by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Break-Up Nightmare
Lifetime showed a typically ballyhooed “world premiere” of something called Seduced, set in the Los Angeles beach community (with scenes
in Santa Monica and Venice Beach as well as L.A. itself), written by Brian
McAuley (a name I’ve seen on previous Lifetime movies) and directed by Jessica
Janos (a name I haven’t, though judging by this work she’s unlikely to advance
the cause of women directors). It’s also about a mother and the daughter she’s
raising as a single parent, though this time mom is Caroline Prati (ex-Law
and Order Elizabeth Röhm), daughter is
Issie (Jessica Amlee, who does not
look much like her on-screen mom), and Caroline is single-parenting Issie not
because she and Issie’s dad broke up but because Issie’s dad Paul died of
cancer two years earlier. Caroline is a redhead (that’s a significant plot
point) and Issie a blonde, and when she’s not dealing with Issie’s problems —
including, as in Break-Up Nightmare,
a boyfriend, Noah (Tanner Stine, not as easy on the eyes as the two young male
leads in Break-Up Nightmare but
still pretty cute), who dumps her when she won’t have sex with him — she’s the
principal accountant for an Internet crowd-funding Web site called Fundercrack.
Alas, the owner of Fundercrack, Jason Birch (Robert Mailhouse), is a typical
asshole 1-percenter, taking the $3.7 million that was allocated for bonuses to
the top staffers (including Caroline herself) and moving it into a “secret
account” where he’s spending it on himself, including buying a hot sports car
with a six-figure price tag. What’s more, the IRS is investigating Fundercrack
and Jason flat-out orders Caroline to commit accounting fraud to conceal his
embezzlement — and when she tells him that the only way he can avoid
prosecution for tax fraud is actually to pay the bonuses he promised and told
the IRS he was going to pay, he counters that the money no longer exists.
While
all of this is going on Caroline’s daughter Issie is researching “Missed
Connections” — people who might be right for each other but never meet — and
has even logged onto a Web site (in Lifetime movies, as too often in real life,
the Internet appears mainly as a device to make ordinary sorts of crimes
considerably easier to pull off) called Missed Connections. Issie reads an ambiguous note from a man who calls
himself Gavin Donati (Jon Prescott, considerably less attractive than one would
think his part called for) and immediately concludes that the mystery woman he
saw and is trying to attract is her mom. Mom is understandably reluctant to
follow up but Issie responds for her, and for the first hour of this film Gavin
and Caroline go on a series of increasingly intimate and hot dates — and Gavin,
once again displaying the almost supernatural powers of your typical Lifetime
villain, is somehow able to slip her handwritten notes giving when and where he
wants to see her next into her workplace (in one that particularly amused me,
he writes his note on the title page of a book he gives her — one of their
trysts took place in a bookstore, which reminded me of the 2002 movie Unfaithful — though that one was originally intended for
theatres and had “A”-list, or at least “A-minus”-list, stars Richard Gere and
Diane Lane, though Lifetime is where I saw it, in which the man Diane Lane’s character is cheating on Richard
Gere with owns a bookstore, and I was wondering if that was the case for Gavin
in this one too — instead he claims to be an “international financial
consultant”) — in which Caroline turns from a strait-laced woman who apparently
hasn’t even thought about sex
since her husband died into a ravenous sex pig, doing it in such kinkily public
places even Gavin seems put out by her demands. It’s only at one point when
they’re taking a bath together in Gavin’s oval-shaped bathtub in his palatial
mansion in the Hollywood hills that we start getting an inkling of what he’s really after (though, if nothing else, his rotten fake
accent — he seems unable to decide whether he wants to sound English, French or
Italian — has made us suspicious), when he offers Caroline an “investment
opportunity” and encourages her to embezzle from her company to give him the
money.
Midway through the movie Caroline, who’s enthralled with Gavin’s rather
nondescript body but so far has maintained enough good sense and moral values not to steal from her company to fund his “investments,”
comes to Gavin’s place and meets his other girlfriend, Halle (pronounced “Halley”) (Alexandria Basso), whom he
started dating two months before — right around the same time he started dating
Caroline. The two hatch a revenge plot to ruin Gavin and bust him for being a
con artist — Halle said she’d
been about to put her entire life savings into Gavin’s (nonexistent)
enterprises — and by the next-to-last act Gavin has been busted not only for
being a con artist but for murdering Halle and two young redheaded women, and
Caroline is the star of a TV documentary hailing them as the woman who had the
courage to fight back against the rotter and lead to his arrest. Only writer
McAuley has two surprise
reversals up her sleeve in the final act: first, Halle turns out to be alive —
she and Gavin were long-term lovers, only Gavin had a way of getting too
sexually intense over the redheaded female “marks” she picked out for him and
Halle would kill them out of jealousy; she then faked her own death so Gavin would
be sent up for murder and she’d be rid of him — and then there’s a final
confrontation between the three women (including Caroline’s daughter Issie, who
like your standard-issue Lifetime daughter gets herself kidnapped by the baddie
at the end) which ends in a bloodbath in that bathtub, with … well, I wasn’t
sure exactly what happened at the
end but both Halle and Issie end up as blood-spattered corpses and Caroline
breezes into Jason’s (ya remember Jason?) office at Fundercrack (ya remember Fundercrack?) and announces that either Jason gives her the
company or she reports him to the IRS. He gives her the company and one of the
last things we hear is a voiceover from Caroline that sometimes “sacrifices
have to be made” — were we supposed to think she killed not only Halle but her
own daughter as well? — to be able to get what she wants.
I couldn’t help but
be reminded of Fritz Lang’s comment on the film Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt, which he intended as a
semi-documentary film against capital punishment (Dana Andrews plays a reporter
who fakes evidence that he’s guilty of murder to prove how easily the criminal
justice system can unjustly convict someone of murder and execute them), only
at the last minute his producer, Bert Friedlob, insisted on a script change by
which Andrews’ character really did
kill the person he was framing himself for killing and the whole “innocence
project” was just an elaborate scheme on his part to conceal his own guilt. In
his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenburg for The
Celluloid Muse Lang recalled his argument
with Friedlob: “I cannot, I said, make an audience love Dana Andrews for one
hour and thirty-eight minutes and then in the last two minutes reveal that he’s
really a son-of-a-bitch and the whole thing is a joke.” Unfortunately, Jessica
Janos and Brian McAuley tried exactly the same sort of reversal with Caroline’s
character here — with equally unconvincing results, especially since
communicating her new-found (lack of a) moral sense totally threw Elizabeth
Röhm as an actress and she’s flat and unbelievable in the final scene. It also
doesn’t help that director Janos is addicted to sunset shots — frame after
frame of this film looks like the cover of the Eagles’ album Hotel
California (indeed, one such shot inevitably
inspired me to warble a few bars of its title song) — or that, not content just
to show the spectacular California sunsets, she insists on flanging them in
that annoying music-video way that’s got really oppressive and which Mark Quod
wisely avoided in Break-Up Nightmare. All in all, Seduced was
a grandly silly movie — or rather two grandly silly movies arbitrarily spliced together — and a grim
reminder of how badly the U.S. film industry’s skills at doing this sort of
story have deteriorated since the 1944 Gaslight, directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid
Bergman and Charles Boyer (despite his accent problems!).
