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After producing a thriller actually set during the Christmas holiday to justify the month’s ‘Slay Bells’ theme, LMN returns to their standard thriller that has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas. It’s not even winter in My Mother the Madam! While the movie skimps on the holiday, it offers up three or four different movies all happening at the same time that may make your head spin … until it all sort of comes together at the end.
My Mother the Madam opens in a women’s prison where someone is getting shanked while two other inmates watch, one of the women showing a small bit of smirk at the incident. But the movie will circle back to this later as the rest of the story is actually a flashback.
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Over in movie number two, Gina Vitori stars as investigative reporter Lauren Calloway, daughter of an affluent family who has returned home for her father’s funeral. Lauren obviously has a frosty relationship with her mother, Elizabeth (Isabella Hofmann), and seems a bit overwhelmed by the funeral which Elizabeth labeled ‘the social event of the season’. Even the governor was there (dad Jon was the Chief of Police). Also in attendance was some odd, fidgety man. But Lauren begins experiencing a recurrence of heartburn that troubles her since her father died of a heart attack. Elizabeth suggests she go and visit her old pediatrician, which she does, learning that it’s just normal heartburn brought on by stress. And besides, she has no need to worry about inheriting her father’s heart disease because … she’s adopted. Waitwhat? Lauren is thirty-one years old and has just found out from her doctor that she’s adopted. Oopsie. Needless to say, she’s not thrilled to just get this news and Elizabeth is even less thrilled to now have to come up with a story as to why she’s kept this information hidden.
Meanwhile in another movie, there is a hotel full of hookers apparently overseen by a guy named Vinnie and head hooker Jeannie. Jeannie has a regular customer, Peter, but for some reason he’s chosen this one day to come in and beat the crap out of her, leaving a small cut on her face that later becomes a bizarrely, heavily rouged cheek. Over in another movie, some backwoods redneck just shows up, gets a call, and somehow finds the pediatrician’s car at a friend’s house. When she gets in the car and starts her up, the interior fills with smoke and she dies. The redneck guy, Cal, seems to know where the hookers are too and has his own favorite. Are any of these stories connected to the main mystery? Lauren happens to meet the town’s investigative reporter, Chad Anderson (Philip Boyd), newly arrived so he finds an immediate attraction to Lauren because she at least knows the area. She also has a spark with him, but she keeps Face Timing with a guy named Kevin, so is she in a relationship? (It takes a while for the movie to finally reveal Kevin, and his husband, are Lauren’s GBFs.) She and Chad team up like a mini Scooby gang and start digging for information, bothering local residents for security cam footage from the night of the doctor’s death, and locating Lauren’s birth certificate in a not-too-well concealed false bottom of a drawer in her father’s desk where she learns her mother’s name is Jean. This information spurs Lauren to go and see her artist uncle (her father’s brother) who, it turns out, was the fidgety man at the funeral. He may or may not have had a beef with Jon, but he absolutely refuses to answer any of Lauren’s questions, shrieking at her to leave his studio.
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Somehow, Lauren and Chad end up at the hooker hotel and Lauren ends up posing as a hooker, accidentally, when Peter shows up and decides she will be his new favorite. Luckily Vinnie steps in just in time, and Lauren connects with Jeannie thinking she is her mother. But she’s not. There was another Jean who ran the place with Vinnie but she got railroaded by the law and is now in prison. Ah ha! The pieces are falling into place. But more people are turning up dead, including Uncle Jack — and how Peter was involved in any of this is still a puzzle — and Lauren finally manages to secure a meeting with Jean in prison (yes, she was the woman witnessing the shanking … or will be), and she reveals some startling truths — Lauren should be worried about that heart issue because Jon was her real father, and Elizabeth probably had him murdered because she has a whole host of secrets of her own, including how she funds her foundation. By the end it all makes a little more sense as we roll back to that opening scene.
