by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was the Lifetime showing of a 2014
TV-movie based on Flowers in the Attic,
a 1979 Southern-gothic novel by one V. C. Andrews, who like Harry
Potter author Janice Rowling signed her
books with initials and thereby preserved a gender ambiguity about her
identity. Andrews was born in 1923 but didn’t take up novel writing until her
50’s (before that she’d been a commercial artist), starting out with a
science-fiction book called Gods of Green Mountain which wasn’t published during her lifetime but was
made available in electronic form only in 2004. Her second novel was originally
called The Obsessed — actually a
better title — but a publisher asked her for a rewrite to “spice up” the story,
and she did the revisions in one night and sent in the new version under a
different title, Flowers in the Attic. The novel, published in 1979, was an instant best-seller and sparked
three sequels and a prequel (a structure Andrews used for several other series
as well), and though Andrews died in 1986 her publisher decided that the name
“V. C. Andrews” was too valuable a property to let expire along with its
original owner. So, with the approval of Andrews’ family, they hired Andrew
Neiderman to keep cranking out new “V. C. Andrews” novels, some of them based
on notes or partially finished manuscripts the real Andrews left behind, some
of them entirely Neiderman’s work.
Flowers in the Attic was originally filmed in 1987 — with Louise Fletcher
from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
as the crazy grandmother at the heart of the story and Victoria Tennant as the
recently widowed mother who takes her four kids to live with grandma in
Virginia — and recently remade by Cue the Dog Productions and Front Street
Pictures in association with MGM (the familiar “lion” logo was shown in the
closing credits) for TV showing on Lifetime. I was interested in watching this
partly because the previews for it on Lifetime had shown some quite appealing
footage of Mason Dye, the juvenile male lead, going around shirtless — and while
young blond boys with no chest hair aren’t exactly my biggest “type” he was
aesthetically appealing enough I decided I wouldn’t mind sitting through the
whole movie for more glimpses of his partially unclad bod — and partly because
on January 18, the day Lifetime was showing this movie for the first time, Los
Angeles Times TV critic Mary McNamara
published a review ripping it but making it sound like it would be a good-bad
camp-fest. “It should come as no surprise that Lifetime’s adaptation of Flowers
in the Attic is terrible,” McNamara wrote.
“Of course it’s terrible! The book was terrible! Rife with clunky dialogue,
ridiculous characters, and ludicrous plot twists, it was so terrible that you
could not put it down.” Though McNamara went on to say that the Lifetime
adaptation had little or none of the demented appeal of the novel, her review still promised a so-bad-it’s-good camp-fest — and for the
most part the film delivered. Like a lot of other Lifetime movies, this one
opened with an act or two of blissful, bucolic middle-class suburban happiness
that the heroine is about to be wrenched away from — about the only difference
between this and most Lifetime films is that this takes place in the late
1950’s (we can tell from the vintage cars we see on the roads and Elvis
Presley’s “Teddy Bear,” which the characters listen to on the radio).
Our
wonderfully happy suburban family consists of father Christopher Dollanganger,
Sr. (Chad Willett), mother Corinne Foxworth Dollanganger (Heather Graham) and
their four kids: son Christopher, Jr. (Mason Dye), older daughter Cathy
(Kiernan Shipka) and fraternal twins Carrie (Ava Telek) and Cory (Maxwell
Kovach). They’re celebrating the fact that dad has just got a promotion at work
and is now vice-president of sales for the entire East Coast (though we’re
never told who he works for or what exactly it is they make — not that anyone
seems to care; we’ve come a long way from the time when Arthur Miller got raked
over the coals for never telling us, in Death of a Salesman, exactly what product Willy Loman sold) when word
suddenly comes that dad has been killed in an accident. Mortgaged up to the
hilt and about to lose their home due to foreclosure (a plot twist that seems
all too current now), Corinne
announces to the kids that as much as she hates her own mother, Olivia Foxworth
(Ellen Burstyn, the one “name” actor in this film and the one person who turns
in a performance of real authority and power), she sees no alternative but to
move back in with Olivia — who owns an estate in Virginia with her husband, Corinne’s father. The gimmick is that
Corinne will inherit the Foxworth millions as soon as her seriously ill dad
croaks — but he can’t be allowed to find out she has any children because he
regards them as “spawn of the devil” and would disinherit her (apparently he’s already disinherited her and she’s launching this whole
campaign to get him to re-inherit her again) if he learned of their existence.
