The Perfect Soulmate (2017) Reviews

• ***1/2

  edwagreen2017-07-04

  Two women with very frustrating lives bond together. The problem is that the poetry student is overbearing and a take charge type of person. She finds friendship and stalking to her poetess mentor whose husband is having an array of affairs and the guy soon takes two bullets courtesy of our young friend. The police begin to suspect the wife as she knew of his affairs and everyone is thrown for a loop when the private investigator she hired takes a couple of bullets as well. Her domineering gets the best of her as our poetry lady begins to suspect her of all the mayhem. In addition, our murderer had killed her father years before and made it look like the abusive dad had done himself in. She also allowed her abusive mother to die on the floor by refusing to help her when she fell. Plenty of insight here.

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• Christine Conradt didn't write this, and she's sorely missed

  mgconlan-12017-06-05

  I watched the evening's "feature," a Lifetime "premiere" movie called "The Perfect Soulmate" whose credits immediately warned me I was likely to be disappointed because both the producers (Pierre David and Tom Berry) and the directors (Curtis James Crawford and Anthony LeFresne) were frequent collaborators, including on previous "Perfect" projects, of Lifetime's greatest writer, Christine Conradt, but la Conradt herself was not involved this time. Instead the writer was someone named John Serge, and that was doubly disappointing: not only was Conradt not involved but a man was taking her place in scribing a tale about women's miseries and maltreatments both of men and each other. The "Perfect … " template as Conradt and others have been working it since Conradt sold her first Lifetime script, "The Perfect Nanny," in 2000, features an innocent heroine who thinks she's found the "perfect" husband/lover/co-worker/nanny/teacher/servant/in-law/whatever until horrible things happen to her and those around her and finally she realizes that "perfect" really means "psycho." "The Perfect Soulmate" suffers from the lack of the kind of dimension Conradt has brought to at least some of her villainesses; instead the title character, Lee Maxson (Cassandra Scerbo, who like most Lifetime villainesses is of medium height, dark-haired and affects a veneer of perkiness), is a pretty straightforward bad girl whose backstory is that she murdered her abusive father (we're never told whether dad merely beat her or sexually molested her as well), though the authorities ruled it suicide, and thought she'd be able to get out of the generic city where all this takes place to New York City to pursue a career in publishing. Instead she got trapped as the unwilling caregiver of her diabetic mother Marlene (Deborah Grover) and ended up in a lousy life in which she got to do nothing all day except work at a bookstore to make ends meet and go home to take care of mom — who asks her why she doesn't have a boyfriend and Lee fires right back that it's because caring for Marlene leaves her no time or energy to date. Lee takes care of Marlene when she goes into an attack and collapses on the kitchen floor near the refrigerator, and instead of getting mom something to eat Lee — in a scene suggesting that either she or John Serge has seen the 1941 film "The Little Foxes," in which Bette Davis dispatched her invalid husband by refusing to get him his heart medication — instead kicks her, walks out of the house and leaves her to die. The "perfect soulmate" Lee thinks she's found is Sarah Miles (Alex Paxton-Beesley), unhappy wife of construction-company owner Daniel Miles (Jeff Teravainen) — the more directors Crawford and LeFresne show us of his unclad chest in his opening scene, the more we're sure that like virtually all attractive guys in Lifetime movies, he's going to turn out to be a no-good rotter, and indeed he does. He spends virtually all his evenings away from home on so-called "business meetings" which are, of course, actually trysts with other women. Sarah finally gets up the courage to see a divorce lawyer, a woman who says she'll hire private investigators to tail Daniel and catch him cheating, only Daniel makes the P.I.'s tailing him on the first night and tells Sarah that she's got two choices — either abandon the divorce, or pursue it but at the cost of never seeing her daughter again. Then Daniel leaves for one of his evening trysts — and who should be waiting for him but Lee, who has "met" Sarah online through her poetry blog. It seems that when Sarah met Daniel she was an aspiring poet who had already brought out one book of verse with a local independent publisher, Will Lawrence (Scott Gibson) and convinced a number of people in the literary world that she was the next Sylvia Plath, even though what we hear of her poetry makes it sound like her true métier would be writing for greeting-card companies. "The Perfect Soulmate" is perhaps a bit too "perfect" in its plotting, its meticulous checking off of each Lifetime cliché, but what it really suffers from is the absence of Christine Conradt as writer. Surely she could have come up with a more complex and dramatically interesting villain — especially given the weird scene about an hour and a half in during which Sarah decides to come to Lee's place and make her dinner, drugging her dessert so she can put Lee under and search her house for the murder weapon. I was beginning to wonder if John Serge was planning a reversal in which Sarah would turn out to be involved with her husband's murder after all; she had hired Lee to do it with the promise of future payment from Daniel's estate and now wanted to eliminate her increasingly inconvenient co-conspirator. That underscores another problem with "The Perfect Soulmate": the leading characters are all pretty much unlikable. About the only person who comes off as sympathetic in this story is Jay (Asha Talbert), Lee's African-American co-worker at the bookstore, who at first thinks Lee and Sarah are Lesbian lovers and makes it clear she wants to see Lee get her ashes hauled, and whether it's by a man or a woman makes no difference to her!

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