by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Later in the evening Lifetime ran their weekend “premiere,” Circle of Deception (based on one of the innumerable true-crime stories by the late Ann Rule and originally called Ann Rule’s Circle of Deception), which also had a woman director – Ashley Williams – and had a woman writer as well, Christina Ray, for a highly convoluted tale of recently divorced former beauty queen Peggy Sue Thomas (Diane Neal); Jim Huden (Tahmoh Penikett), the man she falls in lust with because she thinks he can give her not only great sex but a lavish lifestyle (he delivers on the first but, unbeknownst to her, though he owns a software company that once sold a program to Microsoft he’s mostly run through the money from the sale and he’s lagging behind on the new product he was hoping to rekindle his fortunes with); Brenna Douglas (Jill Morrison), the zaftig friend of Peggy Sue’s who runs a beauty salon (beauty salons have been a place in movies for women to hatch various plots against each other since Clare Boothe Luce wrote The Women and George Cukor and Anita Loos turned it into a marvelously bitchy movie in 1939) and is also renting a house from Peggy Sue and has promised to buy it from her as soon as she gets the money; Brenna’s schlub-like husband Russel (Paul McGillion), who distributes sex toys and keeps bringing home some of the merchandise to try on her, and who’s having at least one affair we know about with a woman named Fran whom we never see, and Brenna accuses him of having affairs with various women and at least one man); as well as Jim’s long-suffering wife and business partner Jean (Alison Wandzura), who’s trying to keep their business going in Florida while he’s cannoodling with Peggy Sue on Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington state (where the bulk of the story takes place) and Las Vegas (where Jim and Peggy Sue hang out for a while and blow what’s left of their money gambling and partying).
When Brenna is lamenting to Peggy Sue that Russel is spending all their money on sex toys, people to use them on, and life insurance, Peggy Sue’s eyes light up and either she, the writers or the real-life scumbags the characters were based on immediately start thinking Double Indemnity and calculating how they can knock off Russel so Brenna can collect on her life insurance, bail out Peggy Sue by using some of the proceeds to buy her house, and live happily ever after. Of course it doesn’t work that way, partly because the Whidbey Island police department assigns two African-American detectives to the case, Williams (the marvelously named Tamara Tunie, whom it was welcome to see again) and Steadman (Viv Leacock – a guy, by the way), and they figure out the whole scheme: Jim Huden, who said he’d always wanted to kill somebody (he explained by saying he’d had a hateful stepfather and had regretted not offing him when he had the chance), killed Russel Douglas in cold blood at the instigation of Peggy Sue Thomas. Though it’s nicely ironic to see one former cast member of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Tamara Tunie, trying to nail another, Diane Neal, for a serious crime, Circle of Deception simply isn’t very thrilling; the murder doesn’t even happen until the show is more than half over.
It also suffers from a modern-day problem with movies in general: too few characters we actually like. About the only people in this film we sympathize with are the Whidbey Island cops; had Christina Ray been a more subtle and sensitive writer (like her Lifetime colleague Christine Conradt), she might have made Brenna Douglas seem like a more genuinely oppressed and put-upon character instead of a whiny bitch – though Ray and director Williams absolutely nail Peggy Sue Thomas and in particular her sense of entitlement, her absolute conviction that the world is her plaything and she’s willing to do anything she has to in order to get men to do her favors (after she chews up and spits out Jim Haden she ends up with a multimillionaire named Mark who gives her houses, cars and everything else she requires for the few months he can stand being married to her). Eventually justice gets sort-of done: Jim Huden is convicted of murder and sentenced to 80 years in prison, but Peggy Sue Thomas gets just four years for not reporting a crime she had knowledge was going to happen and the prosecutors are willing to settle for that rather than take their chances at trial and have to prove she was actually involved in it. Meanwhile, Brenna Douglas gets at least one of the insurance policies paid off, uses it to buy her own house instead of bailing Peggy Sue out by buying the house she was renting from her, and she and her daughter go on with their lives somewhere else.
I wonder if Ann Rule’s story – originally part of a true-crime collection called Practice to Deceive – did a better job of delving into the moral and emotional complexities of this story (certainly a better writer could have made us feel for Brenna Douglas in her dual role as victim and victimizer!), but what we have here is a competently made thriller with a marvelous performance by Diane Neal in a role that seems to have been underwritten. Lifetime also featured a vest-pocket interview with director Ashley Williams during one of the commercial breaks, which was mostly about directing her first feature-length film (she’s mostly acted but previously directed a short called Meats) in the middle of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and there’s some backstage footage of her and her crew wearing masks during the shoot even though the on-screen cast members aren’t. I look forward to seeing her continue as a director (apparently she and her sister are co-directing a two-part movie for the Hallmark channel called Christmas at the Madisons), but Elisabeth Röhm on Girl in the Basement made a much better case for women directors.
