by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movies consisted of a “world premiere”
of one of their “Book to Screen” adaptations — their promos have made it sound
as if nobody before them had ever thought of making a movie based on a book —
called Family Pictures and based on a novel
by Jane Green. I’d never heard of her before Lifetime started filming her
books, but she’s apparently a best-selling romance fiction writer, born in
Great Britain in 1968. It’s not clear from her Wikipedia page just when she moved to the U.S., but she lives here now in
Westport, Connecticut with her second husband, Ian Warburg of the Warburg
banking family. Green’s Wikipedia page lists 23 published novels and claims her
books have sold a total of 10 million copies, making her a solidly successful
writer but not exactly a superstar. I first heard of her when Lifetime showed a
TV-movie called Tempting Fate
that she published in 2014, about a woman who, bitter because her husband had a
vasectomy without telling her, has a one-night stand (a one-afternoon stand,
actually) with a computer gazillionaire who hired her for a decorating project
just to get in her pants, and ends up with one of those “infallible pregnancies
at single contacts” David O. Selznick ridiculed in his production notes on Gone
With the Wind. (For me the most
unintentionally entertaining part of this movie was when the heroine’s
daughter, whom she had with her husband before he got his tubes tied because he
didn’t want any more kids, chewed her out and told mom, “You suck!” I wanted to
yell back at the screen, “Lady, if you’d just sucked, you wouldn’t be in this predicament!”)
Family
Pictures is a more unusual story premise
than Tempting Fate (incidentally
it’s based on one of Green’s novels that’s had different titles in her native
country and her adopted one: the U.K. edition was called The
Accidental Husband) — though it’s still one
Lifetime has done before — though, at least as adapted by screenwriter Ilene
Rosenzweig for this film, its plot depends on jaw-dropping coincidences and
far-fetched gimmicks. Maggie Hathaway (Elisabeth Röhm from the later stages of Law
and Order, top-billed) is the super
status-conscious wife of businessman Mark Hathaway (Matt Passmore, who’s hunky
enough we’re almost sure from the get-go will turn out to be a villain). They
live in Connecticut (as, remember, does the real Jane Green) and as the film
begins she’s preparing a big garden-party fundraiser she’s hoping will steal
the thunder of her principal status rival, Ruthie Dunbar (Courtney Richter).
Meanwhile, at the other end of the country in Los Angeles, Sylvia Hathaway
(Justina Machado) is having arguments with her husband Mark Hathaway (Matt
Passmore — yep, he is a villain!)
over whether they should allow their daughter Eve (Larissa Alberquerque) to
move across country to attend New York University or stay in town and go to one
of the big colleges in L.A. With dad out of town on one of his frequent
“business trips” — the way he’s maintained his bigamous existence for so long
is he pretends to be super-busy maintaining his and their lifestyle(s), though
Maggie is the one with the big house and the expensive cars while Sylvia is
living in a beachfront shack — Sylvia gives Eve permission to go to New York
for a pre-admission party to get to know her future schoolmates. Along the way
we’re also told that both Maggie and Eve are recovering alcoholics and Eve is
getting restive because Maggie keeps insisting she go to rehab every time she
has a relapse. Got that? This is going to be important!
Eve flies to New York
and attends the party, where she hooks up with Mark’s and Maggie’s daughter
Grace (Natalie Sharp) and instantly strikes up a friendship with her with no
knowledge whatever that they are (half-)sisters. Unfortunately, she also falls
off the wagon big-time and Grace takes charge of her, insisting that she go to
their home back in Connecticut to sleep off all the Jell-O shots she had at the
party. The two sisters sleep in the same bed (no, nothing kinky happens between
them — this is Lifetime, after
all!) and when she comes to the next morning Eve sees a photo of Mark, Maggie,
Grace and Grace’s younger brother Buck (Grayson Maxwell Gurnsey) on the wall,
recognizes Mark immediately and says, “What is my dad doing in your family picture?” So the jig that
Mark has carefully maintained for a decade — since we later learn from a
flashback that Eve is not Mark’s
biological daughter, that one day Sylvia took Eve to the beach and got
plastered, Eve swam out too far and nearly drowned, Mark saved her and that’s
how he and Sylvia met —unravels all too quickly. Later Sylvia comes to visit
Maggie at her big home in Connecticut after a repo man has visited her and
taken Mark’s motorcycle and asked her about a Mercedes and a Porsche registered
under Mark’s name — yes, in addition to being a bigamist Mark is also an
embezzler and a fraudster, he’s run out of money (or at least cut off both
wives) and he’s wanted by the FBI. Mark hears Sylvia coming to visit him and
Maggie, and he collects his laptop and bolts for parts unknown — though
eventually he ends up at Sylvia’s place in California and apparently the two
have one more hot night of sex together before Maggie turns up, saying she’s
used up her last frequent-flyer miles to get there, and chews out Sylvia for
shielding their no-good-man and letting him spend the night.
