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. 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. 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.")
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. "Open Marriage" could have been a titillating joyride and a moral tale instead of writing the "villain" character in and turning the resolution flat and ordinary.
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. "Open Marriage" could have been a titillating joyride and a moral tale instead of writing the "villain" character in and turning the resolution flat and ordinary.