The Bad Guardian (Allegheny Image Factory, Lifetime, 2024)

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

The second movie Lifetime showed last night (Saturday, May 18) was also a feature for Melissa Joan Hart, though she played a much more sympathetic character than the bitch-goddess grandmother of Will You Kill for Me? The Mary Bailey Story. This one was called The Bad Guardian and was directed by Claudia Myers from a script by Ashley Gable. It pits Hart, as middle-aged housewife and waitress Leigh Davis Delgado, against a well-oiled machine set up by the piece’s villain, African-American professional guardian Janet Timms (La La Anthony), to exploit senior citizens in general and Leigh’s father, Jason Davis (Eric Pierpont), in particular. Things go awry for Leigh and her family – husband Luis Delgado (Luis Bordonada), teenage son and aspiring musician Robert (RayJonaldy Rodriguez – that’s how imdb.com spells his first name!) and about 12-year-old daughter Allie (Cameron Rose Hoppe) – when her dad has a fall at home and is taken to the emergency room with a concussion. Then Janet Timms and her pack of vultures swoop down on him; unable to contact the Delgados because they were on vacation when the accident occurred, Janet reports to her pet judge, Russell Bean (Pat Dortch), that he’s being neglected and he needs to appoint Janet as his legal guardian. At first this is only a “temporary” appointment, but Leigh learns of the hearing that’s supposed to make it permanent with just one hour’s notice and bails on her job in the middle of a breakfast rush to be there. Totally unprepared, she enters the courtroom like Daniel in the lion’s den, but with considerably less happy results. Leigh is overwhelmed by testimony from the emergency room doctor who attended her dad; Tanya Windham (Lucia Scarano), the head of the Shadyside nursing home in which Janet has placed him; and Janet’s brother Dave (Jason M. Jones), a realtor who once Janet has got Jason firmly under her legal control sells his house and all his belongings out from under him.

Though the credits for The Bad Caregiver make no more of a real-life claim to it than “Inspired by Actual Events,” it manages to achieve a level of moral and emotional complexity far in advance of most of Lifetime’s work. One aspect that works especially well is La La Anthony’s performance as Janet Timms. There’s none of the eyeball-rolling, nostrils-flaring outright nastiness of other Lifetime bad guys. Instead Janet moves through the entire movie with a steely determination and a calm, businesslike attitude as well as an unshakable self-righteousness that makes her all the scarier. The one person on the Shadyside staff who’s actually nice to Jason Davis and treats him with the respect he deserves is Teresa Williams (Mystie Smith), also the story’s one sympathetic Black character, who’s summarily fired when Tanya realizes she’s been leaking information to Leigh about her dad’s care (or lack thereof). There’s also an Asian-American local TV reporter, Mitch Young (Eddie Yu), whom Leigh reaches out to and persuades him, after doing a lot of the legwork for him, to report a story on nursing-home and guardianship abuses in general and her dad’s case in particular. Unfortunately, Janet Timms’ tentacles extend even into the TV station Mitch works for, as she gets the station manager personally to intervene and kill the story just on the eve of a hearing Leigh, with the aid of a retired attorney who lost her mother to Janet’s machine, has sought to block Janet from having Jason’s legs amputated. Jason has been so thoroughly and systematically neglected, his diabetes has got so far advanced that his legs can only be saved via a stem-cell treatment. Because Janet already has so thoroughly looted Jason’s assets he no longer has the money for such an expensive procedure, Janet is going to have his legs amputated instead.

Leigh wins the case only by surreptitiously recording a private meeting between her and Janet in which Janet boasts that Judge Bean will do whatever Janet wants – and on hearing this Judge Bean righteously reacts and rules in Leigh’s favor. Meanwhile, Teresa Williams – the one nurse who actually treated Jason decently well and who got summarily fired – has been killed in a hit-and-run auto accident similar to the previous one in which Leigh was run off the road and nearly killed herself. The killer turns out to be Janet’s brother Dave – much to her disgust because, as unscrupulous as she was, she drew the line at out-and-out murder, not due to moral aversions but simply because a murder rap would be more legal jeopardy than she was willing to risk. There’s also a scene in which Leigh herself is arrested for trespassing at the nursing home during a late-night visit to her dad, and for that Luis has to sell his beloved motorcycle to raise her bail money and she misses her son Robert’s win in a high-school talent contest with a band called the “Sex Jackals.” Abuses by legal guardians and caregivers have become a big news story over the past year or two largely as a result of the coverage of Britney Spears’ attempt to get free of the legal guardianship of her father, Jamie Spears, who not only got himself court-appointed to manage her affairs but helped himself to her earnings and even showed up on the sets of her video shoots to tell her how to dance. The Bad Guardian is an example of Lifetime at its best, even though the phony suspense ending (will Leigh be able to break Janet’s hold on her dad in time to spare him amputation?) is a bit much, and as I noted above the chilling restraint of La La Anthony’s performance as Janet makes her much more scary than she’d have been if played as a typical all-out Lifetime villainess.