–This post was originally published June 21, 2015.
Lifetime
Lifetime is running A Deadly Adoption “for the last time” tonight, in case you missed it.
I have never watched more than one complete Lifetime movie in my own lifetime, but I’ve seen enough to know that they are usually made on the cheap and follow the same formula of a woman in some kind of trouble or being victimized, a philandering husband/boyfriend, perhaps a child who can be put in danger, goofy sidekick, etc. Lifetime’s home-grown movies (which even spawned a network of their own, Lifetime Movie Network, just to incessantly run those movies after they’ve run their course on the parent network, and now rebranded LMN with less emphasis on those movies) have become such a joke, even though they pull in decent ratings, that one of the characters on Hot In Cleveland, Victoria Chase, always had a solution for a situation by starting a sentence with, “In my Lifetime Original Movie [insert wacky title here],” that always garnered a huge laugh from the audience because we’re all in on the joke about how cheesy those movies are.
Now, Will Ferrell and writer Andrew Steele (Funny or Die Presents, The Spoils of Babylon, SNL) have concocted a new Lifetime Original Movie called A Deadly Adoption. The big question surrounding this project has been is this legit or is this a parody? The project was announced on April Fool’s Day and then Ferrell denied it was happening. Suddenly it’s on Lifetime’s schedule and being promoted out the wazoo, but the early teasers for the movie made it very hard to tell if Ferrell and Kristin Wiig were playing it straight or not.
Watching the movie, it’s still hard to tell! The plot is basic Lifetime: Ferrell and Wiig play a married couple with one child and another on the way. Ferrell’s Robert Benson is a successful financial guru and author. Wiig’s Sarah makes and sells her own organic products at a local outdoor market. A tragic accident involving Sarah going head over heels off of a rotting dock leads to the loss of the unborn child, and five years later the couple is ready to adopt. Having been through several candidates, they finally find one who seems to be a good fit, Bridget (Jessica Lowndes). The Benson’s welcome Bridget into their home for her last three months of pregnancy, but of course she has a secret. One big secret you can see coming from a mile away.
Things are going to get a bit spoilery here so if you plan to watch the movie, don’t go any further.
Bridget’s big secret is that she isn’t really pregnant. Gasp! When the young daughter Sully — who also has diabetes, we’re reminded over and over again — discovers Bridget wearing a pad, Bridget comes up with some cockamamie story about having a small belly so she wears the pad to make herself look more pregnant! What?! She couldn’t just say it was a padded cover to protect her belly, which would have made a heck of a lot more sense than the story she told. This girl is not good under pressure, as we’ll soon learn. Of, she also has another secret. Her name is really Joni, and she met (and slept with) Robert while he was on a book tour and drinking heavily. Of course he didn’t remember her until he found the copy of the book he autographed for her in her bag. Long story short, Bridget/Joni has a skeezy boyfriend waiting for her to kidnap the girl and come back with a million dollar ransom so they can leave town. And things go horribly wrong from there as we see that Joni is actually obsessed with Robert and has totally lost her mind. It won’t end well for her, as it doesn’t in any Lifetime movie where a woman goes crazy and tries to break up a family.
Watching the movie, I just kept waiting for some clue as to if this was supposed to be some kind of comedic parody. It felt, at times, that Wiig and Ferrell were on the verge of cracking up but they never did so there was an odd balance of ‘we’re nudging you in the ribs, see what we’re doing here, we’re poking fun at the Lifetime formula’ and just playing it completely (too completely) straight (something that worked to better effect on The Spoils of Babylon). The only person in the cast who seemed to not have been clued in to not play his character too broadly was Bryan Safi, Sarah’s flamboyant business partner. Unfortunately, his actual ‘wink at the camera’ performance was totally at odds with everything else, making him seem like just a terrible actor. Had everyone else lightened up a bit, there would have been a better balance and Safi wouldn’t have seemed so off kilter and in a completely different movie.
But there are hints throughout the movie that tell us we really shouldn’t be taking it as seriously as they seem to be taking it. When Robert confronts Sarah about a box of unopened chocolates in the pantry and says, “You know the dangers of diabetic ketoacidosis” (remember, Sully has diabetes), it became one of those moments that would have your beverage shooting out of your nose. Scanning through the movie a second time does reveal more “this is a joke” moments from lines of dialog to knowing glances to cliched situations.
It really wasn’t until after Sully was kidnapped that it felt like they were finally letting us all in on the joke. Bridget became Joni, all short shorts, colored clip-on hair and liquid eyeliner, full psycho mode (with some of the cheesiest synthesizer music ever doing all it can to evoke Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score), catfighting with Sarah and leaving her unconscious in the garage with the car running, shooting Robert — twice! — with blood pouring out of a wound like an artery was severed, telling Sully that her parents are dead and she’s the new mommy, Robert hilariously waiting for the garage door to open so he can talk Sarah into breathing again (yes, gently talk her back to life!), and finishing up with some crazy continuity errors (is it dawn, is it noon, who knows, and why does the blood on Joni’s head move from side to side?) that leads to one of the most hilarious shots of a character’s demise ever. By the last half hour, the movie almost — almost — redeems itself.
Lifetime
So was A Deadly Adoption a success? Perhaps if you’re a true aficionado of Lifetime Original Movies, you’d take it completely at face value. They certainly have gone out of their way to let the thing play out straight for those viewers. If you were expecting a lot of mugging, especially from Wiig who really seems to be trying hard not to, and laughs at the expense of those movies (and their fans), you might be let down rather hard. I think a second viewing will allow us to be able to read between the lines, see the performances as not as sincere as they first appear to be, and appreciate the satire on display. I was hoping more for an Airplane! style spoof, but perhaps the Lifetime bigwigs weren’t too comfortable poking that much fun at themselves. I’m sure there will be a lot of analysis of what the movie did or didn’t do right. For now, I’m on the fence.
Did you watch A Deadly Adoption? Tell us what you think in the comments section!
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