by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. last night Lifetime broadcast the third installment
of their complete adaptation of V. C. Andrews’ (and Andrew Neiderman’s) Casteel
family saga, Fallen Hearts. V. C.
Andrews’ posthumous career has been a particularly mean and exploitative
instance of a publisher and a literary estate not being willing to let a
popular author’s name die simply because the author herself did — so much so
that the Internal Revenue Service sued the Andrews estate and successfully won
a judgment that her name had such established commercial value it should be
valued as an asset for income tax purposes. Apparently Andrews herself
completed the first two books in the Casteel cycle, Heaven and Dark Angel, before her death from breast cancer at age 63 on December 19, 1996,
and she left behind a partially finished manuscript for the third book in the
cycle, Fallen Hearts. The book
was finished and put in publishable form by a ghost-writer, Andrew Neiderman,
hired by the estate to write “new” V. C. Andrews novels — though as the various
cycles of Andrews’ work (she usually wrote in five-novel cycles, a continuous
tetralogy followed by a prequel giving the backstory of what happened before
book one — a structure copied by Maze Runner author James Dashner) have wound down it’s become
less clear how much of Neiderman’s work is finishing Andrews’ incomplete
manuscripts, how much is writing from her outlines, and how much is solely
Neiderman’s invention. If Fallen Hearts — at least the film version thereof (I’ve never read any of the works of “V. C. Andrews,” whether by her or
Neiderman, and I have a lot of
other things I want to read before I get to them) — is any indication,
Neiderman not only got Andrews’ formula down pat but ramped up the intensity as
well as the sheer unbelievability that gives these stories camp appeal.
Let’s
see if I can remember everything that happens in Fallen Hearts: at the start V. C. Andrews’ heroine, Heaven Casteel
Van Vereen (Annalise Basso, whom I suspect is potentially a better actress than
this role has allowed her to be), has just graduated from college, courtesy of
Tony Tatterton (Jason Priestley, 49-year-old former teen idol who’s also the
director of this film — and imdb.com lists at least five previous TV-movie
credits for him as director as well as quite a few episodes of TV series he was
on and also directed), a fabulously wealthy toy manufacturer who lives in
Farthinghale, an estate in New England, and whom Heaven ended up with after her
previous foster mother died and her foster father walked out on her after
seducing her. He’s introduced to her as her “step-grandfather” since he’s
married to Heather’s aunt Jillian (Kelly Rutherford), but it turns out midway
through Dark Angel that Tony is
actually Heaven’s biological father — Jillian had hired her niece Leigh Casteel
as a maid and Tony had seduced her (or vice versa — in V. C. Andrewsland it’s
never quite clear whether the sub-teen girls the older guys have sex with are
victims or deliberate seducers), forcing her to break off her affair with
Tony’s brother Troy (Jason Cermak) and sending her back to the Casteel family’s
home town of Winnerow, West Virginia (Andrews’ taste in place names is as tacky
as her taste in people’s names), where she married Luke Casteel (Chris William
Martin) and died giving birth to Heaven. Luke always blamed Heaven for
murdering his wife, though that didn’t stop him from marrying again and having
four kids of his own, including Fanny (Jessica Clement) and Tom (Matthew
Nelson-Mahood).
Luke essentially sold his two older daughters to other families
— Heaven to the Van Vereens and Fanny to the local reverend (Todd Thomson), who
raped her the first night he had her under his roof and got her pregnant, then
claimed the child as his and his barren wife’s own (and bribed Fanny $10,000 to
give up parental rights, which Fanny soon blew on bad men and, we assume,
drugs) — so he could fulfill his life-long dream by buying a circus (a seedy,
rundown one), and he got Tom to abandon his dreams of going to college and
instead hired Tom for his circus as a clown. Heaven reunites with Fanny, who’s
become a money-grubbing bitch, who assigns her to go to the reverend and buy back
Fanny’s kid — but Heaven cops out because she doesn’t want to pull the poor
child away from the only family she’s ever known and because she doesn’t think living with Fanny and her
biker boyfriend de jour would be
better for her. Got all that? That’s just the backstory! Fallen
Hearts starts with Heaven returning to
Winnerow in the company of her fiancé, Logan Stonewall (James Rittinger),
determined to become a schoolteacher there and raise the town’s overall
education level as well as trying to bridge the gap between the “hill people”
from whom the Casteels derived and the more cosmopolitan “town people” of
Winnerow itself.
