“Confused” is a word that’s thrown around a lot in Lifetime’s new TV movie An Unexpected Love.
Kate is confused about her sudden attraction to a woman, Kate’s ex-husband is confused about whether this latent attraction to women is the root of their marital problems, Kate’s teenage daughter is confused about everything, and Mac’s friend (Margo Martindale) is concerned that Mac is falling for a “confused, straight mother of two.”
“Confused” is also the word that best describes An Unexpected Love – it can’t decide what it’s really about.
Is it a love story? Is it a movie about a divorced woman struggling to survive on her own after years of relying on her husband? Or a thirty-something woman discovering she’s bisexual or lesbian, with all the implications that go along with it? Is it about a mother coming out to her children and subsequently facing a custody battle? Or is it a story of a daughter finally standing up to her tyrannical mother?
Unfortunately, An Unexpected Love tries to be all of those things at once, and consequently isn’t very good at any of them.
The movie – which premiered on Lifetime on March 24, 2003 and was previously known as This Much I Know – tells the story of Kate Mayer (Leslie Hope), a newly-separated mother of two who gets a job at a small real estate office as a secretary, studies to become a real estate agent, and subsequently falls in love with her new boss, Mac (Wendy Crewson).
That’s the first hour. The second hour is a series of coming-out scenes: first, Kate comes out to her best friend (who reacts negatively), then her ex-husband (who threatens to take the kids away from her), then her teenage daughter (who reacts negatively), then finally, her mother (who refuses to see her again).
All of this when she’s only been “dating” Mac for a few days and doesn’t really have a clue about the future of their relationship.
Everyone in her life comes around by the end, of course – this is a TV movie – with lots of conversations about tolerance and loving someone whose gay even if you don’t understand it, and a lesson in how being gay in such a homophobic society means “you get to disappoint a lot of people.”
An Unexpected Love is consistent in many ways with The Truth About Jane (Lifetime) and A Girl Thing (Showtime), the other lesbian-themed TV movies written and directed by Lee Rose. All three of these films firmly communicate the essentialist position that homosexuality isn’t a choice, that the only choice is whether to act on those feelings.
Like teenage lesbian Jane’s mantra “I’m the person I was always meant to be” in The Truth About Jane, the refrain that people are “born gay” is echoed repeatedly in An Unexpected Love. And similar to Lauren in A Girl Thing, Kate discovers her attraction to women later in life and belongs to the “I love the person, not the gender” camp. But while both of those films were anchored firmly in one primary relationship (Jane’s with her mother in A Truth About Jane and Lauren’s with her therapist in A Girl Thing), there is no strong relationship at the heart of An Unexpected Love – just a lot of underdeveloped ones.
In fact, one of the major disappointments of An Unexpected Love is that the romantic relationship between Kate and Mac is not really developed, to the point of feeling a little unbelievable as such a profound catalyst in Kate’s life. Kate spends far more time talking about her relationship with Mac than actually being in it.
A lot of time is dedicated to the women’s burgeoning friendship in the beginning of the film, but scenes of their romantic relationship consist of one montage of them having sex one night, and then we see no further development of their relationship until a two-minute segment at the very end which is supposed to take place six months later.
Having Kate come out to everyone she knows the day after she hooks up with Mac also feels contrived and unrealistic, more like something a college student would do then a mother in her mid-thirties who makes her decisions as carefully as Kate does. And the “homophobic ex-husband threatening to sue for custody” storyline is so 1996.On the positive side, Rose is always very matter-of-fact in her treatment of the sexual aspect of lesbian relationships, which is nice to see on television. The acting if the movie is generally very good, and Mac’s clothes are great (even if she does appear to wear the same outfit for most of the film). There are also some thought-provoking lines thrown in that would have been interesting to explore, like Kate’s wry comment “Isn’t that one of the perks of being with a woman? You talk and talk and talk about everything until you go insane?” But since the line never goes anywhere, it almost would have been better to leave it out than to tease us with it.
It is interesting to see bisexuality explored on TV for a change (even if the word is never actually used), and Rose is one of the few writers who consistently tackles this issue. But again, the fact that there is no real resolution or even enough time to adequately explore the issue in the film just raises a lot of questions that get buried in the frenzy of storylines vying for the viewer’s attention.
The problem with this film isn’t that the ending is too neat – that’s to be expected in a TV love story – but that the middle is too messy.
Both The Truth About Jane and A Girl Thing received their share of criticism as well as praise when they premiered (especially A Girl Thing), but at least the lesbian storylines in those two films had an steady, unhurried rhythm and some emotional continuity – unlike the frenetic pace and squandered potential of An Unexpected Love.
It is laudable that Rose continues to write and direct television movies about lesbian and bisexual women, but disappointing that her latest film doesn’t quite live up to the expectations set by her previous ones. An Unexpected Love attempts to tell too many competing storylines that cannot possibly be adequately explored in such a limited time and just ends up leaving the viewer frustrated, confused, and ultimately unsatisfied.
