by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Lifetime’s
latest “world premiere,” something called Sugar Babies (oddly, the imdb.com entry on the film spelled the
title as one word, Sugarbabies, but the actual credit listed it as two so that’s what I’m going with)
about a Web site called sugarbabies.com to which nubile young female college
students can subscribe so they can attract the attentions of older, wealthier
men who will make an “arrangement” with them and pay them for “companionship”
which may or may not — but, of course, usually does — include sex. Of course,
this has to be done euphemistically in order to get around the laws against
prostitution (which, the more I think about it, I think are pretty silly; one
of the things I always admired about the late Gloria Johnson was that she
thought anti-prostitution laws actually disempowered women, and it was a delight to hear her
get into arguments with other feminist women who supported laws against
prostitution and porn). If this sounds familiar, it’s because Lifetime has
already done this schtick at least twice before in 2015 alone — with Babysitter’s Black Book and Sugar Daddies (which Lifetime re-ran right after Sugar Babies just in case anyone in their audience missed the
connection) — and all three of these movies couldn’t help but remind me of how
much better MGM did this story idea back in 1931 in the film The Easiest Way, with Constance Bennett as the sugar baby, Adolphe
Menjou as her sugar daddy, Robert Montgomery as the age-peer boyfriend who gets
understandably upset when she finds out just how his girlfriend is making her living, and Clark
Gable (in his first film as an MGM contractee) as the rather stuffy proletarian
brother-in-law who leads her family in opposition to the Bennett character’s
lifestyle. What’s more, the story wasn’t exactly fresh and original even then; The Easiest Way had debuted as a stage play in 1909 and been
filmed previously as a silent in 1917 — there’s a reason prostitution is
colloquially referred to as “the oldest profession.”
It doesn’t help that the
actors available to MGM in 1931 were considerably better than those on board
for a Lifetime producer in 2015 — Alyson Stoner (any relation to Brad Stoner,
the local housepainter whose commercials on San Diego TV stations I find
irresistibly amusing given what I would think a person named “Stoner” armed
with a bunch of paint cans would be likely to do to your house!) as Katie
Woods, the central sugar baby; Giles Panton as James Smith, her sugar daddy
(and once again the casting directors, Don Carroll and Candice Elzinga, have
erred by casting a young, attractive and genuinely hot actor in this role, somebody whom Katie might well
have been attracted to even if he didn’t have money and they hadn’t met on a gold-diggers’ Web site!); Keenan
Tracey as Sean Clark, the age-peer rival for Katie’s affections; and Hrothgar
Mathews and Kerry Sandomirsky as her disapproving parents, who (unlike their
counterparts in The Easiest Way, who took a don’t-ask, don’t-tell attitude to all the goodies their
daughter was lavishing on them courtesy of her sugar daddy) object to receiving
any of the proceeds from her
scummy lifestyle. The plot gets so convoluted it’s hard for me to remember
which sugar baby was paired with which sugar daddy, but the basic intrigue
revolves around Katie and her roommate Tessa Bouillette (Tiera Skovbye), who’s
posing as a 1-percent girl herself (she claims her dad is the fabulously
wealthy Charles Bouillette, but in fact her dad is John Bouillette, who abandoned her mom while she was still pregnant with her and left
them living in a trailer and barely scraping by). Tessa is going on a date with
her own sugar daddy but he’s bringing along a friend, so she wants Katie to go
along and be the friend’s date. Katie at first is reluctant — she’s been
cruised by Sean, a frat boy who’s working his way through college by clerking
at the campus bookstore — but when she goes to a party at Sean’s frat house and
he gets drunk and pukes on her legs, she calls Tessa on her cell phone and asks
if the double date is still on. It is, even though in a black top and blue
jeans (she’s done the best she could to clean Sean’s puke off of them) she’s way underdressed for the fancy restaurant the two
sugar daddies have picked for their date. Katie keeps dating James Smith and
ultimately falls into bed with him — though we get the impression it’s as much
from genuine desire (and as I said before, he’s quite a bit sexier than the
twerpy Sean!) as to keep the cash spigot flowing, and he offers to fund her
schoolbooks as well as underwrite an internship in Florence that will allow her
to realize her dreams of being a top interior designer.
The one thing Sugar
Babies gets right is its vivid
dramatization of just how totally the ability of the female characters to
realize their dreams — one thing Tessa briefs Katie on early is the desire of
the men who log onto sugarbabies.com for young women who have career goals of
their own and aren’t expecting to be supported by rich men all their lives — is dependent on their ability to
attract men already in the 1 percent and “put out” for them. (I remember one
story I recently read about a woman who trained to be an investment banker, was
unable to get a job in that field and ended up working as an “escort” for men
doing the job she had wanted and trained to do.) It’s a bit of nagging sexism that
just adds to the overall evil of capitalism — men can make it on their talents
but women can get that necessary hand-up only if they hand over their bods — and is about as
close as this movie gets to social comment. Oddly, the most pathetic (in the good sense) character is the oldest and richest sugar
daddy of all, Saul Williams (Ken Camroux-Taylor), a septuagenarian who’s built
and sold several companies and is sitting on a huge fortune with no one to
share it with since his wife died of cancer three years previously — “It proved
to me that there were some things money couldn’t buy,” he says ruefully in what’s by far the best
line of Becca Topol’s (any relation?) and David DeCrane’s script — whose sugar
baby strings him along throughout the entire movie until she finally announces
that she’s ready to have sex with him. He takes her to a fancy hotel, intending
to treat her to a room-service dinner before they get to the down ’n’ dirty,
only when she’s stripping for him and straddling him in bed, he gets so excited
he has a heart attack and dies. (Wasn’t there a really bad movie starring
Madonna which kicked off with just this plot premise — she gets the rich guy
who’s keeping her so hot and bothered he gets a heart attack and croaks, and
then she’s arrested and tried for murdering him?) She calls one of the other
girls for advice and is told just to leave the room and walk away, but instead
she has an attack of conscience and calls 911.
Meanwhile, Katie blows it with
James Smith by being a little too insistent in her financial demands, and he tries to pass her on to
another one of his rich buddies, only she gets disgusted at being treated like
a commodity (hey, what did she expect?) and decides to be a poor, struggling college student racking up
hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans instead. I think the business
of nubile female college students selling their bodies to rich men for the
money to finish their education is one Lifetime should give a rest to — there
are a couple of titillating soft-core porn scenes in this one but nothing to
get that excited about (frankly, I
was hoping that old guy would rise to the occasion — literally and figuratively — and give that sugar baby what she
would afterwards exultantly claim was the greatest fuck she’d ever had!), and I
think they’re reaching a point of diminishing returns with this trope. It’s not
that Sugar Babies is a bad movie; it’s just mediocre, with the Topol-DeCrane
script given just the sort of functional but indifferent direction it deserves
by Monika Mitchell. (This is not one of the Lifetime movies that will advance the cause of women
directors.) Indeed, for me the most interesting moment was a bit of
gender-ambiguous dialogue that briefly left the impression that at least one of
the hot young male students had a Gay sugar
daddy of his own — now that might be an interesting way for Lifetime to develop this trope in the
future, especially if the guy isn’t really Gay and the age-peer rival is a
woman!
