by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put Charles through a Lifetime “premiere” movie which the
network dated 2018 and showed under the title My Husband’s Secret Life — though in the promos (but not in the actual
credits) they rather gave away the “secret” by spelling the “r” in “secret”
with a backwards letter to make it look Cyrillic — thereby letting us know that
the “secret” was going to turn out to be that he was a Russian spy. Produced by
our old friends at Incendo Media, with Jean Bureau listed as both “executive
producer” and “producer” (I joked, “Was this movie produced by a hierarchical
agency or a chest of drawers?,” and Charles responded, “Both,” referencing the
marvelous gag in Mel Brooks’ least-known film, The Twelve Chairs, about the “Bureau of Furniture Not Covered by All
the Other Bureaus”), written by Thom Richardson (who on the evidence here is
one of those Lifetime scribes who, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, insists on
writing at least six impossible things before breakfast) and directed by
Philippe Gagnon, My Husband’s Secret Life is a curious mash-up of a typical Lifetime soap opera and a Jason
Bourne movie — though obviously Brett Donahue, who plays typical-looking
suburban florist Freddy Jones in Richmond, Virginia who’s really Russian
“sleeper” agent Sasha Sergeivich Volkov, is hardly Matt Damon in the looks
department! He’s easy enough on the eyes to establish to the Lifetime audience
that he’ll probably turn out to be a villain even though at the beginning he
seems to be the average suburban businessperson (the locale is Richmond,
Virginia, obviously chosen by the filmmakers because of its proximity to CIA
headquarters in Langley, Virginia) who as the film opens is with his wife
Jennifer, usually addressed as “J. J.” (Kara Killmer, top-billed), getting
ready to celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary.
She’s joking about the
“seven-year itch” as they get ready for an anniversary dinner they’ve reserved
at an Italian restaurant called Traittoria (I remember being amused in the
1980’s when there was a brief vogue for fancy, upscale Italian restaurants that
used the word “Traittoria” in their names — the reason that amused me was that
I’d seen enough Italian movies to know that in Italy a “traittoria” is a really
cheap eating place, essentially what we call a “diner”), only instead he takes
her to his florist shop, where he’s set up a private dining space, including
food catered from Traittoria (though all they seem to have to eat is one pizza
slice each) and a bottle of champagne. It seems that their marriage has been
strained since she lost a baby to a miscarriage (not another Lifetime miscarriage!) — in Kara Killmer’s best
acting in the movie she laments first having not told any of their friends that
she was going to have a baby, then having to tell them she was going to have a baby but now she isn’t. Then, while
out on a lunch date with her neighbor and friend Connie (Mylène Dinh-Robic), J.
J. spots Freddy having an argument with another woman, Anna (Ravisa Kondracki),
and she assumes the two are having an affair. (Gagnon, Bureau and their casting
director — the last uncredited on imdb.com, which lists this film under its
working title, Sleeper — screwed
up big-time by casting two women who look so much alike as J. J. and Anna:
they’re both tall, leggy blondes and the only reliable way you can tell Kara
Killmer and Ravisa Kondracki apart is Kondracki has a few more waves in her hair.) The truth is even worse
than that: Freddy Jones is really Sasha Sergeivich Volkov, one of 500 Russian
“sleeper” agents — “sleeper” is spy-speak for an agent sent to another country
to live there for months or even years and not to do any espionage until his or
her headquarters sends a signal for them to be active — sent to the U.S. to
blend in, marry American women, start families and be as inconspicuous as
possible until the day came when their country needed them as spies.
This plot
was worked out by Sasha’s father, Sergei Volkov, back in the days of the Soviet
Union (ya remember the Soviet Union?)
when Russia’s spy service was called the KGB (it’s currently the FSB), and he
was so concerned about keeping it secret that he never gave anyone at the KGB the list of who and where the sleeper
agents were. He kept that info to himself, passing it on only to his son, so now that he’s dead “sleeper” Sasha,
a.k.a. Richmond florist Freddy, is the only one who has it and the current
Russian spymasters want it. So does the FBI; it turns out J. J.’s friend Connie
(ya remember J. J.’s friend Connie?)
is really an FBI agent staking out the Joneses and waiting for him to do
something operational or make a mistake so they can bust him and get him to
give them the list. The plot unravels when Arthur Stern (Joe Cobden), founder
of a company called Sternet which Freddy has been pumping for secret
information of use to his Russian bosses (and which he’s apparently extracted
from Stern by blackmailing him rather than paying him, though just what Freddy has on Stern is kept ambiguous), snaps and
stops supplying Freddy with information. What’s more, he tries to kill Freddy
outside his house by running him down with a car, and J. J. determines to trace
this strange person and find out just why he tried to kill her husband. Freddy
survives the accident but spends the next two days in a coma, during which time
his formidable mother Barbara (Barbara Gordon) shows up — and so does Anna,
whom Barbara (who unbeknownst to us until a few reels later is Freddy’s Russian
control agent, not really his
mother) assigns at first to kill Freddy, later to capture him and take him back
to Moscow so he can be debriefed and the FSB can get the list of agents. J. J.
looks through old boxes in a secret basement and discovers photos from Freddy’s
boyhood in Russia (earlier we’d seen Freddy burn a sepia-toned photo of himself
as a boy with his real mother, standing in front of a tacky-looking car that
resembles an early-1960’s Ford Falcon but is probably a Soviet knockoff), and
eventually she confronts him and he admits everything, though he also insists
that after having lived so long in the U.S. and married an American woman he’s
genuinely in love with, he doesn’t want to go back to Moscow to get debriefed (and likely tortured and/or
killed) by the FSB.
J. J. convinces him that the only way he can get out of his
situation alive is to turn himself in to the FBI, and he does so, though Connie
works out a scenario which involves J. J. turning on her husband in a fit of
rage and shooting him dead while Anna and Barbara watch. Of course this is a
setup — the bullets are real but Freddy is wearing Kevlar, so he survives, Anna
and Barbara get arrested and Freddy turns over the list of agents to the U.S.
At the end he and J. J. are reunited, presumably for a new life together in
witness protection. Oh, and did I mention that J. J. gets pregnant in the
middle of all this, though since she had a miscarriage in the backstory there’s
no guarantee that the baby will be born — though that’s obviously what we’re
meant to think at the end. My Husband’s Secret Life is a movie that chokes on its own preposterousness;
the story is so dependent on
dorky plot twists and the most unbelievable thing about it (despite the
formidable competition) is the whole idea that J. J. could have been with this
man for seven years without any
idea he was really a Russian spy, only to have his carefully constructed cover
fall apart in a day or two. It’s decently directed by Gagnon, who has a flair
for the kind of suspense and action the plot requires — one could readily
imagine him helming a James Bond or Jason Bourne movie — but the acting is
fair-to-middling, and in Barbara Gordon’s case worse than that: it’s all too
clear that, despite a striking screen presence, she really has no clue how to
portray the sort of dragon lady she’s supposed to be playing (and which Lotte
Lenya managed superbly in the second James Bond movie, From Russia
with Love). All in all My
Husband’s Secret Life (as opposed to My
Husband’s Secret, a 2006 documentary about
three women and what they went through when their husbands came out to them as
Gay) is a nice-looking guy and two nice-looking women and some good visual
atmospherics dressing up one of the most ridiculous stories ever conceived by
the mindlessness of man — or at least the mindlessness of Thom Richardson!
