by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Lifetime movie I did
watch last night was their much-ballyhooed “premiere,” Murder in the
Vineyard, which despite some of the usual
Lifetime sillinesses turned out to be pretty good. A product of Cartel Pictures
(which for some reason imdb.com’s site-masters seem to think is two companies,
“Cartel Pictures” and “The Cartel,” even though that’s only one enterprise) and
Reel One Entertainment, Murder in the Vineyard begins with a virtually incomprehensible chase scene
in which someone is chasing someone else through, you guessed it, a vineyard.
We get the impression that the chasee is a woman and the chaser is a man, but
other than that we really have no idea what’s going on when suddenly director
Craig Goldstein, working from a script by Anne Richardson, jump-cuts to a scene
of two women in a car driving up to the wine country and we get one of
Lifetime’s typical chyron title, “Three Weeks Earlier.” Three weeks earlier
Emma Kirk (Helena Mattsson — shouldn’t her name have been “Helena Mattsdöttir”?
Just asking) and her daughter Beatrice, colloquially known as “Bee” (Emma
Fuhrmann), are driving up to the wine country of Topanga in southern California
(though the name of its police station has the opening “T” erased so it reads
“Opanga” — Charles would be pleased!). Emma grew up there and had a brief
affair with Luke (Daniel Hall), who back then was the soccer star of Paso
Robles High School and looked headed for a professional career in the sport
until he tore his foot open on one bad play and was reduced to coaching instead
of playing. Then she left town and made her way to Los Angeles, where she
launched a startup that became a major success (though we’re never told just
what her company did — Arthur
Miller, you have a lot to answer for from your decision never to specify in Death
of a Salesman just what product Willy Loman
sold!) and whose recent IPO has made her rich.
She’s decided to use the money to
buy a winery in her old home town and apply her business expertise to grow and
sell a new line of premium wines, though this has the longer-established
vintners (whom we never see) upset because they’re worried that with her
capital she can put them all out of business. But that’s not the main intrigue:
that turns out to be Bee’s
travails as a high-school junior who’s suddenly had to transfer to a new school
where she doesn’t know anybody and she immediately antagonizes the Big Girl on
Campus, head cheerleader April Ferguson (Sarah Pierce, rather oddly cast in
this role since she’s tall and stocky and hardly the sylph-like creature one
usually gets playing a head cheerleader in a high-school drama), when Bee
innocently walks past a soccer practice and is immediately accosted by team
captain Bryan Hayes (Matthew Erick White, who’s easy enough on the eyes but not
drop-dead gorgeous and nowhere near the actor they needed for what becomes a
quite significant role as the plot progresses), who wants to dump his former
girlfriend April and date Bee instead. Bryan is also being followed by the
soccer team’s next most important player, Mac Wilson (Daniel Coyle, who to my
mind is a lot sexier than Matthew
Erick White), whose relationship with Bryan gives off a heavy-duty homoerotic
vibe it’s likely neither director Goldstein nor screenwriter Richardson
intended. (Frankly, it’s not hard to imagine them as a Gay couple, with hunky,
butch Mac as the top and nerdy Bryan as the bottom.) April puts up a “slam
site” on Bee with the aid of a couple of the other cheerleaders, falsely
calling her a slut and claiming she has a “venereal disease.” This is just one
of the oddball anachronisms in Richardson’s script — no one, especially of
high-school age, has referred to sexually transmitted infections as “venereal
disease” for decades, and the
musical tastes of the characters are about a generation behind: Emma and Luke
rekindle their former relationship to 1950’s modern jazz, the “good” high
schoolers listen to the sort of “sensitive” singer-songwriter stuff that was
popular in the 1970’s and only the “bad” high schoolers listen to rap.
Bryan
wins Emma’s permission to take Bee on a date following the year’s first big
soccer game, only he first says he has to put an appearance at a party for the
team — which turns into your typical Lifetime bad-teen party, with alcohol
being served from the obligatory red plastic Dixie cups. Mac pulls Bryan into
the house’s basement for what’s supposed to be a “team-only” bonding ritual,
and with Bryan out of the way and unable to protect her Bee gets fed a drugged
drink — she thinks it’s just cranberry juice but it’s spiked with ketamine and
just three sips of the dastardly stuff and she’s under. When she comes to she’s
at home in bed, having been brought home by Bryan, wearing a black T-shirt
emblazoned with the slogan “I Need Sleep” (she does, too!) and with no memory
of what happened to her at the party after she blacked out. Like all too many
Lifetime parents, especially
Lifetime single moms, instead of believing Bee Emma concludes that she drank
alcohol and got hammered at the party. Emma grounds Bee and won’t let anyone, not even nice-guy Bryan, see her off campus. The
hits just keep on coming as Bee’s locker gets spray-painted with slogans denouncing
her low morals and April’s “slam site” features photos of Bee at the party in
bed with various members of the soccer team. Coach Luke (ya remember Luke?) gets upset with the immature behavior of his squad
members and threatens to bench anyone who does any more further tricks. Bee
loses the few friends she’s made at school, including Chloe (Katie Kelly) — who
I had thought on the basis of her sexy costuming (skin-tight blue jeans and
metallic silver shirts over a very
tight-fitting bra that shows off her presumably natural chest assets) would
turn out to be Bee’s principal high-school tormentor — and both she and her mom
go to the police to report the bullying against Bee. Unfortunately, the police
officer, Detective Roberts (Jon Root), couldn’t care less — he warns both Emma
and Bee that the high-school soccer players are very popular in town and Emma
is only going to make herself even more hated if she goes after them for
bullying her daughter.
