either she never disappeared
or maybe never even existed at all. It turns out that Jacob and Rebecca hatched
this plot together — which isn’t that big a surprise because Peter Benson is a genuinely attractive actor and
in a Lifetime movie virtually any time you see a hot man — especially a hot man who’s older than his
teens (nice-looking teenage males on Lifetime are genuinely victims of sex-crazed older women psychopaths, or else the
consoling end-of-movie boyfriends of the female teen victims of sex-crazed
older men psychopaths) — he’s going
to turn out to be a dastardly, black-hearted villain.
Their objective was not
so much mutual lust as mutual greed; Laura had a fortune of $6.5 million saved
in her bank, and they were after it as well as inheriting their estate. The
idea was that Jacob would marry Laura, she’d die a mysterious “accidental”
death, and Jacob would have both Laura’s money and Rebecca — though how he
could live with her as a lover when he’d carefully established her as his
stepdaughter, complete with having the birthmark (or a credible simulation
thereof) tattooed on her, is a mystery locked inside Gemma Holdway’s head —
unless he was planning either to pay Rebecca off with her share of Laura’s
money or kill her, too. Jacob does kill Garwin by feeding him whiskey laced with
poison — Garwin was suffering from heart disease and so Jacob picked a poison
that would make it look like Garwin had simply had a heart attack — and at the
end he and Rebecca kidnap Laura and take her to a cabin at Fox Lake, though
they forget to take Laura’s cell phone away from her and Laura is able to call
911 and broadcast their intentions to the police. The final scene is a battle
of wills that makes it look like Gemma Holdway is a faithful worshiper at the
shrine of St. Christine Conradt — Jacob orders Rebecca to kill Laura once he’s
tortured her into revealing the password to drain her bank account and transfer
the $6.5 million to his (“Technology — isn’t it wonderful?” he muses as he
completes his on-line larceny), but Laura convinces her to switch sides by
telling her it’s more likely Jacob will kill both of them than that he’ll share the money with her.
Rebecca gets the gun after Jacob drops it in a struggle with Laura, then Jacob
overpowers Rebecca, but in the meantime Laura has grabbed the gun and used it
to blow away Jacob, while the police have arrived just in time to watch Laura
shoot Jacob and see she did so in self-defense. A rather odd tag scene hints
that Laura and her husband Richard (ya remember her husband Richard?) will get back together, which seems odd.
The
2014 Lifetime movie A Wife’s Nightmare, written by Blake Corbet and Dan Trotta and directed by Vic Sarin, did
essentially the same plot line but with considerably more style and stronger
dramatic credibility: in that one the parents of the missing kid were still
together and the wife was the breadwinner while the husband, who’d got together
with her on the downside of brief sort-of fame as a rock star, is living off
her as he records aimlessly in a home studio and dreams of a comeback album
financed by his missus’ money. He meets his Lolita at a record store
specializing in vinyl and the two of them are motivated simply by lust, not
greed — which doesn’t make them more sympathetic but at least makes them less
hateful — and at the end the wife symbolically castrates him by smashing his
prized guitar, which she had bought for him while they were still just dating
and when she could ill afford it. Lifetime has done quite a few of these
missing-kid dramas with the whole schtick being is s/he or isn’t s/he, and quite the best of the recent ones is Lost
Boy, written by Jennifer Maisel
and formidably directed by Tara Miele (who said there aren’t enough talented women directors in
Hollywood to direct more than just 1.6 percent of all feature films released?),
in which the allegedly returned offspring is a teenage son instead of a teenage
daughter and it’s kept powerfully ambiguous exactly what his motives are. Are You My Daughter? is a middle-of-the-pack Lifetime movie, not as
good as some of them, not as silly as some of them, a decent two-hour
time-filler but not the genuinely moving drama the basic story could have been
(and Lost Boy was).
