by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Lifetime offered a “world premiere” of something
called Open Marriage, a TV-movie from
our old friends at MarVista Entertainment, directed by Sam Irvin from a script
by Jason Byers and apparently shot under the working title To Have
and to Kill. I’d been determined to watch
this movie ever since I saw the promos, mainly because — unusually for a
Lifetime movie — it features two devastatingly hot guys, Tilky Jones and Jason
Tobias — and of course I spent the whole movie hoping that they’d dump their
female spouses and hook up with each other! The plot: Becca (Nikki Leigh) is a
doctor with a killer work schedule who wants a child and is getting worried
because her husband Ron (Tilky Jones) doesn’t seem capable of giving her one —
not that they’ve had sex in quite a while. Ron is a struggling builder trying
to put a contracting business together but he needs a big job to do that —
which he hopes he has when the city they’re in decides to build a community
center and he thinks he has a good chance at landing that contract. Becca has a
friend from her college days, Mindy (Kelly Dowdle), who’s married to a
1-percenter (though we’re never told just where his money comes from or what
he’s doing career-wise now) named Max (Jason Tobias), who’s pretty much the
same physical type as Ron — only Max has frizzier hair and Ron has an elaborate
tattoo covering most of his left arm, which is the main way you can tell them
apart. The film shows us a lot of
Ron and Max in bathing suits and nothing else (way to go!) for the straight
women and Gay men in the audience, while any straight men watching this get
enough glimpses of Becca and Mindy similarly attired in swimwear to get their
sort of charge. During one evening when the two couples are having an outdoor
get-together Max and Mindy announce that they’ve “opened” their marriage to
sexual experiences with other couples. Ron and Becca are reluctant at first,
but the mere thought of a
four-way with their good buddies turns them on enough they get it on for the
first time in months.
Dylan (Zach Cramblit), a queeny Gay man who works as a
nurse or paramedic or something for Becca at the hospital where she’s a doctor,
tells her that he and his husband have an open relationship themselves, though
he also warns her that it’s a bit easier when they’re both men (either because
they don’t have to worry about getting pregnant or on the Men Are
From Mars, Women Are From Venus idea that
men are more able than women to detach sex from emotion and have it just for
the sheer physical pleasure involved). Ron, Becca, Max and Mindy have their
first “open” encounter at Max’s home and set ground rules — they won’t do
anything unless all four are involved and they’ll use “protection” against both
pregnancy and STD’s. Their second open encounter occurs at a private sex club
called Caligula (which made me wonder if they specifically catered to people
who want to have sex with their siblings, the way the real Caligula did), which
you get invitations to through text messages on your smartphone that tell you
what the password is for that night. (No, it’s not “Swordfish.”) The two
couples are greeted at the door by an apparition who’s apparently the dungeon
mistress of Caligula, Vulnavia (Debra Wilson), a woman of ambiguous ethnicity
who’s dressed in a skin-tight leather outfit and looks more at home in the
sexual underground than anyone else in the film. The couples’ second encounter
with each other’s partners at Caligula is as hot as the first, but midway
through the proceedings Max and Becca slip away from one of the dungeon’s
private rooms to another, breaking the two couples’ ground rules because they
found the furniture in the first room uncomfortable. The seeds of jealousy
start to sprout as Ron, left alone one evening when Becca works a late shift
(she covered for her Gay friend Dylan so he and his husband could go to a Lady
Gaga concert) and Ron runs out of football games to watch, instead going to
Caligula alone, where he’s accosted by a woman named Angelique (Cassi Colvin)
who comes on to him; they kiss, but nothing more. We also see a mysterious
person in a white feathered mask who’s being attended to by two men, one on
either side of — well, we assume
it’s a she, though there are hints of both Gay and Lesbian goings-on at this
mostly hetero club. Still later it’s Becca who breaks the ground rules and goes
to Caligula on her own, and had screenwriter Byers stopped there he might have
had a very interesting movie about people who think they can handle the sexual underground, find they
really can’t, and suffer picturesquely along the way before reverting to
monogamy at the end.
One particularly interesting twist is that Ron isn’t
entirely infertile but he’s told by one of the doctors at Becca’s hospital that
he has only one-one hundredth of the chance of impregnating his wife as a
normal man. That leads to the tantalizing possibility that the entire “open
marriage” business was stage-managed by Becca as a way of having a child; since
her husband couldn’t give her one, she decided to go after Max and see if he could do the job (which could have led to an
intriguing sequel 20 years later, as the kid, now grown, learns that his
biological father is fabulously wealthy and goes after his money). Instead Open
Marriage takes a turn into typical Lifetime
melodramatics that significantly weaken it; the two couples find themselves
victimized by a no-good rotter who sends texts with photos of them at Caligula.
This costs Ron the city contract he was so desperate to get and leaves both
couples floundering in a sea of mutual jealousy and recrimination, and it turns
out the culprit is … Mindy, who it seems always had the hots for Ron (and maybe
a Lesbian itch for Becca as well), and who ends up literally holding a gun on
Ron to force him into one last orgy and, when Becca is unwilling to go along,
she fires the gun and Becca reaches for an odd antique clock with its own
pedestal and clubs Mindy over the head with it, killing her. The cops accept
Becca’s self-defense claim and a tag scene indicates that the child she’s
carrying is Ron’s after all — he made it in the 1/100th window. Open
Marriage offered plenty of titillation (or
dickillation) for this Gay viewer — even though the script didn’t give them
much to work with in the way of acting, when I can watch a movie with two
people as gorgeous as Tilky Jones (despite that silly name) and Jason Tobias
and see them mostly wearing nothing but the bare legal minimum, I’m going to
enjoy it on aesthetic grounds alone — but it could have been a titillating
joyride and a moral tale instead
of writing the “villain” character (Mindy was the woman in the feathered mask
at Caligula taking the damning photos she later sexted far and wide, costing
Ron his job) in and turning the resolution flat and ordinary.
