by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the Lifetime “premiere” movie — and for
the third week in a row Lifetime hasn’t supplied any advance information on who
made the film or who stars in it,
and it’s been up to independent sites like meeaw.com to put what trickle
of information is actually available on these films before they aired. So I had
to scribble the names of the filmmakers as best I could during the opening
credits and hope I got them right. The film was called Birthmother’s
Betrayal — the spelling “birthmother” is
one of those horrible neologisms, like “healthcare,” that seems to have crept
into English via German — and, according to an article on the Web site
bustle.com (https://www.bustle.com/p/is-birthmothers-betrayal-based-on-a-true-story-its-caused-some-controversy-22987972),
there’ve been hissy-fits about this film from advocacy groups for women who put
their babies up for adoption. (You didn’t know there were advocacy groups for women who put their babies up
for adoption? Neither did I.)
One such group started an online petition urging
Lifetime to take this film off their schedule, claiming, “The upcoming Lifetime
movie Birthmother’s Betrayal
portrays birthmothers as dangerous and unbalanced women who are mentally
unbalanced and unpredictable, and who pose untold risks to both adoptees and
adoptive mothers. This sensationalist horror entertainment does a vast
disservice to the tens of thousands of adoptees and adoptive families
nationwide who enjoy positive, safe, lifelong open adoption relationships.”
(“Yeah, and their little dogs, too,” I can’t help but joke in response.) Aside
from the sheer obviousness of describing a Lifetime movie as “sensationalist
horror entertainment” (if it weren’t for sensationalist horror entertainment,
what would Lifetime be able to fill its schedule with? Cooking shows?), it’s
rather unfair to the movie, which obviously the petition’s author(s) were
describing without having seen it. I remember getting into the politics of
adoption when I did a Zenger’s Newsmagazine cover story with Patrick McMahon, Becoming
Patrick, about his search for his birth
family while he was a young adult, and I’ve followed (and largely agree with)
the changes in the law that have made it easier for adopted kids to trace their
birth families and find out who, biologically, they really are — especially
since there’s been an increase in medical science’s knowledge about hereditary
diseases and as a society we’ve understood that you need to know something
about who you are and who your natural family is so you can be warned if you
have a genetic disease and take whatever steps are available not to become
symptomatic.
Birthmother’s Betrayal
begins with Amy Bennett (Tanya Clarke), oohing and aahing about the baby girl
she’s just been allowed to adopt, Tara (after just watching Gone with
the Wind it was jarring to see another
movie featuring the name “Tara,” especially since here it’s a person instead of
a place!), while Barbara, the official in charge of the adoption agency that
placed Tara with her, says her application and home visit were the best they’ve
ever had. Then Amy casually inquires about the birth mother, and Barbara gives
her a stern warning that because of certain “issues” it would be “unsafe” for
Amy to try to contact her. Then we see someone else following Amy in her car —
we assume she’s Tara’s birth mother because she has a stack of diapers in her
car — only just when she’s about to catch up to Amy’s car a police car pulls up
in front of her, blocking her way. The officer orders her to get out of the car
and immediately arrests her for murder. Then we get a title chyron readling,
“Sixteen Years Later,” and 16 years later Tara is a junior in high school and
she lives with Amy and her partner David (Matthew Pohlkamp, a bit sexier than the tall, lanky men Lifetime usually
casts in their sympathetic male
roles) — who, rather oddly for a Lifetime leading man, has been living with Amy
since Tara was in the third grade but they haven’t actually got married. Tara
is encouraged to search for her birth mother by her best friend Jenna, who was
also adopted, did a search, found her birth mother and is now quite happy with
having two moms.
Jenna tells Tara
about a genetic search site called DNAndMe (an obvious ripoff of the real “23
and Me,” named after the number of chromosomes in a human gene), and Tara
secretly sends a sample to this company and comes up with a maternal match to
Grace Culver (Aria Pullman). The contact information includes a phone number,
which Tara texts to, and eventually the two women meet. Grace turns out to be a
good pal, who lets Tara do things her adoptive mother hasn’t yet — like drive —
and had writers J. Emilio Martinez (story) and Huelah Lander (script) built
their story around the antagonism between a fiercely protective, indeed overprotective, adoptive mother and a more freewheeling
birth mom who lets Tara spread her wings more but also puts her in danger, they
and John Murlowski (who’s listed as co-producer, director and cinematographer)
would have had a much richer, more complex and more interesting film. Instead
of a slow buildup in which Grace would have seemed like a nice person from the
get-go and we would have been dropped hints that she was dangerously crazy, we keep getting
reminded that she’s psycho: not only have we seen her arrested for murder
shortly after she gave Tara up, she knocks off a blonde woman who was her
cellmate in prison when the blonde woman, Michelle, comes up to her in the
street while Grace is in her car. Grace kills Michelle by opening the car door
and thereby knocking her into the path of an SUV whose driver runs her down,
then stops and futilely calls out to Grace to stay as Grace leaves. Later on,
when Grace learns that Amy has contacted Barbara from the adoption agency
seeking their written records on Grace, Grace breaks into the storeroom where
Barbara has gone to fetch the records and kills her with a tire iron. (Blunt
objects seem to be the favorite means of murder in this movie: a lot of people
get clonged to death, or nearly so, by garden shovels.)