Logan, you’ll remember, was Heaven’s high-school sweetheart in
episode one until he caught her in an affair with her foster-father Cal,
whereupon he immediately broke up with her, but he’s kept an interest in her
and midway through Dark Angel
decided to forgive her and start up his own affair with her. (The script by
Scarlett Lacey, adapted from Andrews’ and Neiderman’s mumbo-jumbo, shows us
Heaven being continually upset when people call her a slut, but judging from
the sheer number of boyfriends she has in the story, it would seem they have a
point.) At the start of Fallen Hearts Heaven is still bitter at Luke for the way he sold off his daughters
to richer men to finance his dream of owning a circus, and how Luke sucked
Heaven’s (putative) brother Tom into joining the circus with him instead of
going off to college and making something of himself. So she decides to get her
revenge by dressing up in her late mother’s wedding gown, putting on a black
wig to make her more resemble her mom (though Annalise Basso’s red sideburns
still poke through under the wig, a “revealing mistake” I posted to imdb.com),
and showing up at Luke’s circus to make him think she’s the ghost of his late
wife come back to haunt him. Only Heaven gets more carnage than she bargained
for: she makes her appearance at the circus just when Luke has opened the cage
of the circus’s one lion, presumably to feed him, and when Luke sees Heaven
dressed to look like her mom Luke is so transfixed he forgets that the lion’s
cage is still open. The lion escapes and Luke grabs a gun and shoots it, but
also fatally wounds Luke’s son Tom — and of course everyone, including Heaven herself,
blames Heaven for Tom’s death. At Tom’s funeral Fanny confronts Heaven and says
that since Heaven wasn’t there for her when Fanny needed her, Fanny is going to
exact her own revenge against Heaven — which she proceeds to do by seducing
Lucas Stonewall and getting pregnant by him. (Fanny has a rich fiancé of her
own, Randall [Kurt Szarka], but we’re told he can’t have kids.)
Meanwhile
Heaven goes back to Tony Tatterton’s estate outside Boston and arrives there
just in time to witness the death of Tony’s wife Jillian, who stepped up the
pace at which she was drinking herself to death by switching from wine to gin
(though still drinking it in wine glasses) until she finally accomplishes it
while Heaven is staying there. Heaven talks Tony into bankrolling a new
venture: he’ll build a factory in Winnerow to manufacture a new line of dolls
based on the “willies,” traditional hand-crafted dolls made by the “hill
people” around the town, and appoint Heaven and Logan Stonewall to co-manage
it. Only while Heaven is on the Tatterton estate she runs into her old
boyfriend, uncle Troy, who apparently committed suicide after Heaven rejected
him at the end of Dark Angel. But,
withdrawing the deposit V. C. Andrews and Andrew Neiderman made into the cliché
bank by showing a fruitless search for his body where he supposedly drowned
himself, they and Scarlett Lacey have Troy turn up alive, skulking around the
Tatterton estate and hiding out in his old digs — a cabin separated from the
main house by a garden maze — where Tony had been having Heaven and Logan stay
until he sent Logan back to Winnerow for the ground-breaking and kept Heaven in
New England (which is how Heaven’s putative sister Fanny got her hooks into
Logan).
The inevitable — at least for a V. C. Andrews woman (one wonders why a
woman writer wrote her woman characters with so little agency) — occurs and
Troy and Heaven get it on one last time. Did I tell you this “one last time”
gets Heaven pregnant with Troy’s child? She’s a V. C. Andrews character, isn’t
she? So both Heaven and Fanny are
carrying children sired by men other than the ones they’re officially committed
to, and if that isn’t enough plot
for you, Luke (ya remember Luke?)
and his third wife conveniently die and Heaven determines to get custody of their child, Drake (unidentified on imdb.com), after
having already offered Fanny $2,500 per month to take care of Logan’s child by
her and keep quiet about the kid’s true parentage. Only, at the big party to
celebrate the opening of the new Tatterton Toys factory in Winnerow, Fanny
kidnaps Drake and, after an even more nasty confrontation between the sisters
than we’ve seen before, the case ends up in court despite the warning of
Heaven’s attorney that if she sues Fanny to get back Drake, all the family’s dirty secrets will come out, including
the true fathers of both Heaven’s and Fanny’s babies, Fanny’s years working as
a prostitute to support herself, and ultimately Heaven’s own true parentage.
