I settled in and screened last night’s “world premiere” movie on Lifetime, The Preacher’s Sin. The use of the definite rather than the indefinite article in the title is a bit of a surprise (though imdb.com reveals that it was shot under the working title A Husband’s Confession), and the contents of the movie are an even bigger surprise because it’s not the tale you would expect of a minister meeting a femme fatale and succumbing to the lure of her flesh to the point of committing not only adultery but other, nastier crimes — up to and including murdering either his wife, his girlfriend’s husband, or both. Instead the preacher is Evan Tanning (J. R. Bourne, who’s not exactly a drop-dead gorgeous sex god but looks considerably hunkier than the usual tall, sandy-haired, nondescript Lifetime leading man) and the sin he committed happened nearly two decades earlier. He’d already married his wife but was still in the Army, and he was deployed when he had a brief affair with a fellow servicemember, Monica Roswell (Diane White). Though they only actually had sex once, once is enough, and as usual in the movies it’s always enough; their union produced a son, Gabe (Demi Oliver, a genuinely sexy man who’d probably be on his way to mega-stardom if it weren’t so hard to cast for his “type,” men of Barack Obama’s skin color but clearly defined African-American features).
Monica is now dying of cancer — when we first see
her Gabe is entering her apartment and kissing her on the forehead, and she’s
bald (from chemo, we find out later) and director Michelle Mower picks an angle
that makes her look so masculine at first I thought she and Gabe were going to
turn out to be a Black Gay male couple and the preacher’s sin was he was going
to have a homosexual affair with Gabe. (Well, since they’ve done the
preacher-ruined-by-an-affair-with-a-straight-woman trope so often one would
think Lifetime would be ready for a preacher-ruined-by-an-affair-with-a-Gay-man
movie: after all, it’s happened enough in real life!) Years before, Monica
wrote a letter to Evan explaining that she’d had a son by him but never sent
it, but now she’s deliberately left it in a place in their home where Gabe
would find it and learn about his true parentage. Gabe approaches the minister
at a time when he’s got at least two other dramatic issues going on in his
life, and though writers Michelle Mower and Kevin Dean eventually blend the
three plot strands, for a long time this movie makes us feel like we’re being
wrenched from one to the other with an intensity that’s giving us whiplash. One
concerns his ne’er-do-well niece Jamie Barringer (Allie Gonino), whom we know
right away is an alienated teen when we see she’s dyed the ends of her hair
green. She borrows a friend’s car while she’s drunk and gets popped for DUI,
and it turns out that she’s living with Evan and his wife Lauren (Tara
Spencer-Nairn) because six months earlier her mom killed herself after a long
struggle with bipolar disorder. (As for her dad, he left her mom either before
or not long after she was born.) Evan and Lauren are attempting to impose an
ultra-strict regimen on her, and she’s going to turn 18 in two months and is
attempting to live her sort of life — including drinking, drugs, partying and
boys — and wait out the time until she can walk out their door and not have to
worry about a parental influence in her life anymore.
The third strand of the
plot concerns media mogul Bill Traggert (Bill Lake), who among other media
properties owns the radio station in Philadelphia on which Evan broadcasts a
show about how to be a good and properly godly parent. Mower and Dean were
obviously going for the cheap irony that Evan is being relied on for advice on
parenting when he’s so evidently unable to get to first base with his crazy
foster daughter Jamie — though Sarah Tanning (Tori Barban), his biological daughter
by his wife Lauren, has turned out just fine. In fact, the most rebellious
thing Sarah does all movie is lie for her sister when she sneaks out to a party
after Evan and Lauren have grounded her following the DUI arrest so she can be
with, and hopefully have sex with, her boyfriend Quinton Paul (Glenn Cashin,
who’s actually quite well cast: he’s nice-looking enough one can understand
Jamie’s attraction to him, but he’s not so hot that, in light of the usual Lifetime iconography that a genuinely
hot guy is a villain, we’d think we were supposed to hate him). What Jamie
doesn’t know is that the party is being hosted by Tinley Traggart (Stephanie La
Rochelle, who plays the part with just the right combination of bitchiness and
entitlement of a girl from the 1 percent who’s used to getting her way about everything) and she’s the daughter of Evan’s boss Bill Traggert
and his alcoholic wife Shayla (Tria Donovan), who’s shown as “loose” enough
that one of the roads not taken by writers Mower and Dean was to have Evan
drift into an affair with her.
