by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s first Lifetime “world premiere” was something
with the rather clinical title Infidelity in Suburbia, though it’s different from all Lifetime’s other
movies about infidelity in suburbia only in the relative affluence of the
characters: they all have big homes with spectacular views and both the hero
and the villain own boats which are parked next to each other in the local
marina. Greg Halpern (Peter Benson) is a successful attorney — at least we think he’s an attorney because there’s a passing reference
to a big case he’s supposedly working on — only he’s so busy he leaves his wife
Laura (Sarah Butler, top-billed) home a lot. Looking for something that can
occupy her during his long absences and also help overcome her sexual
frustration — even on the rare occasions they’re under the same roof at the
same time they can’t make love, it seems, without being interrupted (in the
opening scene, even before we know who these people are, Greg’s attempt to get
it on with Laura is broken up when their son Jamie, played by Arlo Hajdu, innocently
but annoyingly walks in on them in their bedroom) — Laura persuades Greg to
allow her to get their kitchen remodeled. Alas, Greg makes the mistake of
hiring as his contractor hot young Elliot Graverston (Marcus Rosner, a glorious
hunk of man-meat director David Winning makes even more delectable by showing
him with his shirt off a lot), and Elliot soon makes his lascivious interest in
Laura quite apparent.
They have sex for the first time while taking a shower
together and then they become a typical American adulterous couple, with her
constantly expressing guilt feelings about what she’s doing and then going
ahead and doing it anyway (the attitude Mike Nichols and Elaine May brilliantly
satirized in their 1960 comedy routine “Adultery” on their album An
Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May).
One of the reasons Laura let herself have the affair with Elliot was she was
convinced Greg was cheating on her
with his office assistant Hannah (Lucie Guest), not only because they were
working long nights together but because she found a pair of purple panties on
her husband’s boat and later looked up Hannah on a singles’ dating Web site and
saw a photo of her wearing similar purple panties. It turns out that Greg and
Hannah were just working together
those long nights, and the panties were left there by a teenager who sneaked on
to Greg’s boat with her boyfriend for their own sexual experience at night —
but in the meantime Laura is predictably in over her head with Elliot. That’s
right: Infidelity in Suburbia is
yet another Lifetime movie in which the writer (Christie Will this time) can’t
be content just with making her character a master seducer and so drop-dead
gorgeous no woman in the dramatis personae can resist him — not Laura, not her single friend Mira (Miranda
Frigon), and not Hannah when she finally meets Elliot at a party Greg is
throwing in his backyard. No, he has to be an insanely possessive psycho as
well, determined to get Laura to leave Greg for him and willing to stop at
nothing, including murder, to make that happen.
At that party he gets Hannah to
leave with him and come to his boat — only he can’t get it up for her and she
realizes why when she sees that the walls of the boat’s cabin are plastered
with candid photos of Laura. She says she’s going to tell on Elliot — and
Elliot responds by strangling her. Elliot’s craziness is explained by Christie
Will in typical Lifetime fashion: like Norman Bates in Psycho, he loved his mother and hated his dad for cheating
on her (we get some of this in flashbacks in which young Liam Butler plays
Elliot as a kid), and this has made him obsessive about bedding as many women
as he can find and causing them as much havoc as possible. After Elliot kills
Hannah he breaks into Laura’s home and leaves a series of signs on every
surface he can find announcing that she is his forever and he’s going to dump
that husband of hers for him … or else. Eventually they have a final confrontation in which she pushes him
out of a window on the top floor of her house, killing him and putting herself,
the movie and its audience all out of our miseries. At one point Elliot kidnaps
Greg, ties him to a pipe inside Elliot’s boat, and leaves him there; later he
assaults him and we worry that he’s going to be a-goner, but as many people get
killed in Lifetime movies, the stalwart husband who stands by his wife as she
deals with her crazy suitor is almost never one of them. Infidelity
in Suburbia has a few good aspects,
including a lot of soft-core porn
between Elliot and Laura — did I tell you this old queen thought quite a lot of
the appeal of this film was seeing Marcus Rosner as unclad as the producers
could get away with on basic cable? — though there are also some odd moments,
including one scene in which Elliot has shaved (more or less) the sides of his
moustache but not the part under
his nose, thereby giving his face an odd resemblance to Hitler’s. Other than
that it was pretty much another Lifetime loser, and as with some previous
movies on this channel (including Open Marriage) I’ve had the feeling that if, instead of portraying
the “other man” as crazy and evil, they had kept it a story about a couple
tempted to the sexual underground but ultimately deciding that they’re better
off both physically and psychologically staying together, director Winning and
writer Will (names that seem to invite bad puns) would have had a stronger and
more moving film.