But Emma and Bee do learn from the police — and from the Black
high-school principal (Joanne Baron in what’s very much a Vivica A. Fox-type role) — that two years
earlier another girl at the school, Rachel, was the target of similar bullying
and ended up committing suicide. Rachel was also a girlfriend of Bryan Hayes
and, especially since Bryan’s father is already in prison (we’re told that it
was for a non-violent white-collar crime but Richardson is no more interested
in specifying what his offense was than she was in telling us what business
Emma made her fortune in), the cops start suspecting him of drugging Bee at the party and letting other guys
have their wicked ways with her while she was too drugged to fight back. (One
of the reasons real-life date rapists like ketamine, also known as “Special-K,”
is that the victim stays aware of her surroundings and was is being done to her
— or him — but at the same time the drug immobilizes them and renders them
powerless to resist.) Bee starts piecing back her memories of the party,
including what happened to her and how she got the bruises on her sides from trying to fight off one of the guys, but later she
disappears — lured away by a text from someone who stole Bryan’s phone and said
he wanted to meet her — and of course Emma doesn’t trust the police and thinks
she has to find Bee herself. By this time I had guessed there was a conspiracy
afoot that had murdered Rachel and was after Bee as well, and either of two
people were at the head of it — either the rather creepy guy who was Emma’s
assistant at the winery (ya remember the winery?), whom I thought would turn out to be in unrequited
love with her and fiercely jealous of Luke; or it would be Mac Wilson, whose
unrequited Gay crush on Bryan was leading him to knock off all Bryan’s
girlfriends and make it look like they killed themselves.
In the end [spoiler
alert!] Mac indeed turns out to be the
killer; he not only knocked off Rachel way back when but more recently killed
April Ferguson (ya remember April Ferguson?) when she threatened to go to Emma and Bee with information (once
again Richardson doesn’t specify what information, though April did discover her “slam site” against Bee was hacked and someone else
posted the compromising pictures of Bee and the soccer players from the party),
and now he’s after both Emma and
Bee. He’s living in a farm house on the outskirts of town and he’s tied up Bee
and locked her in an outdoor shed; Emma frees her by knocking the shed’s
padlock open with a pickaxe, but (in the opening scene we’ve already seen
before the extended flashback that has constituted the bulk of the movie) Mac
recaptures both of them, locking Bee in his basement and tying up Emma and
strangling her preparatory to raping her and then killing her. Mac speaks lubriciously about how for
him the real thrill is when his victim starts to lose air and is about to
transition from life to death. Only Mac has left a box-cutter knife in reach of
Bee’s bound hands, and she grabs it, cuts herself free (it helped that, while
he tied her legs together with rope, he used only duct tape for her hands),
then uses the box cutter to stab Mac and, though she doesn’t kill him, she
wounds him enough that he collapses in the vineyard where he’s been chasing
them and the police eventually arrest him. The police caught on when they
realized Bee had been drugged with ketamine and Mac’s estranged father, Dr.
Doug Wilson (Blake Boyd) — who’s listed on imdb.com as “credit only,” which
usually means a TV series regular who’s listed on screen but doesn’t appear in
that episode, though not only is this a stand-alone movie rather than a TV
episode but he actually appears in one scene in the film — is a veterinarian
and therefore has ketamine (whose legitimate medical use is as an animal
tranquilizer) on hand which his son, on one of his rare visits home, was able
to steal.
Emma was able to search Mac’s room before he caught on to her and
copied three photos of women Mac had killed other than Rachel, indicating his
true motive is he’s a psycho serial killer of women (so I was right about Mac
being the killer but way wrong
about his motive!). Murder in the Vineyard is actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie —
the plot more or less makes sense and Richardson and director Goldstein at
least partially follow Hitchcock’s Law in constructing a thriller — tell the audience up front what’s going on and build suspense out of
when the characters will find out
and what’s going to happen to them when they do. There are also some quite
felicitous ironies in Richardson’s script, including the bizarre intercuts between
Bryan courting Bee and his coach Luke courting Emma — Bryan’s coach (and father
figure, given that his real dad is in prison) is making love to Bryan’s
girlfriend’s mom, which seems almost incestuous — and the way Luke and Emma
always seem to have three wine bottles on the table in front of them whenever
Luke comes to Emma’s place (she is
in the wine business, after all!), even as she’s lecturing Bee for going to a
drunken party. Murder in the Vineyard isn’t one of the very best Lifetime movies — it’s not Restless
Virgins or The Bride He Bought
Online — but it’s a quite good one, and
well acted by all the principals except Matthew Erick White, who simply doesn’t have either the good looks to
make us believe Bee would fall in love (or at least in lust) with him at first
sight or the authority as an actor to make us believe he would defy all the
“cool kids” in school and maintain his friendship and interest in Bee even
after the rest of the school declared her a pariah.