Bill Traggert makes Evan a contract offer to take his radio show nationwide,
but the contract terms are that Traggert gets 80 percent of everything Evan makes on his radio show, his lecture tours and
his books, and when Evan tries to renegotiate it to a 50-50 split Traggert says
that it’s an offer he can’t refuse: if Evan turns it down Traggert will cancel
the radio show and Evan will lose his mega-church and never preach again.
So
Evan signs, and in the meantime it turns out that Tinley is not only Quinton
Paul’s ex, she’s determined to get him back by destroying Jamie’s life in the
process. She also hosts her parties in houses she’s broken into, and when she
sees Jamie and Quinton not only embracing at the party but heading for an
unused bedroom to do the dirty deed, she calls the police to report a break-in
and gets all the other guests to leave. Quinton and Jamie are thunderstruck
when the cops show up and, with everyone else having fled, they’re arrested in
flagrante delicto and there’s another
charge for the cops to have against Jamie. Jamie is spared a year of
incarceration in a juvenile facility but only if she agrees to go to a drug and
alcohol treatment center; she does so, but in her absence Tinley decides to continue
bullying the family by picking on innocent young Sarah, including stealing and
hiding her street clothes while she’s in gym class. When she’s alone in bed
with Quinton (they’re at his place even though his parents are home — talk about living dangerously!),
she grabs his cell phone and uses it to text a message to Tinley, ostensibly
from Quinton, saying he’s broken up with Jamie and wants to meet her in a
deserted spot near a cliff and some water. The two girls duly meet and Mower
and Dean pull another switcheroo on us: instead of having Jamie lose her temper
and kill Tinley, it’s Tinley who loses her temper and kills Jamie. Evan is on a
Traggert-sponsored lecture tour to promote his parenting book when he hears
from Lauren that Jamie has disappeared — but not that she’s dead because the
body hasn’t yet been found — and he decides to cut short the lecture tour
(despite Traggert’s “I own you!”
protestations that under their contract he doesn’t have the right to cut short his lecture tour) to be with his wife.
In the middle of all this he also decides to tell her that he has a son from an
adulterous affair years earlier — and she coldly tells him he’s no longer
welcome in her house, with the odd result that he ends up bunking in Gabe’s
apartment (by this time his mom has died of her cancer).
Meanwhile the police,
led by detective Peters (Allison Graham, the sort of hard-ass woman detective
who’s become a popular sort of character after the success of Mariska Hargitay
in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit — though, come to think of it, it was Angie Dickinson on Police
Woman in the 1970’s that really was the
prototype!), at first write off Jamie’s death as suicide but eventually realize
it was murder, and Peters spots similar paint scrapings on Tinley’s car and a
post near the scene where Jamie’s body was found, puts two and two together and
ID’s Tinley as the murderer. In the end, despite the attempts of Traggert to
pull the plug on Evan’s radio show (literally and figuratively) reminiscent of Edward Arnold pulling
the plug on Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe, Evan gets and stays on the air long enough to confess all to his
radio audience: his illegitimate son, his problems with his foster daughter,
and the fact that she was murdered by the daughter of his boss. There’s a tag
scene showing Evan and Lauren not only back together but welcoming Gabe as a
member of their family at what appears to be a Thanksgiving dinner. The End. The
Preacher’s Sin isn’t exactly the
lust-in-the-dust tale the title and Lifetime’s promos led me to expect, but
it’s actually a bit above the usual Lifetime fare, if only because Mower and
Dean as writers do enough tweaks in the formula the film actually seems at
least somewhat original, and Mower as director gets excellent performances out
of her cast (though Bill Lake as Traggert does rather chew the scenery — a problem Frank Capra had
with Edward Arnold as well!) and stages the action powerfully. As I’ve noted in
these pages before, if the movie industry really wants to correct its exclusion of women from directing
jobs (the statistic I’ve seen is that in 2014 only 1.6 of all feature films
released to theatres in the U.S. were directed by women!), they need look no
further than Lifetime to find women more than qualified to direct!