She also spikes Amy’s
morning coffee as Amy drives off to work, and apparently for good measure
sabotages the brakes in Amy’s car, so when she tries to pull over and stop she
can’t. Amy crashes her car into a tree, the police give her a sobriety test,
and ultimately cite her for DUI while Grace films the whole thing on her
smartphone and posts it online, where it’s apparently accessed by the entire
student body at Tara’s high school. There’s one scene about midway through in
which, while Grace is at the home of Amy and Tara, she’s stalked herself by,
you guessed it, yet another
mysterious stranger in a black hoodie (though at least this time director Murlowski lets cinematographer
Murlowski bring the camera close enough that we can see it’s a woman — a lot of
times Lifetime clads sinister killers in black hoodies so we can’t see what
gender they are) who follows her after she leaves Grace’s home. About half an hour
before the movie ends we see this woman accost Grace and we realize [Surprise!
Spoiler alert!] that the two women look
exactly alike because they’re identical twin sisters. The sister’s name is Karina and she is the one who was stalking Amy and baby Tara in the
opening scene until she was arrested for murder. She’s also the one who killed
Michelle the hard-bitten cellmate (I wish I knew who the actress who played
Michelle was because she makes an indelible impression even though she’s only
in that one brief scene) and Barbara the head of the adoption agency, and now …
well, it’s not immediately clear what she’s going to do but her ultimate aim seems to be to kill Amy, Amy’s
partner David (ya remember Amy’s partner David?) and her own sister Grace, and spirit Tara off to
Costa Rica to raise her as her own for the next two years of Tara’s minority.
The special-effects work to allow Aria Pullman to play both sisters is quite
convincing — but it was done just as well 74 years ago in the 1946 film A
Stolen Life, directed by Curtis Bernhardt
at Warner Bros. and starring Bette Davis as a good sister whose boyfriend
(Glenn Ford) is seduced away from her by her bad sister; then the two are on a
boat together, bad sister drowns when the boat sinks and good sister swims back
to shore and poses as bad sister to win back the man she’s always loved. (I
suspect Murlowski did the two-shots the same way Bernhardt did: with a double
who kept her back to the camera while Pullman faced it as whichever sister she
was supposed to be.) Karina lures all the other principals to Grace’s house
(once we’re told that it was Karina, not Grace, who served that 15-year murder
sentence, we’re left totally hanging about what the real Grace was doing in the
meantime while Amy was raising her daughter) and starts by tying Grace up to a
chair in the basement and force-feeding her drugs so she can’t interfere — then
she surprises David (again, ya remember David?) and clongs him over the head with a shovel, and
ultimately there’s a big fight in the front yard in which Grace finally comes
to and tries to come to the aid of Amy and Tara — only by this time we’re confused as to which sister is which. Since Martinez
and Lander had previously established that Grace is prone to dizzy spells
because her blood has too much iron in it (too much iron — there’s a switch!), I had assumed this was a classic screenwriters’ “plant”
and Grace would go dizzy at the crucial moment, thereby telling Amy and Tara
which one they should protect and which one they should subdue — but somehow
Tara just seems to intuit which
is the bad sister and grabs that omnipresent shovel, knocking her out until the
police arrive. The finale occurs back at Amy’s and David’s home, where the two
are finally going to tie the knot
legally and spend the next two weeks on honeymoon in Hawai’i, while Grace looks
after Tara.
Birthmother’s Betrayal
is that most frustrating sort of mediocre movie — one which could have been
really good with more thought in the writing and overall conception — though that
previously-unknown-twin-sister bit is a bit hard to take. The acting is also variable: Aria Pullman is great
in both roles — though the trick gimmick prevents Martinez and Lander from
differentiating the sisters enough to give her a real challenge and an
opportunity to create two different characters — but Tanya Phillips is pretty
much your standard-issue overprotective Lifetime mom, Matthew Pohlkamp your
standard-issue decent but hapless Lifetime dad, and Monica Rose Belz is by far
the weakest link in this cast. She’s totally unable to project any character at
all; she just walks through this movie as if numb, and I can’t help but think
the casting director, Jeff Ardrich, could have found another girl the right age
for this part who might actually have been able to do something with it. Birthmother’s
Betrayal is an O.K. Lifetime movie that
could have been really good — the basic situation had the potential for it —
though whoever the activists were who were upset at the way it portrayed birth
mothers of adopted kids probably should at least have seen the movie before
they had their public hissy-fit about it, since not only does it portray a girl
who has a positive experience meeting her birth mother after growing up
adopted, the real villainess turns out not to be the birth mother but the birth aunt. Just a couple of notes: though the film is supposed to be set in California (judging from the California license plate on Grace’s car) it was really shot in Canada (in the early scene, the warning label on the car safety seat in which Amy takes Tara home is in French). And there's what imdb.com would call a continuity goof: the name of Tara’s birth dad is given as “Peter Shepard” on Tara’s birth certificate and “Peter Sheppard” on his tombstone.
