by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched the Lifetime TV-movie Secrets of
Eden — “Eden” in this case being a small
town in Vermont whose main industry, if you can call it that, is selling
overpriced antiques to tourists — and it begins with voice-over narrations by a
young minister who’s just been hired to take over the church in Eden (just what
denomination of Christianity is unspecified, but it’s one that does
total-immersion baptisms since one figures prominently in the plot) and a young
woman who isn’t identified but turns out to be Katie Hayward, daughter of Alice
(Sonya Salomaa) and George Hayward. George is the owner of a chain of
sporting-goods stores and he and Alice have what seems from the outside to be a
perfect marriage, but behind closed doors he regularly beats her. She finally
gets up the courage to throw him out of the house after one particularly brutal
assault — she makes his departure the condition for her not pressing charges
against him — largely because through this period she’s been going through
“pastoral counseling” from Pastor Stephen Drew (John Stamos), and after George
leaves (though they’re still married) she and Stephen get hot ’n’ heavy with
each other and have a sexual affair (shown by director Tawnia McKiernan in a hot
bit of soft-core porn that’s considerably more exciting than the rest of the
movie!), only Pastor Drew has guilt feelings about the affair and breaks it off
on the night the two were supposed to take their first out-of-town trip
together.
This leads Alice to decide to invite George to move back in and
attempt a reconciliation — while they’ve been apart he continued to e-mail her
poems (apparently he’s quite the romantic when he’s not beating her up) and he
also bought their daughter Katie an expensive pair of sports shoes to help her
as a soccer player. Only Alice, who’s been reconnecting with her spiritual
roots in the Christian church and also developing some new ones with Heather
LaRoche, local antiques dealer and New Ager who’s written a book called Angels
and Aurascapes (“Aurascapes” is also the
name of her shop). She decides to be baptized in Pastor Drew’s church; George
has a jealous hissy-fit over that and gets even crazier after it’s happened. He
demands to know what she was wearing when she did the total immersion, and when
she says, “A long shirt over a bathing suit,” he accused her of making a public
spectacle of herself and thereby embarrassing him, which leads him to a fight
in which he ultimately strangles her to death. Then we hear a shot and see a
flash from the house, and at first the killings are reported as a
murder-suicide until someone from the Eden police’s CSI unit (or whatever they
call it) figures out that the gunshot that killed him went in at an angle that
could not possibly have been a suicide shot.
The police immediately fasten onto
Pastor Drew as a suspect, and prosecutor Catherine Benicasa (Anna Gunn — she’s
described on the imdb.com page for this film — which lists only five of its
actors — as a police detective but that’s not how she comes across in the film;
indeed, given her blonde hair, severe demeanor and utter conviction in Drew’s
guilt, she strikes me as a portrait of what Nancy Grace must have been like
before she quit her job as a prosecutor and joined Fox News) goes after him
with about as much professional detachment as Javert showed in his pursuit of
Jean Valjean. Eventually she finds the journal Alice kept, which gives us much
of the backstory of her relationships with both her husband and Drew (this film
is non-linear in ways that just seem arbitrary and confusing, and one sometimes
has to look closely at Sonya Salomaa’s hair style to determine just when a flashback scene is taking place), and Katie says
that her family’s dog would have gone after a stranger attacking their home or
anyone in it, leading to Pastor Drew because he, alone of all the townspeople
who didn’t actually live at the Haywards’, was friendly with the dog.
Pretty
early on I became convinced that this film (written by Anne Meredith, adapting
a best-selling novel by Chris Bohjalian) was going to end with Katie turning
out to be her father’s murderer because, after killing her mom, he had tried to
rape her — Bohjalian and Meredith didn’t quite go that far but they did have Katie be her dad’s killer (she came home early
— she had gone to a concert with friends and was supposed to sleep over there
but she wanted to fetch her laptop — discovered her mom dead and her dad
sitting in a chair, drinking, barely conscious but still very much alive, and
shot him) and Pastor Drew actually helped her get away with it, saying he’d set
up the scene to look like suicide and, if that didn’t fool the police, they
would leak evidence implicating him
so she would not be suspected. Secrets of Eden was an O.K. movie that had the potential to be much
better than it was, and the key thing wrong with it was McKiernan’s sluggish
direction, way too slow and dull
for what was supposed to be a thriller — though in general the movie was well
acted and, aside from a somewhat far-fetched resolution, was great bad fun. It
didn’t help that Drew has a brief affair with Heather after Alice dies (or that
he calls her “Alice” in bed!) — John Stamos is, as he was in his youth, a
decent-looking but hardly drop-dead gorgeous hunk of man-meat and it’s hard to
believe two women in the dramatis personae both found him irresistible; frankly, I found the actor playing the
abusive husband far more visually appealing!