The repo guys
seize just about everything both Mrs. Mark Hathaways own and all that’s left to
them are some household items they raise money on via an estate sale (which
embarrasses the hell out of Maggie because it means confessing to her
1-percenter former friends that she’s no longer one of them) and a dilapidated
mountain cabin in upstate New York that, having nowhere else to go, Maggie
moves into with her son Buck. The living room is decorated with a hideous
portrait of Maggie, commissioned by her husband, that makes her look like a
cross between a Stepford wife and a V. C. Andrews character (by coincidence —
or maybe not — many of Lifetime’s house promos for this show were pushing a
five-part mini-series they’re going to start airing July 27 based on one of
Andrews’ typical five-novel cycles, Heaven). Maggie also gets a job as waitress at a local café — she gets a big
speech to the effect that the whole reason she went after Mark in the first
place was that her mom had
waitressed to support them as a single parent, and she was determined never to
go back to that sort of proletarian existence — and she’s cruised by the hot,
sexy cook Quinn (James Pizzinato), who offers her food in exchange for a date
and ultimately fucks her in the cab of his pickup in this movie’s only
soft-core porn sex scene. It’s also established that Maggie let Mark handle all
the couple’s finances because she was intimidated by all those numbers, but
after Mark fled she took an Internet course in accounting and was able to learn
from the records of Mark’s company that he actually took out $3 million in
assets before leaving both her and Sylvia (and their kids) out to dry
financially — but where is it?
The finale takes place at that deserted mountain
cabin, where Maggie and Sylvia are trying to figure out where Mark hid all that
money and Sylvia is taunting Maggie about that horrible portrait of her. She
goads Maggie into destroying the portrait by slashing it with a kitchen knife —
and, wouldn’t you know it, all $3 million is there behind the painting, in cash. Remember this is a story concocted by an author in
her mid-40’s whose husband is an investment banker; wouldn’t it have occurred
to either Mr. or Mrs. Warburg that modern-day embezzlers don’t make withdrawals
in cash and stash the proceeds in physical locations? They set up shell
companies through which they open accounts in Switzerland or the Bahamas and
deposit their ill-gotten gains electronically. (I can think of one previous
movie in which three women teamed up to regain the money stolen from them by a
no-good man who was the ex-husband of one of them, the current husband of
another and the fiancé of the third, who learned enough computer hacking skills
to steal back the money their guy had stolen from them.) Maggie and Sylvia plan
to grab the money and split it three ways with Mark, but when he shows up with
sinister intent they decide to keep it for themselves and pay off Mark with a
few token bundles of cash — and if he complains they’ll call the police and, of
course, if that happens none of
them will get the money because it will be confiscated as the proceeds of
crime. So it ends with the wronged wives seemingly set for life and the man who
wronged them in the wind again.
It’s probably just as well for the wives in
this one, especially Sylvia, that Jane Green didn’t go as far as Michael Feifer
did in the last Lifetime movie about bigamy (at least the last one I can
recall), His Secret Family, in
which the bigamist was at least savvy enough to use two different names and he
was a pharmaceutical salesman who, when he started losing business, responded
by deciding that wife number two and their child had become needless expenses
and he would downsize by killing them. (Feifer also twisted the knife even more
by having the second wife’s daughter have leukemia which only a bone-marrow
transplant from her dad can cure.) Family Pictures, befitting its origins in a book by an at least
semi-respectable novelist, is a good deal less gory than your average Lifetime
movie and relies for its entertainment much more on situations than thrills.
That’s a good thing, and the film is also relatively well acted by the leads —
Röhm is an especially welcome sight since she’s mostly stayed mired in series
TV since the end of her stint on Law and Order (as one of the assistant district attorneys Jack
McCoy, Sam Waterston’s character, was both mentoring and having affairs with —
in the relatively tolerant early 2000’s Dick Wolf and his writers and show
runners could get away with this but today the #MeToo movement would hang them
out to dry and demand the character’s head for a “sin” like that!) — and
decently staged by director Manu Boyer. It’s just that there are way too many plot holes, from the speed with which Mark
Hathaway’s carefully constructed life suddenly unravels to that business with
him withdrawing the money in cash
and stashing it in a space way
too small to hold $3 million, for this film to be as satisfying as it could
have been.
