There is a rule I tell my students when they start on their
creative pieces; I tell them that they shouldn’t talk ABOUT
a story, but tell it -- put me there so I can believe the
action. I wish Lifetime would have taken this advice when
scripting and casting the reboot, Flowers in the Attic. I
had high hopes for this remake -- as a fan of the original
1979 novel (that I read as a [much too young] third grader),
and then of the 1987 movie version with Kristy Swanson I
totally bought in; especially since LIfetime was touting a
more faithful telling of the novel; incest included. But
what I got was a heavy-handed shell of the tale that
completely lacks nuance or subtlety.
The premise of the movie closely resembles the plot of the
novel: a beautiful, young mother loses her husband and is
forced to return to her estranged family, from which she was
disinherited years before. Heather Graham plays the mother
Corinne in a lackluster, bland performance that was so vague
it was hard to tell if she was sympathetic or not (by act
three, it was obvious she was a bad guy but it didn’t take
much acting on her part to get us there (I guess Lifetime
didn’t trust us to deduce that on our own). Corrinne returns
home in the middle of the night to her childhood home and is
greeted by her mother, played by Ellen Burstyn, a stern,
evil, shard of a woman, that has long harbored a grudge
against Corrinne. Burstyn’s character is meant to be
personification of the dark, twisted tone of the movie, but
it doesn’t quite hit the mark. She is scary in the way that
quicksand is supposed to be scary (but really isn’t, if you
think about it), but it never really materializes. We learn,
through a painstaking and unnatural passage of time, that
Corrinne was shunned for falling in love with her father’s
half-brother (the children’s father). The two ran away and
had four “perfect” children together, cutting themselves off
from the family. After the father’s death, they return in
secret and the children are sequestered away in the attic
until Corinne can win over her father and be added back to
the will. Burstyn’s character, the grandmother, supervises
their care with sporadic visits from their mother that grow
fewer and fewer as she reacclimates to the high society she
left years earlier. The children grow wan and pale and
bored, and eventually the two older wind up sleeping
together (you will recognize Cathy as Don Draper’s daughter
from Mad Men, Kiernan Shipka). I know, gross -- but that is
pretty faithful to the book, and the movie does an ok job of
keeping the ick-factor to a respectable level. The older
children grower bolder and eventually find ways to sneak out
and devise a plan to escape, but not before a series of dire
circumstances force them to rethink their relationship with
their mother. .
While the premise is dark enough, the execution is
cartoonish and ham-fisted. The actors act around each other
like wooden robots, and all the emotion and humanity is just
so obvious. There is very little psychology in the this
once-psychological thriller, and what could have been a
deeply disturbing, haunting reboot of a classic turned into
Lifetime bludgeoning us over the head with the AWFULNESS of
it. We get it: its gross and weird and terrible Stop telling
us and SHOW US (also something I tell my students).The
characters are painted with such a broad brush that it
seemed like it was the first time any of the actors were
reading the script. I had to fight the urge to surf the
internet while I watched because there was very little that
was intriguing about this movie, except for Ellen Burstyn’s
wig.
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