Watched: 01/19/2025
Format: Amazon
Viewing: First
Director: Richard Gabai
After running through something like 10 Lacey Chabert movies during the holiday season, Amazon is now offering up additional Chabert content - which has not helped when I pondered "what if I drove everyone nuts by making 2025 the year I watch and discuss *every* Lacey Chabert movie?" Because, friends, she has 183 credits already, and is, like, 42. That's not 183 movies - she's voiced several cartoons (including Supergirl on Harley Quinn), and been on a few TV series. A glance at her IMDB suggests she's doing like 10-12 projects every year.
Anyway - I'm not going to cover all of that. But I'm also not going to not do it. Who else will be the chronicler of Lacey Chabert's career arc?
Imaginary Fried (2012) is about eight years after Mean Girls. It's a Lifetime movie, and part of the "someone close to me is trying to kill me" fantasy that characterized a lot of Lifetime's programming at one point. Lifetime is a weird bastion of noirish programming that gets overlooked, but if these movies were black and white and the characters spoke with Mid-Atlantic accents, we'd just shrug and include them in the category as maybe B's.
This movie is about a young woman, Emma (Lacey Chabert) who had an imaginary friend as a child who helped her deal with the death of her mother at the hands of her rage-aholic father (Sam Page). In the present, she's inherited her family's wealth and is married to a psychiatrist (Ethan Embry) who is carrying on an affair with his secretary and - I believe - drugging his wife so she is having hallucinations, with a drug she believes to be an anti-psychotic.
It's all a long-con to put his wife in an institution so he can carry on with his mistress while he drains her bank accounts.
Abruptly, Emma starts seeing a grown-up version of her childhood imaginary friend, a friend she finds comforting to her.
SPOILERS
The imaginary friend is an ex-patient/ lover of her husband. She comes clean (off-screen) and tells Emma everything, so they flip the script and Emma tells her husband she's killed Brittany, the hallucination, and buried her in the yard. The husband thinks she's really killed a person and flips out. Meanwhile, Emma starts slipping her husband the drugs.
It's pretty good hokey noir-thriller stuff on paper.
Lifetime is never afraid to at least suggest or allude to sex, so it's definitely present on the periphery as a motivator and something our characters engage in. And what's some blood splatter here and there?
Along the way, we get Ted McGinley playing a beat-cop, Paul Sorvino as Emma's attorney, and Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen!) as another psychiatrist.
What's funniest to me about the movie is that the suggestion from the editing is that the faux-hallucination of Brittany is a real human who still appears and disappears like a vision. Which means she's silently speed-tip-toeing out of rooms, hiding behind couches or something. She's not Batman.
I imagine in some version of this script before it wound up at Lifetime, it stated Emma and "Brittany" found romance. Instead, here, there's a lot of hand-holding and googy-eyes at each other in a couple of scenes, but Lifetime got spooked and just said "now they're BFF's!" at the film's end while the two link hands and gaze into each other's eyes.
There are lots of logistical problems with the movie that don't add up - like people suddenly changing their behavior toward the husband when he's trying to figure out what Emma did - like a landlord stating that the Brittany portrayer never lived there. How did they get him to play along? What happened with Emma's accounts at the bank?
There's also something that may be a mistake or is intentional never explained that the imaginary friend was named "Lily" as a child and "Brittany" as an adult, but maybe she was "Lily"? But she was also named Rachel... This thing needed clearing up.
And, I think the movie wanted to say Chabert's character killed her dad, but pulled back from confirming it. Cowardly deep-cable studio notes!
Thanks to my face-blindness problem, I also had a major issue telling the secretary from "Brittany" but was clear they were two different characters. But it does mean, I was unclear about what Brittany's relationship was to the husband and how many women he was juggling.
There was a cool little noir in here, and everyone is fine to good in their roles. No one is *playing* noir, which he really helps ground the thing in its way. But there were clearly script and/ or editing issues that were a disservice to what could have been a surprising little neo-noir mystery flick.
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