Soccer Mom Madam (Front Street Productions, Lifetime, 2021)

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

After Gone Mom: The Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos Lifetime ran a movie that wasn’t quite as much the good clean dirty fun as I had expected from the title and the promos, but still had its points: Soccer Mom Madam, based on the real-life exploits in the mid-2000’s of one Anna Gristina, who went to work for a “massage parlor” that was a thinly disguised whorehouse and eventually went into the madam business herself in order to keep her kids and herself alive, housed and relatively well off. In the movie the soccer-mom madam (though we see much more of her kids riding horses, the sort of thing mom’s madaming gives them enough money to pursue, than playing soccer) is called Anna (though if they gave her a last name I never caught it) and is played by Lifetime regular Jana Kramer (who’s quite good in the role, though her voice-over narration is a bit too golly-gee-whillikers to suit me; she does her best with what writer Barbara Marshall gave her. She’s trying to raise two kids, daughter Mia (played by London Robertson as a 10-year-old and Taylor Dianne Robinson as a rather sullen teenager) and son John Christopher (Azlei Dauman at five; imdb.com doesn’t list who plays him older). Anna dropped out of high school at age 15 and married a man who killed himself accidentally in a car crash. To give the kids a father and herself a breadwinner, she took up with a guy named Kyle Russo (Michael Patrick Denis – why the three first names?), only he turns out to be a rotter, not only having an affair with a woman named Sharren (Anna finds her phone number in his pants pocket) but actually bringing her over and sleeping with her in his and Anna’s bed, where she discovers them when she comes home unexpectedly with her kids in tow.

She throws him out immediately and tears off the wedding ring he’d put on her, then realizes that she’s suddenly got herself in trouble because she has zero income and the house is in his name. She moves in with her cousin Letty (Leah Gibson), who runs the “massage parlor” and tells her the ground rules: run the business cash-only, don’t call the cops under any circumstances (otherwise, she warns Anna, most of their staff’s working time will be spent giving discounted or outright free services to local law enforcement) and make sure you stay below the radar of the New York Police Department (the story is set in New York City). This occurs in 2003 as part of a flashback from a story which started in 2009 with Anna literally being ambushed and picked up off the street by FBI agents in an unmarked black SUV who treat her like kidnappers. Instead of formally arresting her, which would create the bothersome necessity of reading her her rights and letting her call out to get a lawyer, they simply hold her incommunicado for five days and try to browbeat her into giving them information about her clients. Then we file the prologue in our memory banks and return to the thrilling days of 2003, in which Anna finds out that despite her lack of formal education she has natural business skills. She has a series of arguments with Letty and in the end leaves – though on friendly terms – and opens her own business, an out-call service aimed exclusively at a clientele of multi-millionaires and billionaires. Using the Internet when it was still in its infancy, she checks out the bank balance of everyone she does business with and invents a code name for each one, sometimes amusingly reflective of just what sexual practices they want to indulge in with her “girls.”

She also builds up an impressive stable and within a few years has bought herself and her kids a nice home, put Mia in riding school and amassed a small fortune in cash. She also cuts a deal with another madam to service international clients – even though she runs a risk of doing that because it gives the FBI jurisdiction over her activities – and she has to deal with the defection of one of her girls to start a business of her own and poach not only her girls but her clients as well. She also hires a pair of heavy-duty enforcers, though at least as far as we can see they don’t actually kill or beat anybody on her behalf. We see them in action twice, once when they confront Vicky, the woman who tried to set up shop on her own, and threaten her in the middle of nowhere but ultimately let her go; and in another scene in which a client, a big media mogul who also owns a collection of priceless antiques, beats up one of the girls in a decidedly non-sexual, non-consensual way. Anna sends her two goons to get her revenge: they tie him to a chair and force him to watch while they carefully go through his museum-like room and smash one ultra-rare antique vase after another. Eventually the Soccer Mom Madam is caught when her attorney and long-time factotum rats her out to protect his own skin (it’s not specified, but we do get the impression, largely from the twitchy way the actor in this role plays him, that the reason he’s been able to maintain himself around all this female pulchritude without trying to sample the goods is that he’s Gay).

She actually tries to exit the business and become a real-estate developer, using her money to buy a prize 56-acre parcel in upstate New York and hoping thereby to fulfill her promise to her daughter Mia to get out of selling sex for a living, but a diabolus ex machina intervenes in the form of the 2008 economic crisis, which puts her property under water just as the FBI is going after her main business. She ends up being held for five months without trial, then being allowed to plead out to a sentence of time served, but all her money is seized and she has to start over. Soccer Mom Madam is most fascinating in the all-too-brief glimpses we get of the kinkiness the ultra-well-healed clients are paying for – particularly from Lola, a striking six-foot Black woman who (the joke in the script goes) is all legs and breasts and who seems to be Anna’s main in-house dominatrix. There’s even a scene in which one of her clients asks for two women to drive up behind him in a black SUV and stage a fake kidnapping – which director Jeff Hare shoots as an odd parallel to the real-life virtual kidnapping of Anna by FBI agents that we see twice during the movie, once at the beginning and again as it falls chronologically in Anna’s flashback. I’m a rather odd audience member for this sort of movie because there’s an implied moral condemnation of what Anna is doing, whereas I’m inclined to believe prostitution should be legal and regulated because people are going to seek sex in whatever ways they can, those with enough money will want to buy it (there’s something to be said for the old feminist saying that wives are just like prostitutes, only one sells sex wholesale while the other sells it retail), and they ought to be able to do that as long as it’s done in ways that don’t exploit the workers and allow people who are abused in the sex trade to complain about it to the police instead of being treated like criminals themselves.