Heaven agrees to settle the case once her attorney tells her that she has no
claim to Drake’s custody since she isn’t a blood Casteel, and she offers Fanny
$1 million for Drake. (Yes, her actual father is loaded, but where on earth is
Heaven getting this kind of money to throw around? Even if she’s his only heir,
she’d still have to wait for him to croak before she could acquire and spend
his fortune.) Fanny savors the irony of Heaven being in the business of buying
and selling children — exactly the crime she condemned her (foster-)father Luke
for, but eventually Fanny agrees to take the money and this bizarrely
melodramatic film (even by Lifetime standards!) lurches to the end.
It seems
that Lifetime started their “Book to Screen” series on a high point (with Pride
and Prejudice Atlanta, Tracy McMillan’s
clever adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic to the modern-day 1 percent of
Atlanta’s Black community) and
has trailed its way down since, landing on a writer who has nothing in common
with Jane Austen except a gender and the first letter of her last name. That’s
pretty much how this episode ends, though afterwards Lifetime showed a preview
clip from episode four, Gates of Paradise (for which Andrew Neiderman claimed no more than “inspiration” from
the late V. C. Andrews), in which the plot gets even more hysterical (in both
senses: insane and campy): in that one, it seems, Heaven ends up in an auto
accident on her way up to Farthinghale, loses her ability to walk, is in a
wheelchair and is now being tyrannized by her biological dad, Tony Tatterton
(and there are hints from the preview footage that being able to play an
out-and-out villain in episode four turned Jason Priestley on more than the
merely prissy spoiled rich boy he was in episodes two and three). Fallen
Hearts is the sort of movie you watch as if
it were a car crash: you’re at once sickened by the situation and revolted at
yourself for being gripped by it and unable to turn yourself away. As the
writers pile on insanely melodramatic situation on top of insanely melodramatic
situation, the actors mostly seem to forget everything they’ve ever learned
about acting: one can almost sense them thinking, “Get my line out … hit my
mark … turn to the person I’m supposed to be talking to … get my line out and
hit my mark again.” Like Dark Angel
— in which the actor who stood out was Kelly Rutherford, who’s just as good
here but gets too little screen time before she croaks — Fallen
Hearts has one genuinely good performance:
this time it’s by Jessica Clement as Fanny. Casteel, alone among the people in
this movie, has found a way to reconcile the aspects of a V. C. Andrews
character: her sexuality, her sleaziness, her greed and the traumas she’s lived
with all her life that have made her that way and shaped her evil. Other than
that, the acting in this movie is at a strictly professional level, not
downright bad but not
particularly good either.
I’ve long had a theory that actor-directors seem to
have a unique gift in getting understated performances out of their casts —
even actor-directors who as actors were unmitigated hams, like Erich von
Stroheim and Orson Welles. Among modern-day (albeit getting on in years)
actor-directors I’ve especially liked Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford for not
only selecting compelling stories to film for their movies in which they direct
but don’t act (and sometimes, like Redford’s The Horse Whisperer, in which they direct and do act) but for getting their actors to play in subtle
and understated ways. Alas, either Jason Priestley doesn’t have the chops in
terms of working with fellow actors Eastwood and Redford do or — as I suspect —
he realized early on in this project that a V. C. Andrews/Andrew Neiderman
story requires a certain amount
of scenery-chewing and that trying to get understated performances from his
cast would have only made the movie seem even sillier. No doubt there’s still
an audience for this sort of Southern-fried Gothic melodrama — Lifetime’s first
foray into Andrewsiana, Flowers in the Attic (based on Andrews’ 1979 debut novel) and the sequel Petals
in the Wind were huge ratings winners for
them (apparently they filmed the other three books in that sequence, but I
never saw them) — but I’ve found myself alternately infuriated by the movies in
the Casteel sequence and drawn to them in a sick fascination, wondering just
how low these storytellers can go and how many plot contrivances they can stick
on top of each other until Il Trovatore looks like cinema verité by
comparison.
