by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I stayed in last night and watched a rerun of a Lifetime
movie from November 24, 2017 called Framed by My Fiancé — a name which reinforces my feeling that Lifetime
is running out of inspiration and having a harder time finding sorts of
relationships that can turn ugly and generate their typical plot lines.
Directed by Fred Olen Ray (a name I’ve encountered on previous Lifetime
productions) from a script by Stephen Lyons based on an “original” story
(quotes definitely merited!) by Suju Abraham and David DeCrane (most of these
people are old Lifetime hands but the production company is credited as
“DeInstitutionalized,” one word with a capital letter in the middle à
la a computer program, which suggests what
had happened to the writers just before they came up with this script), Framed
by My Fiancé begins with a sequence that
promises, if not a great movie, at least a better-than-usual one. Attorney
Daniel Hackett (Jason-Shane Scott) is about to be appointed to a state
judgeship in a move that could clear his way to run for governor of New York
(this is set in Buffalo, which makes me wish Charles had been there with me, if
only to clue me in on how much Buffalo has changed since he spent a good chunk
of his childhood there) but is warned by Harold Barnes (Gerald Webb, an African-American
but one of Barack Obama’s color and bald, so you really have to look hard to
realize he’s Black) that the appointment would be canceled if he got involved
in a scandal. Then he goes out for a nighttime drive with his live-in
girlfriend, nurse Jenny Fisher (Katrina Bowden, top-billed), and the two are
involved in an accident when Daniel, who’s driving, gets distracted and slams
into a black SUV that had stalled on the road, killing one of the people
inside, a politically well-connected contractor named Joseph Langford.
We’d
also been given a scene establishing that Joseph and his wife May (Valynn
Turkovich) are expecting their first child — and May had a miscarriage the year
before (like so many other Lifetime women before her!) and is scared that she
won’t be able to carry this baby to full term either. (One wonders if the
writing committee intended the names “Joseph” and “May” to evoke comparison
with the Biblical Joseph and Mary, who according to Christian myth had big-time
help from The Man Upstairs in having their baby.) May’s pregnancy survives the accident but not by much, and
after she loses this child too she swears revenge against Jenny for having
killed not only her husband but her last chance to be a mother. Jenny finds
herself in a Kafka-esque situation in which her boss fires her from her nursing
job and her best friend, Rosa Harris (Kara Buckley), is threatened with
eviction herself for having taken Jenny in following her moving out of Daniel’s
place following the accident. While she was still unconscious, Daniel had
concocted a plot to blame her for
the accident, moving her from the passenger’s to the driver’s seat and planting
her fingerprints on the steering wheel so he could say that she had been driving and therefore he wasn’t to blame
for the fatal crash. When she comes to, Daniel is hovering over her, pleading
to go along with his “one little lie” and back up his story that she was
driving, saying that she’ll probably get just a slap on the wrist since she has
no criminal record and she’s “clean” as far as the legal system goes. (The
phrase “one little lie” appears so often in the dialogue I wondered if One
Little Lie had been the working title of
the film — and indeed it would have been a better name for it than Framed
by My Fiancé — but the imdb.com page on it
lists no other title.) Instead she finds herself arrested for manslaughter by
police detective Logan (Alan Pietruazewski, a rather nondescript
milquetoast-looking actor of the “type” Lifetime usually casts as the long-suffering
husband) and facing a 20-year prison term because of the political connections
of the victim, his wife and Daniel.
Framed by My Fiancé is yet another Lifetime movie that could have been
quite good if the writers had only known when to stop — had they focused on
Jenny’s Kafka-esque inability to get out of the situation Daniel had pulled all
the political strings available to him to get her into, with the implied class
critique that some victims are more “equal” than others and you can get into a
lot more trouble for killing a 1-percenter than someone farther down the
economic food chain, they could have had a fine, entertaining and moving film.
Instead the plot takes several melodramatic turns, as Jenny goes to the home of
Mia Langford and begs her to stop taking it out on her and making her life
miserable and awful. Mia insists that now that her husband and baby-to-be are
both dead, the only satisfaction
she can still get out of life is exacting revenge against the woman who killed
them. Amazingly, Jenny somehow convinces her to ask Daniel about the events,
saying that there’s an involuntary “tell” — when he’s lying, Daniel starts
tapping a pen uncontrollably — that will give it away if Daniel is giving an
untrue account of the event. Mia meets with Daniel, sees him tapping his pen as
he lies to her, and instantly changes sides and determines to have her revenge
against Daniel instead of Jenny. At one point Mia tells Jenny (in the writing
committee’s best line), “Man, I’m glad you’re on my team. Being a vengeful
bitch is such a lonely job.” Alas, Daniel soon discovers that Mia has turned
against him and responds by going to her house, conking her on the head with a
vase and thereby killing her. Then he steals a gun from her home and for a
moment I thought he was going to shoot her corpse with it, put it in her hand
and thereby try to pass off her death as suicide — especially since the next
thing he does after he’s killed her is write something on her computer — but no-o-o-o-o, he just leaves her there and one wonders how he
thinks he’s going to get away with it.
The body count rises as Jenny’s friend
Rosa — ya remember Jenny’s friend Rosa? — starts tracking Daniel and he confronts her in an alley and
strangles her, seemingly to death, though two Law and Order-style guest body-finders stumble on her almost
immediately and call 911 in time to get her help and save her life. Director
Ray badly botches both scenes of Daniel actually committing murder, or trying
to — that cute little bonk on the head seems unlikely to have been serious
enough to dispatch Mia (at least Warner Bros. in the Al Jolson vehicle Say
It With Songs and the later films The
Life of Jimmy Dolan and its remake They
Made Me a Criminal handled scenes like this
more deftly; the hero’s blow against the villain merely knocked him against a
lamppost or an andiron, thereby killing him but rendering the killing merely
manslaughter, not murder), while Daniel strangles Rosa so hard for so long it’s
nearly impossible to imagine her surviving it. The climax takes place on a
train on Buffalo’s trolley system, as Daniel confronts Jenny and tries to kill her — and Detective Logan comes on the scene after the
trolley reaches the end of the line and Daniel tells Jenny he intends to shoot
her with the Langfords’ gun and tell the cops Jenny killed both Mia and Rosa,
then out of guilt committed suicide with the gun she stole from Mia. Logan
orders his suspect to get on the ground in order to be handcuffed, Jenny — sure
he’s there to arrest her — starts doing so, and then Logan says, “Not you, him.” It also turns out that Daniel had once defended a
young Black man accused of shooting a drug dealer by refusing to allow a
witness to the crime to testify because the witness was the son of the
governor’s aide Harold Barnes (ya remember the governor’s aide Harold
Barnes?), he had been on the scene to buy
drugs, and by covering up the fact that Barnes’ son was a drug user Daniel put
Barnes père in the position of
owing him a favor, hence his judicial appointment in the first place. A quite
good movie in its first third, Framed by My Fiancé then becomes a virtual encyclopedia of almost
everything that can go wrong with
a Lifetime movie, including the villain showing a combination of almost
supernatural power and willful stupidity. I’ve seen better on this channel —
sometimes considerably better, like last Sunday’s “premiere,” Nanny
Killer, which they showed last night right
after Framed by My Fiancé — and
though this isn’t by far the worst film I’ve seen on Lifetime either, it is a rather disappointing one given that it had the
potential to be considerably better than it is.
