by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Sunday Lifetime
decided to commemorate Father’s Day by offering a series of movies about
vicious, corrupt or contemptible fathers under the rubric “Bad Dads,” and while
most of the titles were ones I’d seen before there was one I hadn’t, and it was
quite good. It was called Escaping Dad — though it was shot under the working title Amber Alert — and was essentially a mashup of the 1991
theatrical feature Sleeping with the Enemy (directed by Joseph Ruben from a script by Ronald Bass based on a novel
by Nancy Price, and starring Julia Roberts as an abused wife and Patrick Bergin
as the husband who abuses her) and the 1999 CBS-TV movie Black and Blue (directed by Paul Shapiro from a script by April
Smith based on a novel by Anna Quindlen, and starring Mary Stuart Masterson as
the abused wife and Anthony LoPaglia as the husband who abuses her). Escaping
Dad was written by Adam Balsam
and directed by Ross Kohn, and it borrows from Black and Blue the added complication that not only is Darren
Lattimer (Jason Wiles, who’s perfectly cast as a man who can maintain
appearances as a decent guy in public while his interactions with his wife,
whom he bosses around unmercifully, subjects to police-style interrogations
about what she’s done during the day and how she’s spent “his” money, and
regularly hits her when he finds her answers unsatisfactory) a wife abuser and
a sexist pig, he’s also a police officer — or in this case a former police officer who went to law school and is
currently the district attorney for Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the film starts out.
(It was certainly ironic to be watching a fictional film set in Tulsa when that
city has been so much in the news today as the site of President Trump’s
comeback rally — which drew disappointingly small crowds — and the Juneteenth
counter-protests organized by Black Tulsans to commemorate the end of U.S.
slavery.) Darren’s wife Erin (Sunny Mabrey) lives not only in terror of her
husband’s abuse but fear of what he’ll do with her two children, teenage
daughter Amy (Grace Van Dien) — who’s not Darren’s child but the product of a
casual sexual encounter Erin had years before (and of course when Darren tries
to boss Amy around she fires back with the classic line, “You’re not my dad!”) and eight-year-old Charlie (Andy
Walken), who is Darren’s biological son
and also a diabetic who’s regularly going into insulin shocks and needing
emergency injections. The film opens at a party Darren is giving to build
support and a donor base for his upcoming run for Congress, and Darren gets mad
at Erin for not wearing the horribly ugly yellow dress he bought her for the
occasion — instead she took one of the family credit cards and bought sexier
dresses both for herself and Amy — and she wore red lipstick to the party after
he explicitly told her not to.
He punches her out for these bizarre infractions
— the contrast between the triviality of her actions and the severity of his
punishments is a oft-told tale of real abusive relationships as well — and he
also mutters that their marriage is “’til death do us part” (while we’re
worried that his actions will bring about her death well ahead of schedule!)
and that if she ever tries to leave him, “I’ll hunt you down.” He also says
that since he’s the district attorney and an ex-cop besides, if she tries to
report him to law enforcement they’ll believe him over her and he’ll get away with whatever he’s done to her. One day it’s all too much for
her and she takes the kids — not telling them what’s going on — and flees,
after first taking the $6,000 in their joint bank account and changing the
password on their computer so he can’t access any information about her. There
are various complications, including the fact that Charlie is at a summer camp
(given the in-joke name “Camp Indy” — “Indy Entertainment” was the name of the
production company that made this film) and she has to fetch him, and the
queeny schlub who’s the camp counselor
receives Darren’s phone call just as Erin is taking Charlie and tries in vain
to stop her — and that Darren is after Erin and the kids not only because he
wants his wife back and doesn’t want the embarrassment of being exposed as an
abuser on the eve of his Congressional campaign, but also because he and his
old partner on the police force, who’s still an active-duty cop, conspired to
fix a case so a Mexican drug cartel owner wouldn’t be held accountable.
Supposedly their connection could be proved by the visa stamp for Mexico in
Darren’s passport — and Erin has taken all four of the family passports with
her, so Darren has to hunt her down and destroy the incriminating evidence. (It
didn’t look all that incriminating to me — just a couple of stamps to indicate
he visited Mexico City — but we’ll let that pass.)
Thanks to an ill-advised
phone call back home to her boyfriend Jake (Sterling Beaumon), Amy gives away
their location and police summoned by Darren and his corrupt ex-partner raid
the motel where they’re staying and steal the cheap car Erin bought in a hurry
from a used-car lot à la Janet
Leigh’s panicked flight early on in Psycho. By towing the car they also recover most of the $6,000 Erin had taken
from their joint bank account to finance their escape — they have only $300
left. They end up in a truck-stop parking lot where, after turning down the
offer of a ride from a skuzzy trucker with a bushy beard, they hook up with Wes
(Trevor Donovan, top-billed), who turns out to be their white knight, driving
the three fugitives to Santa Barbara, California and the boat on which Erin’s
friend Stacey (Courtney Henggler) and her husband are living, and with whom
Erin plans to stay until she gets established. Wes and Erin are also sexually
attracted to each other, though they refrain from doing the actual
down-’n’-dirty while they’re still on the road. But back in Tulsa Darren worms
out of Jake (by holding a gun to his head and telling him that as an ex-cop he
can kill him with impunity!) the secret of who Erin was taking herself and the
kids to stay with, and director Kohn copies one of the most famous shots from Sleeping
with the Enemy: the abusive husband lets
his victim wife know he’s there with an object. In Sleeping with the Enemy it was a particular arrangement of towels and
canned goods the no-good husband insisted his wife follow at home — or else — and in Escaping Dad it’s that hideous yellow dress Darren had wanted
Erin to wear to his party in the opening sequence. There’s a climactic
shoot-out in which Erin manages to grab the gun Darren has dropped and kill him
with a spectacularly well-aimed shot to the forehead.
There are a few bits of
classic Lifetime “milking it” in Adam Balsam’s script — notably the gimmick of
having Darren be not only abusive but corrupt, and the even tackier gimmick of
making Erin’s younger child diabetic and giving him several nearly fatal insulin
shocks during the story — but they’re only minor blemishes on what’s otherwise
a superior piece of suspense filmmaking. I particularly liked the plot gimmick
that Darren not only puts out an Amber Alert on his wife for allegedly
kidnapping the kids (he meets the requirement for an Amber Alert that the kids
be in imminent physical danger by saying in his report — falsely — that Erin
has taken his gun) but does a TV interview saying that Erin is mentally ill and
is therefore a danger both to her children and herself. Later, when Wes asks if
there’s any truth to that, Erin tells him she had an unusually long and severe
post-partum depression after Charlie was born but she got over it and hasn’t
taken or needed anti-depressants since — and in the interview scene Jason Wiles
perfectly portrays the surface smarminess and underlying evil. Indeed, all the acting in Escaping Dad is quite good — though as hot and hunky as Trevor
Donovan is (yes, folks, Escaping Dad is one of those rare Lifetime movies in which the good guy is
considerably sexier than the bad guy), he’s not quite capable of getting us to
believe his trucker-with-a-heart-of-gold character. But I did like the bit in which, when they first get into
his truck, Erin, Amy and Charlie are less than thrilled with the country music
Wes is playing on the radio — “Don’t you like country music?” Wes asks, and Amy
snarls back, “Who does?” — though later the three are seen hopping, bopping and
hand-dancing to the country songs on Wes’s radio as much or more than he is.
Country music triumphs again! And there’s a nice in-joke that the camp Charlie
is going to in the opening scenes,and from which Erin takes him, is called “Camp
Indy” — after Indy Entertainment, the company that made this film.
