Mommy Meanest (Stalking Productions, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 11) my husband Charles came home from work shortly before 9 p.m. while I was watching a quite good Lifetime movie with the rather preposterous title Mommy Meanest. It’s about Mia Keith (Briana Skye), a senior at the exclusive Maplewood Preparatory School in Portland, Oregon; and her neurotic, controlling mother Madelyn, usually called “Maddie” (Lisa Rinna, top-billed). Mia got into Maplewood in the first place only because her mom got a job there as the school’s music teacher – where she leads her class in a cappella vocal versions of 1920’s songs like “Everybody Loves My Baby” and “Ain’t We Got Fun.” (Her rather antediluvian choice of material is explained by a passing dialogue exchange in which she says she can’t pick newer tunes the kids might actually relate to because the ultimate goal is a public performance and they need songs in the public domain so they don’t have to pay music publishing royalties, though given that Maplewood is an ultra-elite school one would think they could afford it.) Three years earlier Mia had a crisis in which all the spoiled rich kids at the school bullied her – in their cruelest prank, they literally threw pennies at her – and Madelyn came to her rescue and stood behind her. Now she’s being bullied again, this time via a barrage of anonymous text messages on her phone. They keep coming – she gets nearly 200 insulting and abusive texts over the course of the story – and by the time the movie is over her school acquaintances are also getting bullying texts in Mia’s name. Mia has acquired a boyfriend, sort of, named Josh Landon (Kyle Clark); she also has an old friend named Eliot (Jonathan Simao) – apparently the only kid at Maplewood besides Mia who doesn’t come from a family with money – who wants to be more than just a friend.

It’s obvious writer Gregg McBride is setting Eliot up as a red herring since his comments to Mia sound suspiciously like some of the nasty texts she’s getting, but half an hour through the movie we learn [spoiler alert! – though it’s not that much of a spoiler since Lifetime gave away the big plot twist in their promos] that Mia’s mom Madelyn is the one sending her daughter the abusive texts. The story opens with a prologue suggesting that Madelyn’s texts have literally driven Mia to suicide, or at least an attempt at it, before it flashes back a month. Mia is giving a speech in the Maplewood auditorium denouncing cyber-bullying as well as the in-person kind, and telling her classmates that though she wouldn’t wish the experience of being bullied on anybody, it made her a stronger person. She boasts that she took the pennies her well-heeled classmates threw at her and used them as seed money to start a non-profit to raise money to care for abused animals, and that’s what drew her and Josh together in the first place. Both of them have set their sights on the University of Northeast Florida (referred to throughout as “UNEF”) because of their especially good program in veterinary medicine (though why, if they want to become vets, they can’t find a school closer to home is something of a mystery; I was once working a temp job at UCSD when I met Robert Redford’s son Drew, who was studying veterinary medicine there, and yes, he looked just like his dad in his younger days). In case you’re wondering where Mia’s dad is in all this, his name is Erik Keeting (Bradley Stryker) and he and Madelyn had an unusually bitter divorce 10 years earlier. There’s some confusion about whether the family name is “Keith” or “Keeting,” but I suspect McBride wanted us to believe the divorce was so acrimonious Madelyn tweaked the name on purpose. Erik reappears on the scene and takes an active part in Madelyn’s and Mia’s lives when Mia starts getting cyber-bullied.

Both Josh and Mia want to go to UNEF, but Josh’s family has money and therefore they can afford to send him there while Mia needs a scholarship. To get it, the school’s principal, Allen (he’s not listed on the film’s imdb.com page but he’s an avuncular African-American authority figure, and though it is 2024 and the racial barriers have at least partially broken down in the U.S., it still seems odd that this ultra-exclusive school for spoiled rich white kids has a Black principal, especially since he seems to be the only Black person on the faculty), has to write a letter of recommendation. Allen, who’s already had words with Madelyn over her teaching style – it seems he thinks she’s getting too close to the students – at first supports Madelyn through Mia’s ordeal but gets suspicious when Madelyn asks him not to write Mia’s letter of recommendation because she doesn’t think Mia is ready to leave home yet. Madelyn wants Mia to attend a community college instead – and it’s that scene that nails down Madelyn’s motive for cyber-bullying her own daughter. At first I thought it would be that she wanted to toughen Mia up to be stronger when she took on the world, but no-o-o-o-o; she really wanted to cling to her daughter as long as possible and not have Mia abandon her the way Mia’s dad did. There also seems to be a bit of Munchhausen-syndrome-by-proxy in Madelyn’s actions, since she gets a lot of sympathy points from her colleagues at Maplewood. The fellow teacher she was dating at the outset, Scot (Jason Tremblay), who had broken up with her earlier on the ground that it wasn’t appropriate for two work colleagues to be romantically involved, returns to her at the end.

In fact, they’re making out at his place when Madelyn gets the word that her daughter has attempted suicide – the set-up scene we saw earlier on – only it turns out to be a trap. Mia has discovered that Madelyn has been sending the bullying texts and she and Eliot have worked out a scheme by which Mia will fake a suicide attempt, complete with a scene in her bathroom with bloody water overflowing from the bathtub. Only when Madelyn opens the curtain, instead of her daughter’s body she sees blood-red letters on the side wall telling her that Mia knows her mom sent the texts. Eventually Madelyn and Mia confront each other, not knowing that police detective Bolton (Katrina Kwan), a dogged, competent investigator who got involved when Mia insisted on reporting the cyber-bullying to the police against Madelyn’s predictable objections, is listening in on Mia’s phone, which was on speaker. Madelyn is arrested, though there’s one more confrontation with Mia in which Madelyn, out on bail thanks to Erik, Scot or someone putting up the money, pleads with Mia not to leave her. At the end Erik agrees to let Mia move in with him for the rest of her term at Maplewood (he is her father, after all!) and also agrees to take out a loan to fund her first semester at UNEF, after which she can apply for a mid-year scholarship.

Though it’s made from some pretty familiar Lifetime materials, and it’s saddled with a ridiculous title (obviously taken from Christina Crawford’s memoir Mommie Dearest, though at least Joan Crawford wasn’t as bonkers as the fictitious Madelyn!), Mommy Meanest is actually quite a good movie, well directed by Greg Beeman. I note that I had two previous moviemagg posts about Lisa Rinna, both from Lifetime showings of films that were nearly a decade old when I first watched them: Another Woman’s Husband (2000) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/06/another-womans-husband-hearst.html) and Sex, Lies and Obsession (2001) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/07/sex-lies-and-obsession.html). Sex, Lies and Obsession co-starred Rinna and her real-life husband Harry Hamlin; they play a married couple in the film, but he’s a long-term sex addict who ultimately gets busted for cruising a “prostitute” that turns out to be an undercover policewoman. There’s a link on the imdb.com page for Mommy Meanest (https://tvshowsace.com/2024/05/11/lifetime-mommy-meanest-lisa-rinna-somebody-really-crazy/#google_vignette) in which Lisa Rinna, who’s best known for her TV work on the soap operas Days of Our Lives, Melrose Place and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, says she took the role of Madelyn because she’d always wanted to play a crazy person. She also allowed her real-life daughter, Delilah Hamlin, to be in the movie – though not as Mia but as Mia’s friend and confidant Summer – even though before that Delilah and her sister Amelia hadn’t wanted to become actors.