You have to hand it to the writer and directors of My Mother the Madam, Cullen Douglas and Philip Boyd & Jon Osbeck, for crafting this story made up of what seem to be so many disparate pieces, each scene with each set of characters feeling wholly unconnected from the other scenes, keeping the viewer off-balance, never really knowing what the heck is actually happening. Who is Cal and who is he taking orders from? Why are we suddenly at a hotel full of hookers? Who is this Peter guy? Is Chad on the up-and-up? Why was Uncle Jack so angry? When Jean reveals the truth to Lauren, it all becomes pretty satisfying as everything fits into place. Credit also to the editor, Evan Campbell, for keeping all of the pieces moving, doling out just enough information in each different scene so that the ‘Ah Ha!’ moment pays off in a satisfying way. They all worked really well to keep the viewer off balance, but not to the point that you feel so frustrated that you want to throw things at the TV (although did we really need the scene with Cal and his girl frolicking?). The Uncle Jack character also added nothing to the story since all he did was yell at Lauren and then get killed, and the performance of Richard Width at the funeral was just … bizarre. There’s also a moment for Jean that is completely undone in seconds, which seems very unrealistic unless many of the characters in the movie are secretly psychic, but without it we wouldn’t have gotten the ultimately satisfying ending. So, yeah, there are some story issues but I’m willing to overlook them because most everything did come together in the end, and that ending was truly killer (pun intended). One other minor point of contention — the newspaper headlines that are seen a couple of times. The one about Uncle Jack desperately needs punctuation, and the one at the end noting Elizabeth is ‘renowned’ even though Lauren knew nothing about her is odd and also needs punctuation. Also … how did the FBI suddenly show up out of nowhere?
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The main cast also do some good work at making their characters feel real. Vitori really makes her relationship with her mother feel awkward and she also has a nice connection with Chad. She allows Lauren to be as in the dark about what’s going on as the audience is, and even though we see more than she does, through her performance and the way she plays out the story, we can see everything through her eyes and are just as gobsmacked as she is when all is revealed. Vitori keeps the character on an even keel, never going over into hysterics or getting overly frustrated, just as any good investigative reporter would do. She really holds the story together. It was a real treat to see Isabella Hofmann as Elizabeth, having been a fan of hers since her Dear John days. She plays Elizabeth as an upstanding member of society, seeming to put her station in life above everything else. She makes us wonder if she is the problem in her relationship with Lauren, or if Lauren is the one who has a problem with her. She keeps Elizabeth’s secrets very close to the vest, always making you wonder how she and the family afforded such a lavish lifestyle. Hofmann just makes Elizabeth classy and she commands the room whenever she is in a scene.
Philip Boyd is fine as Chad (he really should have been named Peter and Peter named Chad because Peter is a total Chad), he has good chemistry with Vitori, and he never makes Chad feel like he’s up to no good. He actually plays the character as an ally with no agenda other than to help Lauren with her investigation, and the way he looks at her it’s clear that he’s attracted to her. Phil Abrams gives a nice performance as Vinnie, sort of a pimp with a heart of gold, and Monica Lacy is also really good as Jeannie. She gets a really nice moment while talking with Lauren explaining that the women there are often safer than they would be out in the world and that puts it all into perspective for Lauren. (It also makes a subtle argument in support of sex workers.) Bryant Carroll is a bit over-the-top as Cal, a character who is a few eggs short of a dozen, and he makes Cal as unpleasant as he should be. Jesse Kove (son of Martin Kove, of The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai fame) just plays Peter as angry all the time, even though Jeannie describes him as usually a nice guy, so there is no real explanation for his anger, or how he connects to the rest of the story. Cullen Douglas appears in flashbacks — or in Lauren’s memories — as Jon Calloway, always offering some fatherly advice and support. Susan Gallagher is excellent as Jean Rochelle, the Queen Bee of the prison, putting up a hard front but showing that she does indeed have a softer side when Lauren comes to visit, actually making us root for her as she reveals who railroaded her, hoping that she and Lauren will be able to have a relationship.
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And if you’re keeping count, several of the cast members were also involved behind-the-scenes: Philip Boyd (Chad) was co-director and producer; Cullen Douglas (Jon) was the writer; Jon Osbeck (Mike Lancaster, who spoke at Jon’s funeral and has a key role later in the story) was producer and co-director; and Susan Gallagher (Jean) was an executive producer, and her production company, Her Little Red Productions, produced the movie.
Overall, even though it seems completely convoluted with all of the separate elements, sticking with My Mother the Madam is ultimately rewarding thanks to the skill with which it was assembled, some terrific performances and an ending that pays off wonderfully. Even with some of the minor issues, this one is worth the watch.
My Mother the Madam has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.
My Mother the Madam Trailer
Her Little Red Productions