In Love with My Partner's Wife (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 my husband Charles and I watched a salaciously titled movie on Lifetime called In Love with My Partner’s Wife. At first I assumed it was a story about two business partners, one of whom falls in love with the other’s wife, and the story would be about the obvious tensions this creates as they try to navigate the business and keep their professional relationship together when one is secretly romancing the other’s spouse. Instead it turned out to be the story of two police partners, and writer Paula Rahn decided to make the about-to-be cuckolded husband not only a domestic abuser but a corrupt cop as well. The imdb.com summary reads, “When detective Paul Ford (Andrew Spach) discovers his partner, Frank Miller (Jonathan Stoddard), is abusing his wife Eve, Paul steps in to rescue her, but a vengeful Frank frames him for a murder.” It turns out that not only does Frank openly and repeatedly brutalize his wife Eve (Gina Vitori, top-billed), he’s in the pay of a local drug dealer named Callaghan (Corbini Timbrook) whom the Black woman both detectives work for, Captain Anderson (Nicole Pulliam), is trying to bust.

At one point the two detectives trace a possible lead to Callaghan, a rather squirrelly young (or at least young-ish) man named Jeffrey, and Frank insists on going in there without waiting for backup. Paul is making progress with Jeffrey, who is holding a knife on him but is too far away and too stoned to be much of a threat with it, only the moment Paul seems to have built Jeffrey’s trust, Frank draws his own gun and fires it through Jeffrey’s open window. He claims he had to do this to save Paul’s life, but we know better. We also learn from bits and pieces of exposition that Frank’s father was a big-time financier and always liked Frank’s brother Andy (whom we never see) better because Andy stayed in college (business school, presumably) and became a financier like his old man, while Frank did something at least ostensibly public-minded by becoming a cop, albeit a “dirty” one. Frank claims that he’s been able to buy the lavish home he and Eve live in – which Paul rather ruefully comments that it’s way too expensive for his salary to cover – through careful investments in the stock market. But it’s all too obvious he’s financed it through his ill-gotten gains from Callaghan and presumably other crooks he’s sold out to as well. There’s also another detective on the squad, a woman named Andrea Billings (Isabella Olivera) who’s clearly got the hots for the single Paul – director Lindsay Hartley has her doing a lot of sexually aggressive things, including literally shoving her big jeans-clad butt in Paul’s face.

When Paul discovers the tell-tale bruises on Eve’s body, he threatens to report Frank. Frank isn’t worried because it’ll be Paul’s word against his., But when Eve actually moves out of Frank’s home and Paul agrees to put her up (non-sexuially at first, but that doesn’t last very long!), Frank not only decides to frame Paul for Jeffrey’s murder, he manages to convince Captain Anderson that it’s Paul who’s the “dirty” cop of the pair. He also takes a sick sort of revenge against Eve, who suffers from Addison’s disease (the only other context I’ve heard of it is that President John F. Kennedy had it), for which she takes prescription steroids. Frank not only confiscates her entire supply of the drugs, he calls Eve’s doctor and says that Eve has been selling the medications to high-school athletes looking to get “juiced,”: and without the drugs Eve will become disoriented and eventually die. Paul and Eve find themselves on the run from both the authorities and Callaghan’s agents, and when Eve calls Frank and sets up a meeting, Frank says he’ll discuss the “conditions” under which he’ll take her back and give her back her meds. Paul wires Eve – one would think a trained cop like Frank would be able to find the wire on her, but he doesn’t – in hopes of getting a confession from Frank on tape, and in the end the police confront Frank at a train station (by now Captain Anderson has realized, based on her own sources, that it’s Frank who’s the “dirty” cop on her staff) but he escapes by hopping on a passing train.

This happens with about 20 to 25 minutes of running time left, and there’s a chyron reading “Three Months Later.” Three months later Paul and Eve are living together and making plans to marry as soon as she can divorce Frank, only Eve finds two miniature statues of pandas (Frank’s nickname for her was “Panda” because they had first met at the zoo in front of the panda enclosure, and every time he would beat her he would then buy her a little panda statue as a peace offering) in a shock scene writer Rahn clearly ripped off from the grandmother of all modern-day abused-wife movies, Sleeping with the Enemy, in which Julia Roberts’ character realizes that her abusive ex (Patrick Bergin) traced her and figured out how to get into her house from seeing her canned goods and towels arranged in the same obsessive pattern he used to use when they were married. By the time the final confrontation occurs Paul has left Eve alone in their home – he’s gone to work for a different precinct after Captain Anderson agreed to transfer him – and after a false start Eve ultimately shoots down her monstrous ex and presumably kills him.

In Love with My Partner’s Wife is an O.K. Lifetime film, hardly in the same league as either Sleeping with the Enemy or Black and Blue, the 1999 CBS-TV movie (which Lifetime re-ran in 2009) based on Anna Quindlen’s best-selling novel in which the abused wife faces a Kafka-esque situation because her husband is a well-respected police officer and therefore she’s unable to get anyone in law enforcement to believe that she’s in any danger from him. It also doesn’t help that the actors playing Frank and Paul strongly resemble each other; since Andrew Spach is about six inches taller than Jonathan Stoddard it’s easy to tell them apart in scenes in which they actually stand next to each other, but since both have moon faces and scraggly near-beards it’s not always that easy to distinguish them in scenes in which they appear separately. In Love with My Partner’s Wife is an O.K. Lifetime movie, but not only does it suffer from Paula Rahn’s decision to overdo9 Frank’s villainy and make him not only a wife-beater but a crook (by contrast the abusive cop in Black and Blue was an excellent and well-regarded detective), he’s too one-dimensional a villain and one doesn’t get the impression that he has some good qualities underneath all the evil. Despite Hartley’s solid suspense direction, this is one movie that delivers the Lifetime formula goods but doesn’t put a particularly interesting “spin” on them.