by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last
night Lifetime showed two “premiere” movies from 8 p.m. to midnight (or shortly
thereafter) under the rubric “Mommy Madness,” of which the first was Mommy’s
Little Boy, a clear follow-up to the 2016
production they had re-run just before it, Mommy’s Little Girl. Created by the same people — Lifetime’s ace writer,
Christine Conradt (she had help from Mark Sanderson on the script for Mommy’s
Little Girl but wrote Mommy’s Little
Boy solo), and her frequent directorial
collaborator, Curtis James Crawford, Mommy’s Little Boy wasn’t a ripoff of The Bad Seed the way Mommy’s Little Girl was. It was promoted on the Lifetime Web site by a
29-second trailer that showed Mommy’s little boy, Eric Wilson (Peter DaCunha),
out with her in the dead of night helping her bury a tarp-wrapped body, which
made it looked like mommy Briana Wilson (Bree Williamson, an oddly similar name
to her character!) was knocking people off and enlisting sonny-boy’s help as an
accessory after the fact. The truth, when we finally get to see the movie start
to finish, is more complex and more morally ambiguous than that — moral
ambiguity is the biggest thing that separates Conradt’s scripts, as insanely
melodramatic as some of them (including Mommy’s Little Boy) get, from those by the rest of Lifetime’s writers.
When
we first meet Eric he’s being all too blatantly bullied by his older
half-brother Max (Auden Larratt) — the two have different fathers and both men
disappeared from Briana’s life without so much as a by-your-leave, though one
of them left her a nice house which she can still afford to live in because of
some sort of legal settlement she got that enables her not to work. What she does do with her time is drink — sometimes at sleazy bars, in
one of which she meets a boyfriend de jour named Shane Reed (Sebastian Pigott) who figures prominently in the
later action, but mostly at home, straight from a bottle of liquor which, since
the fluid is clear, we assume is either vodka or gin. During one afternoon
she’s lying next to their backyard swimming pool, laying in a chaise longue, listening to music via ear buds and doing the best she
can to drown out the sounds of her sons as they horseplay in the pool. Somehow
Max falls to the bottom of the pool, a wound opens up and he dies — director
Crawford keeps it uncertain whether Eric deliberately killed him, whether he
was fighting back against Max’s bullying and just pushed too hard, or Max had
an accident and Eric’s only culpability was that he didn’t bother to tell mom
until it was too late because he knew he would be better off with his brother
dead than alive. Nonetheless, mom convinces Eric that he’s a murderer and he’s
going to have to do exactly what she says or else he’s going to end up in
prison. The Wilsons have a nosy neighbor who lives across the street, Barbara
Nolan (Brigitte Robinson), who notices that the Wilson boys aren’t eating
especially well — since one of the things their mom is too hors de combat from all that drinking to do for them is make meals — so
she brings over some sort of taco pie (I think that’s how the dish was described in the dialogue) and mom
overreacts hysterically to the idea that she needs some interloper to help her
feed her kids. So she clongs Barbara on the head with a frying pan, knocking
her unconscious and leaving Eric alone with the body. Eric notices that Barbara
is still alive and is about to reach for the phone to call 911 when mom comes
back into the room. Eric tells her, “She’s not dead,” and mom’s response is to
grab that frying pan and keep hitting Barbara over the head with it until she really
is most sincerely dead.
Then mom
concocts the plot for concealing her crime into which she enlists Eric and
which involves the scene we saw in the trailer: mom buries Barbara’s body in
the local Kern Campgrounds (the film supposedly takes place in Philadelphia but
the settings look more suburban to me) and abandons Barbara’s car and purse,
hoping that either or both will get stolen, the police will find them and, if
Barbara’s body is ever discovered, the cops will blame her murder on whoever
stole her car and/or purse. Only it doesn’t work that way because nobody goes
near the car, and when she isn’t doing bouncy-bouncy with Shane or getting
plastered, she’s noting the news reports as the cops find first the car and
then Barbara herself. Meanwhile, Eric has managed to escape from mom’s bizarre
clutches into one of the local parks, where he runs into a girl his age named
Kaylee Davis (Jadyn Malone) and her parents, local schoolteacher and coach
Michael Davis (Paul Popowich, one of those rare males in a Lifetime movie who’s
both hot and sexy and actually gets to play a good guy!) and his wife Sherry (Natalie Lisinska). We
immediately get the impression that the Davises would make far better parents for Eric than his mother would, not only
because there are two of them but because they’re strong, loving, supportive
and have better things to do with their lives than drink themselves into
oblivion. Michael recruits Eric to try out for the school’s baseball team, at
which he sucks and gets teased by the other kids (one of whom even has the gall
to tell him that the wrong Wilson brother died), and he tries to help Eric as
much as possible without arousing suspicion as to his own motives. Meanwhile,
as mother Briana’s crude attempt to cover up her crime starts to unravel, she
hatches a plot to get herself, Shane and Eric out of the country and over to
Mexico in Shane’s elaborate RV, which he’s so emotionally committed to it’s
clear the vehicle, not any human, is the great love of his life. Eric doesn’t
want to leave and Shane wants it to be just him and Briana without that
obnoxious kid of hers anyway, but mom insists that the two are a “package
deal.” Alas, Shane is so protective of his RV that when he finds out that Eric
has been going through his possessions and discovered first his porn collection
and then his gun, he threatens to beat Eric to within an inch of his life with
his belt — and Eric panics and shoots Shane.
When mom realizes that they’ve got
another corpse on their hands she’s
even more anxious to get out of the country — though somewhere along the line
it peeks through even her alcohol-soaked mind that Canada would be a closer and
more feasible place to run to than Mexico — and in the meantime Michael has
alerted child protective services to Eric’s plight at home and the Philadelphia
police have assigned a woman detective, Jan Myers (Allison Graham), to the
case. Mom left her cell phone behind when she abandoned her car and went with
Shane in his RV, but Eric has his own phone and uses it to call Michael, who
tells him to keep the line open so the police can trace them. Director Crawford
and editor Jordan Jensen create effective suspense as it becomes a race of time
— can the cops stop the runaway RV and its mother-and-son fugitive occupants
before mom discovers her son is alerting them on his cell phone and beats the
shit out of him, or worse? When Michael and detective Myers finally corner
them, Briana comes out of the RV holding Eric at gunpoint, hoping to use him as
a hostage, only he manages to get away and Briana refuses Myers’ command to
drop her gun and essentially commits “suicide by cop.” As melodramatic as it
sometimes is, and as clear that Conradt has been doing these for so long (her
first Lifetime script, The Perfect Nanny,
was made in 2000) she’s got the clichés down pat and knows what her audiences
expect, she also manages to make her characters believable as flesh-and-blood
people with flaws as well as good points. We basically like and root for Eric
but he does leave his brother in the pool
to die, and later he shoots someone whose only crime was wanting to discipline
him; and Briana comes off as a figure of real pathos even though we generally
loathe her; we basically like the nosy neighbor Briana offs early on but could
see how her constant butting in to the Wilsons’ lives could become a real
trial; and Shane comes off as a no-account pleasure-seeker but also a proud and
independent man who’s just in over his head with this woman and her troubled
son. The Davis family are the only members of the dramatis personae of Mommy’s Little Boy who really are too good to be
true; otherwise the characterizations are intriguing and make this something
more than just your standard-issue Lifetime movie with a provocative title and
premise.
