The Good Father: The Martin MacNeill Story (Julijette, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night Lifetime reran one of their recent telecasts, a more or less fact-based movie called The Good Father: The Martin MacNeill Story based on a mysterious death in the suburbs of Provo, Utah (who knew Provo was big enough to have suburbs?) in 2007. The victim was Michele Marie Somers MacNeill (Charisma Carpenter) and her killer was her husband, Dr. Martin MacNeill (Tom Everett Scott in a chilling performance of controlled villainy). When the film opens the MacNeills seem to be living the perfect suburban existence in Provo – he’s a highly respected doctor with good connections in the town, she’s a dedicated homemaker, and in the film’s opening scene she’s winning a town award as “Sunday School Teacher of the Year.” (It’s not stated in the film, but – not surprisingly, given where the story takes place – the real MacNeills were Mormons.) Only Michele is getting suspicious of her husband, who seems more withdrawn and distant than usual and who skips out a lot, ostensibly for medical emergencies. She suspects he’s having an affair, and of course she’s right; she enlists her daughter Alexis (Anwen O’Driscoll), a medical student in Nevada, to investigate him. Alexis comes up with a set of Martin’s phone records that proves he’s been making frequent calls at all hours of the day and night to a woman named Jillian “Gypsy” Willis (Nicola Correia-Damude). Either at Martin’s urging or to make herself look younger in order to be more competitive with her husband’s “other woman,” Michele agrees to undergo a facelift and she ends up with her head swathed in bandages (thinking of the 1947 film Dark Passage, I thought, “Oh, great. She;’s going to end up looking like Humphrey Bogart”).

At her husband’s urging, her plastic surgeon prescribes her a whole raft of very nasty painkillers, including oxycodone, and we get the impression Martin is trying to engineer his wife’s death by giving her so many dangerous drugs she’ll die of a polypharmaceutical overdose. Her death occurs eight days after she’s released from the hospital; Martin sends his five-year-old adopted daughter to the bathroom, where she discovers Michele’s body slumped over the bathtub. Martin passes it off as an accidental drowning as she was trying to unstop the tub following her bath, and the authorities initially buy that. But Alexis is suspicious – she doesn’t think her dad killed her mom, at least at first, but she takes an instant dislike to Gypsy when dad moves her into the home, ostensibly to be his kids’ “nanny.” (In the script the MacNeills have one biological child, Alexis, and four prepubescent girls they adopted from Ukraine. In real life the MacNeills had four children of their own as well as the four adoptees, and one of them, their son Damian, himself committed suicide in 2010 while attending law school in New York.) The nascent conflicts between Martin and Alexis flare up into open warfare once Martin moves Gypsy into the house and demands that Alexis accept her as essentially her stepmother – and director Annie Bradley, working from a script by John Fasano and Abdi Nazermian, stages a nice opening shot to introduce her: we see her emerge from the back of the car that’s driven her to the MacNeill home, and she’s dressed in the sort of skimpy black-lace dress one would expect a high-end call girl to dress in for work.

The film then turns into a battle of wills between Martin and Alexis (both superbly acted by Scott and O’Driscoll), as she grows more determined to find out the truth about him and uncover all his lies. She already knew that shortly after his marriage Martin served a six-month sentence for check fraud – something Martin had explained to Michele as no big deal, some sort of accounting mistake – and now, digging deeper into her dad’s past, she finds out he was stealing the identities of dead people and using them to defraud. She also finds out that he faked his transcripts to get into medical school, stealing the records of a dead fellow student to do so. Alexis goes to various authorities, including the police (represented by a disinterested, heavy-set Black detective who just wants to get this crazy white woman out of his office already) and Child Protective Services, while dad clandestinely ships one of his adoptees back to Ukraine and asks Alexis for her passport so he can fake an identity for Gypsy – who, it turns out, was on the run from the law for her own criminal activities. (As Alexis notes later on in her dialogue, the two scumbags seem made for each other.) Eventually, Alexis, with the help of a retired cop who’s a friend of the family, nails Martin for identity fraud in faking Gypsy’s passport, and that allows them to get the police to hold him long enough to charge him with the murder of Michele. He’s tried and convicted in 2017 – yes, that’s right, it took his daughter ten years to bring him to book – and sentenced to 17 years to life, but shortly thereafter he kills himself in his cell.

The Good Father: The Martin MacNeill Story is a chilling tale that sometimes lapses into Lifetime’s usual clichéd silliness, but it’s also an effective thriller and quite a lot more credible than many movies in which someone we’ve seemingly been set up to like emerges as a villain. It does suffer from one flaw of a lot of movies – and not just Lifetime movies, either – where do the characters get their money? Martin is a doctor, all right, but in small-town Utah, and Alexis seems to have almost limitless financial resources of her own, able to afford repeated travel (including at least two trips to Ukraine as Martin tries to send one of his adopted kids back – the implication is he wants to get rid of all of them so he and Gypsy can live their romantic idyll unencumbered by anything as pesky as “family”), as well as being able to take days or even weeks off her medical studies in Nevada at a moment’s notice. (Just about everyone I know who actually went to medical school has told me it’s literally an all-encompassing experience that leaves you utterly no time or energy, physical or mental, for anything else.) And I can’t help but irreverently suggest that perhaps Michele MacNeill’s early demise is collateral damage from the Mormons having been forced by the federal government to give up polygamy in 1890; maybe if Martin had been able legally to take Gypsy as wife number two, he wouldn’t have felt compelled to knock off wife number one …