by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Last Sunday night at 8 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime “premiere,” a film shown under the title Desperate Widows but originally shot under the working title Mommune – a mash-up of the words “mom” and “commune” that probably no would-be Lifetime viewer would have understood. (Charles didn’t understand it when I mentioned it to him, and if he didn’t get it … ) Written and directed by Lane Shefter Bishop (she turns in a decent job as director but can’t overcome the melodramatics and improbabilities of her script), Desperate Widows deals with the newly widowed Paige (Justine Eyre), a best-selling mystery writer whose husband Brian was an English professor until he suddenly succumbed to a heart attack four weeks before the film begins. Paige is attending her late husband’s funeral with her daughter Allie (Olivia Stuck), who’s responded to the loss of her dad by going into the Mother of All Teen-Age Attitudes. She snaps at the funeral, saying her dad would have hated all the mourning and ceremonial grief and preferred they remember him with a party instead. Paige moves herself and Allie from the large city they lived in when Brian was alive to a small town in Iowa on the ground that it will do Allie good to get away from the surroundings of her life with dad and as a writer Paige can work from anywhere.
Paige is recruited to join a support group for bereaved widows – a step recommended to her by her psychiatrist back home, who’s not only her therapist but a family friend. At the support group she’s targeted by a recruiter named Willow (Ayiya Marzolf) for “The Farm,” a women’s commune nearby which makes such far-reaching demands on its residents – they have to turn over their car keys so they can’t leave without administration approval, they’re forced to do chores, the place is surrounded with electrified fences and security cameras, residents who step out of line are locked into “solitary” (cells so small you can’t stand up in them) and kept there until the Farm’s imperious leader, Dianne (Allison McAtee), decides you’ve been punished enough and lets you out. Dianne runs the place with all the love, support and bonding of a Nazi concentration-camp commandant, and insists on a three-month commitment from the residents. She explains that she inherited the land from her own deceased husband and in the four years since she’s made the community self-sufficient. She also says the reason for the heavy-duty security is that not all the women there are widows: some of them are escaping abusive husbands or exes and need to be protected from their former partners hunting them down, kidnapping them and exacting their retribution.
Allie is assigned to room with Samantha (Elyssa Joy), whose mother Tessa (Kate Bond) bonds with Paige. Naturally Paige was expecting that she and her daughter would live together under the Farm’s roofs, but Dianne insists that separating the generations is necessary to break the bad family dynamics and foster their “healing.” Since the show already began with a prologue depicting two women being kidnapped off the Farm and taken in a truck to an unknown destination, we’re already well aware that something untoward is going on there and Dianne and her sidekick, African-American woman Kianna (Geri Nikole-Love – gee, this dark, depressing movie has two cast members whose real names are Love and Joy!), are actively covering it up. Since the Farm has been advertised as all-female, Paige is startled one day to see a man on the premises, a handyman named John (Jake B. Miller), whom we’re told has been rendered catatonic by the shock of his wife’s death. Only he corners Paige and tells her that he can indeed speak, he infiltrated the Farm as a handyman to find his former wife Elizabeth (Sarah Jane Cornelius) and their daughter Melissa (Tabitha Petrini), who falsely claimed that he was abusive to them and got the Farm and Dianne to take them in. Allie and Samantha get a stint in solitary for relaxing on a pier on the lake on the Farm’s property instead of working their asses off nonstop to sustain the place, and Paige is shocked enough by this she is determined to get to the bottom of what’s going on at the Farm and enlists Jon’s help in doing so.
Jon explains that he was an IT specialist at his previous job – he’d done handyman work before that so he applied for the Farm with that skill – and the two sneak into Dianne’s office to hack her computer. They discover that, contrary to Dianne’s proclamation that the place is self-sufficient, it’s deeply in the red financially and only mysterious infusions of cash are keeping it afloat. Alas, Dianne returns to her office unexpectedly and in order to give themselves an excuse for having sneaked in there, Jon grabs Paige, embraces her and gives her an intense kiss that couldn’t help but remind me of the great scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious in which Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, caught in the wine cellar by her Nazi husband Claude Rains (they were there to locate the powdered uranium Rains’ character had hidden in wine bottles), respond by embracing and hungrily kissing each other. Alas, Hitchcock and his writer, Ben Hecht, were far more subtle than Lane Shefter Bishop (in Notorious the gimmick is the two are pretending to be lovers to find out the villain’s secret, but they’re really in love and are just following this whole spy plot as an excuse to be together), and my hopes that Bishop might be leading up to a climax in which Jon would not only help Paige rescue her daughter Allie as well as his own ex-wife and their daughter but end up as Paige’s new partner are quickly dashed when [spoiler alert!] Jon turns out to be a man named Greyson who really was abusive to Elizabeth and Melissa, and shows his true colors (such as they are) when he and Paige find Elizabeth and Melissa – they were the two women we saw kidnapped in the prologue and Dianne intended to sell them to human traffickers as “packages” (a fundraising approach she stumbled into and has continued – not only is Lane Shefter Bishop no Alfred Hitchcock or Ben Hecht, she’s no Christine Conradt either: the Mistress of Multidimensionality would almost certainly have fleshed out Dianne’s character instead of making her just a cardboard villainess.
Instead the only real surprise we get is that, once he and Paige stumble onto Elizabeth and Melissa, who are being held in a shed on the property waiting to be picked up by the creepy guy Dianne is trafficking them to, the two women cower in fear of him and it turns out he was an abuser after all. I was genuinely surprised by this but I shouldn’t have been, if only because Jake B. Miller was way too cute to have any role in a Lifetime movie other than a villain. Eventually Paige, Allie, Elizabeth and Melissa are rescued by a set of dei ex machina in the form of FBI agents who’ve been tracing the human traffickers from the other end – they’ve been watching Dianne’s contact and show up to bust him – and Paige and Allie end up safe, sound and still best friends with Tessa and Samantha, and in the final scene they receive advance copies of Paige’s new thriller Mommune, based on their experiences at the Farm. Both Charles and I had wondered if Desperate Widows (a title that sounded too much like a sequel to Desperate Housewives!) was going to have a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style ending in which the entire movie would be the plot of Paige’s new novel – and in fantasizing such an ending I thought that Bishop might have had Paige’s husband Brian turn up alive after all (his “death” was only a plot device in Paige’s fiction), read the manuscript and, with his expertise as an English professor, tell her, “This is way too preposterous even for your genre!”