So Corinne and Olivia tell the kids that they can only be in one bedroom of the house, and if they need to play they
can do so in the attic. It’s hard to enjoy Flowers in the Attic without being all too aware of the sheer
preposterousness of this plot device — it makes Il Trovatore seem like hard-edged realism by comparison and
suggests that maybe instead of having it filmed (again) the Andrews estate
should have sold it to someone like Jake Heggie or Mark-Anthony Turnage or
Thomas Adès and had them turn it into an opera, in which larger-than-life
medium it just might work — though it has its compensations.
Olivia is shown as
a black-hearted villain, setting an insane series of rules a concentration-camp
commandant might have regarded as too strict and whipping the kids (or
threatening to) whenever they step out of line — though the scene in which she
whips Christopher made me wonder why he didn’t just grab the belt out of her
hand and strangle her with it (he certainly looked physically robust enough to
have done it) — but also capable of little kindnesses; and the one hint of any
sort of dramatic complexity in this story comes from the character of Corinne,
who’s drawn at first as the sympathetic, loving mother but later, under the
influence of her own greed, becomes as vicious and nasty to the kids as her own
mom — more so at the end, when she’s married her dad’s lawyer (Dylan Bruce),
who’s under the impression that their relationship will be “just the two of us”
and won’t include four kids, two of them almost grown, and in order to get rid
of the inconvenient offspring feeds them doughnuts laced with poison. In the
meantime the kids have spent over two years in that damned attic, painting
pictures of flowers to make it look more like a real garden (hence the title),
and it’s revealed that they’re the product of an incestuous relationship:
Corinne’s (first) husband was her father’s half-brother. That’s the explanation for why Corinne’s parents regard
them as “spawn of the devil” and why Corinne and Olivia are going to such great
lengths to conceal the fact of their existence from their grandfather (Beau
Daniels). Flowers in the Attic
actually features two incestuous
relationships (the same number as in Wagner’s Ring) as Christopher and Cathy start screwing each other
for no apparent reason other than sheer proximity — they’re burgeoning into
sexual maturity in this absurd environment where they’re literally prevented
from meeting anyone else their own age. In the end Cory dies of pneumonia and
the other three Dollanganger offspring (that preposterous family name couldn’t
help but remind me of British mystery writer Mignon G. Eberhardt, another woman
author who adorned her characters with ridiculous names like Kingery and Keate)
escape on a train, looking for all the world like a young mom, dad and
daughter.
The Wikipedia page for V. C. Andrews tells more about their story, if
you’re interested; “Petals on the Wind picks up the story directly after their escape from the attic without
one of their siblings. If There Be Thorns and Seeds of Yesterday
continue to tell their story, but the focus shifts to Cathy's children Jory and
Bart after a mysterious woman and her butler move in next door and start
inviting Bart over, turning him into a monster. Garden of Shadows is a prequel that tells the story of the
grandparents, Olivia and Malcolm Foxworth.” The Lifetime version of Flowers
in the Attic isn’t exactly alive even to
the meager possibilities in this story; save for a marvelous sequence when mom
and the kids arrive at the Foxworth mansion at 3 a.m., having had to walk from
the train station since the promised car to meet them didn’t show up (I joked
that they would be met by a carriage driven by remote control by a bat flying
alongside it, and Charles caught the hint and started dropping Bela Lugosi
impressions), director Deborah Chow supplies almost none of the Gothic
atmosphere the story seems to cry out for, and screenwriter Kayla Alpert seems
to have spent her entire writing stint looking at Andrews’ novel and holding
her nose at the preposterous trash she was being forced to regurgitate. Ellen
Burstyn dominates the cast, managing to make Olivia formidably evil without
yielding to the omnipresent temptation to chew the scenery, and the actors
playing the kids turn in competent victim performances but do little more with
the material — still, the half-clad Mason Dye was a lot of fun to look at!
