Gone Mom: The Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos (Lighthouse Pictures, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday night I watched two new movies on Lifetime, both advertised as more or less based on true stories, one of which was last night’s “premiere” and one had been the “premiere” on Saturday and was being rerun. The Saturday “premiere” was Gone Mom: The Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos, a mouthful of a title indeed. In fact it’s too much of a mouthful for imdb.com, which lists the movie merely as Gone Mom, without the subtitle. Jennifer Farber Dulos was a Connecticut housewife, socialite, heir to the Liz Claiborne cosmetics fortune (her aunt and uncle had founded the company) and wife of Fotis Dulos. She first met him when they were both students at Brown University in 1990 but they didn’t get together until 2004, when they had a whirlwind affair and married largely because she was 35 years old, she wanted a family and she heard the biological clock ticking. She was also an aspiring novelist, but she pretty much stopped writing after her marriage and only started up again following her divorce from Fotis in 2017. Along the way she bore him five children (though from only three pregnancies, since two of her births were of twins), and they became flash points of controversy during their long drawn-out divorce proceedings that reminded the friend who was watching this with me of the 1989 film The War of the Roses, which cast Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as a divorcing couple who literally fight to the death as their marital battle winds its way through the courts.

Fotis (a name that perplexed me during the promos for this film – it sounded like those bizarre abbreviations used in Washington, D.C. for the President of the United States, POTUS; his wife, FLOTUS; and the U.S. Supreme Court, SCOTUS) turns out to be a money-grubbing scumbag who early on in his and Jennifer’s relationship quits his regular job to start a development company building upscale super-mansions there isn’t a market for in Connecticut. Jennifer suspects Fotis married her for her (or her family’s) money, and some of their fights verge on her being a domestic violence victim (in one incident, she escapes being beaten only by locking herself in the couple’s bedroom and waiting him out as he vainly tries to break down the door). I’d been noting during the week Lifetime was running promos for this that in 1988 Annabeth Gish, who plays Jennifer Dulos here, was the star of the movie Mystic Pizza and got top billing, with second place going to a relatively unknown actress named Julia Roberts. Today, of course, Julia Roberts is a superstar and Annabeth Gish is reduced to appearing on Lifetime – though her performance as Jennifer is quite good, managing to maintain her dignity even while her marital situation and the way her husband is using their kids as a way to keep her in line by threatening to take them out of the country so she’ll never see them again (Fotis Dulos was born in Turkey and grew up in Athens, Greece, so the implication is he has plenty of international contacts that could help him flee the country) start to disintegrate her.

Throughout the movie she has a friend and confidante named Audrey (Laura Harris), an older-looking white-haired woman whose relationship to Jennifer is not made clear (is she her mother, her older sister or just a friend?) but who warns her about marrying Fotis in the first place, says I-told-you-so after the marriage breaks apart and he starts not only threatening her with violence but having a long-term affair, and who when Jennifer disappears and the police start investigating tells them, “Jennifer always told me that if anything happens to me, it’ll be my husband’s fault.” Fotis is played by Warren Christie, considerably hotter than Lifetime’s usual run of husbands but also hot enough to have us anticipating, even when we’ve still seen no more of his relationship with Jennifer than a hot soft-core porn scene while they’re supposedly out of town, that he’ll turn out to be a villain. For the most part Gone Mom – which is told by director Gail Harvey and writers Richard Blaney and Gregory Small on two separate time tracks, with flashbacks indicating the sorry story of Fotis’s and Jennifer’s marriage intercut with scenes of the police interviewing various people (mostly Audrey) and ultimately piecing together a case against Fotis as Jennifer’s murderer even though they don’t have her body and therefore can’t know for sure that she is in fact dead – is a pretty standard tale of a decent woman stuck in a relationship with a no-good man. Fotis takes chutzpah so far he not only romances various women on his many out-of-town trips, he even brings one of them, Michelle Troconis (Heidi Bauman), home with him, and when Jennifer naturally objects, Fotis says, “Men have mistresses. Get over it.” (Yeah, but they usually don’t try to keep them on their wives’ money.)

Gone Mom is a well-made movie, eloquently acted (especially by Gish, who quite frankly should have had more of a career than she did) and acceptably directed, with a particularly chilling scene (the last they filmed, according to Gish in an interview) in which the police reconstruct how they believe Fotis killed Jennifer: by sneaking up to her home in a bicycle, then letting himself into the garage, striking her from behind with a tire iron and then, once she was unconscious, beating her again and again and then, once she was dead, loading her body into an SUV after cleaning up most of the blood spatter (fortunately, leaving enough blood behind that the police were on to him) with several rolls of paper towels and sneaking away. There’s an Orwellian twist in that there are so many private security cameras monitoring the affluent homes of New Canaan, Connecticut (where the story takes place) the cops are able to trace Fotis’s movements throughout almost his entire flight, including his disposal of the towels he used to clean up and Jennifer’s belonging. But her body is never found, and after his arrest Fotis commits suicide in jail, thereby depriving Jennifer’s surviving family and friends of so-called “closure.” He leaves a note but still protests his innocence, and according to the final credits his girlfriend was arrested as an accessory but was still awaiting trial when the movie was made. Gone Mom is a chilling tale, especially in its exposure of how persistent the old sexist beliefs about male-female relationships, particularly the idea that the man is supposed to be the “master” of the house really are: a lot of males out there still have the attitude that marrying a woman means you literally own her and can help yourself to her money, her body (or anyone else’s body without her having a right to object) or anything else she brings to the table.