by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. I watched the “premiere” of another Lifetime movie, Dying for Motherhood — originally shot under the title Expectant (maybe the people running Lifetime thought that sounded too much like Expectorant and would lead people to expect a movie about spit) — directed by Damián Romay and co-written by him with Kelly Peters and Amy Katherine Taylor. Basically this movie could have been called, silent-film-serial style, The Troubles of Tracy, since its leading character, Tracy McCann (Hannah Bamberg, properly winsome in the role and with nice, long, straight red hair), is beset by more woes than anyone should have to deal with, especially in only 90 minutes of running time. She’s barely holding down a job at a seaside restaurant (ya remember restaurants?) and, though she’s apparently only in her late teens herself, has a live-in boyfriend, ex-cop turned security guard Bobby (Daniel Contois, not drop-dead gorgeous but easy enough on the eyes), who regularly abuses her and has made it clear that about the last thing he wants to be is a father. Nonetheless, he has got her pregnant and she’s tried to conceal this not only from Bobby but also from the people at the restaurant, including Ed (Owen Miller), the avuncular African-American who owns the place. (Yes, this is one more Lifetime movie in which a Black person is the voice of reason who tries, without success, to talk the white characters out of all the stupid things they have to do for a Lifetime movie to have a plot at all.) Tracy decides that she can’t raise the child herself (especially since its daddy — her daddy, I can say, because after first turning it down Tracy changes her mind about seeing the sonogram and learns her kid-to-be is a girl) — threatening her with bodily harm if she so much as mentions the possibility of making him a father.
So she goes to an adoption agency but finds that in order to do an above-board adoption she has to tell them who the father is so they can make sure he’s on board with the adoption and isn’t going to complicate things by asserting his parental rights. Instead she runs into another prospective baby donor and learns of a couple named Patrick (Josh Ventura) and Genevieve (Emmanuelle Vaugier, top-billed) Parker. He’s an investment consultant and she’s a former nurse, and they’re either in the 1 percent or close enough to it that their home is a spectacular mansion that looks like a slightly updated but still recognizable version of the one in The Magnificent Ambersons, complete with big bay windows. (No self-respecting 1-percenters in a Lifetime movie would dare to live in a house without bay windows.) Since Tracy has no job — she’s living on what’s either a gift, a loan or an advance from Ed (ya remember Ed?) — and no place to stay since Bobby will beat the shit out of her (or worse) if she goes back where she’s been staying — she accepts the offer of the Parkers to stay with them until she gives birth. Only, as usual in a Lifetime movie, she realizes that the Parkers aren’t as goody-good as they seem — and the fact that Patrick is drop-dead gorgeous (we see him wearing nothing but a pair of blue trunks dive into his swimming pool flashing a pair of pecs to die for — yum!) just adds to our conviction that he’s going to turn out to be a black-hearted villain. In this run of the Lifetime formula, however, it turns out that the Parkers’ family dynamics are closer to the Macbeths: like Lady Macbeth, Genevieve is the real villain and Patrick a weak-willed man who goes along with her schemes. We learn through bits and pieces of exposition we’re thrown (sort of like zoo animals being fed) that the reason Genevieve can’t have kids of her own is she was involved in a car accident when her son was 1 year old; the boy was killed and she was so badly injured she needed a hysterectomy. She also pulled the same scam on another young, pregnant woman, Julie Meyer (dead at the outset of this story but seen in flashbacks and played by Tommi Rose), who agreed to move in with the Parkers and give them her baby when it was born but got so upset about how controlling they were she fell out of a window in their home, an apparent suicide.
While Tracy is on a rubber mattress in the Parkers’ pool and Patrick is showing off that ultra-hot chest, she happens to turn her attention to a television (where was it?) that’s broadcasting a report of a fire at the restaurant where she used to work. The fire is reported as “probable arson” and both Tracy and we leap to the conclusion that Bobby set it, whereupon Tracy turns into the water and it looks like she’s trying to kill herself before Patrick rescues her. Midway through the movie Genevieve, who for the most part has been so relentless about keeping Tracy at home and never letting her go out that you’d think this movie was made after SARS-CoV-2 hit instead of before, finally takes her to a high-end baby-clothes store — only Bobby (ya remember Bobby?) kidnaps her and takes her in a security company vehicle. Genevieve gets in front of Bobby’s car and dares him to run her over, and when Bobby refuses Genevieve gets him out of the car with a gun she’s holding and she runs him over. She has Tracy help lift Bobby into the car’s trunk, ties Bobby up to the bed in the birthing room she’s prepared for Tracy (since Genevieve is an ex-nurse she’s decided to keep Tracy from giving birth in a hospital and has taken charge of Tracy’s care in her home) and hands Tracy the gun, telling her to shoot Bobby and get rid of her scapegrace boyfriend once and for all. Patrick enters and frees Bobby from the handcuffs — only Genevieve calmly shoots him and he dies. Patrick buries the body on the house’s grounds as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, and Tracy apparently lives in mortal fear of the two people who control her own and her baby’s lives.
Then [big-time spoiler alert!] it turns out that Tracy met Julie Meyer (remember Julie Meyer?), the Parkers’ previous victim, at the adoption agency through which she first tried to get an above-board adoption. The two struck up a friendship and Julie told Tracy about this cool rich couple called the Parkers who were going to adopt her baby and let her stay with them until it was born, and when Tracy eventually learned that Julie was dead she hatched a scheme to get the Parkers interested in her baby and entrap them into providing evidence that would allow the police to bust them — which duly happens in the last reel, as Tracy records an incriminating conversation between herself and Genevieve on her cell phone and before Genevieve can grab the phone the police, called by Tracy, have finally arrived. At the end Tracy is walking her newborn in a carriage through the cemetery where Julie was buried and telling the kid she has named her Julie, after the one person in the story who was nice to her (which seems to leave out Ed, who did give her money to get away from Bobby and pledged to hold Tracy’s job open for her if and when she needed it). I was more than a bit disappointed that the writers and director Romay decided to kill off Bobby — I was hoping the shock of losing Tracy would cause him to clean up his act, use his ex-cop skills and contacts to find out the truth about the Parkers, rescue her and end the film taking responsibility for baby Julie so she could be raised by both her parents — but even with those flaws it’s a spectacularly successful Lifetime movie. Romay has real suspense chops as a director, and Emmanuelle Vaugier delivers a marvelous etched-in-acid performance as the principal villainess. There are also typically veiled but unmistakable social comments in Genevieve’s bland assertion that because she’s rich, “I can get away with anything — including murder,” even though I’ve seen more socially conscious Lifetime movies than this one.
