by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie
was one of their so-called “Book to Screen” presentations, Tempting Fate, based on a novel by Jane Green, whom I’d never
heard of before (quite different from the other British-born writer named Jane
on whose work the first Lifetime
“Book-to-Screen” series film, Pride and Prejudice Atlanta, was based: Jane Austen!). She is British by birth
but lives in the U.S. with her second husband, investment banker Ian Warburg
(yes, of those Warburgs), and between
them they have six children even though four are hers from her previous husband
and two are his from his previous wife (sounds like The Brady Bunch!). Green’s Wikipedia page lists 21 books by her,
starting with Jemima J: A Novel About Ugly Ducklings and Swans from 2000, along with a 15-minute appearance on a
radio program called The Moth Radio Hour described by Wikipedia as “a story on the virtue of marital fidelity.”
(That seems a rather odd topic for a writer who’s not only specialized in tales
about adultery but has been divorced and remarried herself.) Green published Tempting
Fate in 2014 and its central
characters are Dr. Elliott Cartwright (Steve Kazee, tall, lanky, sandy-haired
and, aside from his rather scruffy beard, the sort of actor Lifetime usually casts
as the wronged husband) and his wife Gabrielle, universally referred to as
“Gabby” (Alyssa Milano, top-billed). They’ve been married long enough to have
two daughters, teenager Olivia (Emilia Baranac) and “tweener” Alana (Beatrice
Kitsos), but they’re having ongoing arguments. It seems that Gabby wanted more
kids but Elliott didn’t, so without telling her in advance he had a vasectomy
and they’ve been arguing it ever since — the film starts with the two of them
in bed, him hot, horny and ready to have sex until she brings up her bitterness
about his vasectomy again and immediately puts him out of the mood. At a party Gabby meets young,
hot Internet gazillionaire Matt Shaw (Zane Holtz), who’s embarked on a
philanthropic venture to build schools for foster children because he grew up
as a foster child himself and every time he got reassigned to a new family, he
got pulled out of one school and into another. So he wants to set up a chain of
schools named Rearden (after the well-to-do family that adopted him when he was
a teenager and financed his education so he could get to be an Internet
gazillionaire) so that even if foster kids get moved around from home to home,
they can still stay in the same school. He hires Gabby, whose only pretense at
a career is a hobby she runs out of her garage, restoring and reselling old
furniture, to be a design consultant for his schools, though it’s obvious to us
that what he really wants is
to get into Gabby’s pants.
Unusually for a drop-dead gorgeous and filthy rich
Lifetime adulterer, Matt is not a twisted psycho killer out to seduce Gabby away from her husband and
turn her into his property; he’s just a nice, hot guy who’s used to having any
woman he wants and not interested in anything resembling commitment. After yet
another weekend which Gabby was expecting to stay with her husband while the
kids were away but Elliott ran off to go to a medical conference instead, Gabby
finishes restoring the desk she had promised Matt for his office at the first
Rearden School and invites Matt to come over. He does, and the two of them fuck
on it in one of the hottest soft-core porn scenes Lifetime has had for a while
— the directors (plural) are Manu Boyer and Kim Raver (according to imdb.com,
Raver has previously been an actress and this is her first film as director)
and the script is by Jennifer Maisel — only shortly after her one-afternoon
tryst with Matt, Gabby starts having symptoms of distress, including getting
snappy with her family, and wonders whether she’s starting menopause. Her
doctor (an overly smiley dark-haired woman) informs her that, quite the
opposite, she’s pregnant (yet another one of those “infallible pregnancies at
single contacts” David O. Selznick ridiculed in his production notes for Gone
With the Wind), and even supplies her
with a sonogram of the fetus in her womb. Now what is she going to do? Get an abortion — which
is what her doctor advises but she’s one of those women who, though
ideologically pro-choice, never thought she would choose to terminate a pregnancy of her own, especially since the flash point of her conflicts with her
husband that led her to be open to outside sex was that she wanted more kids
and he didn’t? Try to pass off the kid as a pregnancy against the odds and
persuade her husband that his vasectomy wasn’t fully effective? She goes to see
Matt and presents the issue as hypothetical — and he says flat-out that he’s
not interested in being a dad.
When she finally confesses to Elliott that she’s pregnant by
another man, he reacts in the all-out flamingly jealous way we’d expect (and,
indeed, would know was coming if we’d seen
Lifetime’s promos for this movie), moving out immediately, putting their house
up for sale (since he no longer wants to live there and he knows she, with no
income to speak of, can’t afford to keep it) and taking their older daughter
Olivia with him, while younger daughter Alana stays with mom. Mom sets about
trying to get Elliott to come back to her, but in the meantime he’s started
dating again and his new girlfriend is an old friend of Gabby’s: Trish (Lucia
Walters), Gabby’s yoga teacher. At a confrontation at a favorite restaurant of
theirs at which Gabby shows up to pick up a to-go order for herself and Alana,
while Elliott turns up with Trish to meet another couple they’re double-dating
with, Elliott and Gabby realize they should attempt a reunion and the finale is
an uneasy modus vivendi in which
Gabby’s new child — a son she names Henry — is born, she and Elliott reunite,
and Matt shows up with his new girlfriend (Maisel drops the hint that he’s getting more serious about relationships than he’d
been before) for an oddball attempt at co-parenting his son. Along the way we
learn that Alana got into so much trouble at school she was expelled — though
that’s just a hint in the script and, though we presume that was because of the trauma of her parents (at
least temporarily) breaking up, that’s never made clear in the actual script.
(That’s the kind of detail that often gets explained in a novel but is left out
of a film adaptation.) Tempting Fate seems like the kind of story that has a lot more potential resonances
than got explored, at least in this film version, and it’s a bit on the
ponderous and dull side, but the action is effectively staged, the principals
are all competent actors (though none of them are either brilliant performers
or sex gods — Zane Holtz is easy enough on the eyes but not so drop-dead
gorgeous as to seem irresistible) and it’s welcome for once to see a Lifetime
movie in which an adulterous wife suffers only the usual real-life consequences
rather than being put in mortal peril from her paramour!
