thoughts on Lifetime's Flowers in the Attic (spoilers)

So.  I read Flowers in the Attic when I was maybe thirteen, and I must have liked it, given that I read not only the entire series but also the Dawn series by V.C.Andrews, as well as a third V.C. Andrews series with a main character named Melody Logan.  I think around the time of the Melody Logan series, I started getting impatient and feeling like the series were all kind of the same, or had a lot of the same elements, anyway.  At any rate, I would imagine that I liked Flowers in the Attic because it had a page-turner-y, "are these kids ever going to get out of this attic?!" quality, as well as because, as a thirteen-year-old, I was mainly used to reading stuff like The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High; it probably seemed like a grown-up and somewhat naughty thing to be reading.  It was not until I went to grad school in my mid-twenties that I realized that a lot of women my age had read V.C. Andrews novels as young teens, and it became something my friends and I kind of bonded over.  "I can't believe I read that when I was thirteen," I think I've said in more than one conversation.  "That was so messed up."

It is with all of this in mind that I looked forward to Lifetime's adaptation of Flowers in the Attic starring Heather Graham as the mother, Ellen Burstyn as the grandmother, and Kiernan Shipka as Cathy.  For those unfamiliar, the plot is this: Cathy, who is maybe twelve or thirteen at the beginning of the story, has an older brother named Christopher, a younger brother named Cory, and a younger sister named Carrie.  Cory and Carrie are twins.  Their father is often away on business, and their mom (Corrine) is a housewife whose defining quality is being beautiful and who basically lives for the days that her husband returns home.  One day, he doesn't; he's killed in a car accident.  It turns out they're in a ton of debt and Corrine has never had a job, so she writes to the wealthy family that disowned her years ago (because she married her half-uncle, which I had forgotten until I watched this movie) and asks if they will take her family in.  They agree, but she can't tell her father right away that she has children, so she arranges with her mother to keep them in a room that leads to the attic; they are allowed to play in the attic, and this winds up being their refuge, because their grandma is claustrophobic and doesn't like to climb the narrow stairs. 

Anyway, at first the mother says that they will only be up there until she wins her father over, then until he dies (which will supposedly be soon); eventually, she gets married to someone she has never even told she has children, so it's fairly clear the kids are never, ever going to get out of the attic.  The grandmother is in charge of bringing them food; the mother comes around less and less frequently to give the kids presents and to lie to them that they're all going to be super rich someday.  The grandmother is scary and sometimes physically abusive.  An incestuous relationship develops between Christopher and Cathy.  The twins, deprived of fresh air and sunlight, don't grow as they should and become sickly; Cory eventually dies, at which point the other children, who have already been plotting their escape from the attic, realize that they all need to leave sooner rather than later.

Isn't that an awful, awful story?  My memories of the book were that it was both a page-turner and over-the-top, so I think I expected the movie to have a "naughty fun" quality to it; instead, all of this is played completely straight, so that you're just faced with how terrible all of these events are.  Also, perhaps because I already knew what was going to happen, I grew very impatient with all of this very early on; the early scenes depicting the family's pre-attic life are interesting, but once they go to live with Corrine's parents, I was just like, "All right, kids.  You're never getting out of this attic.  Start plotting your escape."  There are reasons they don't do this immediately-- they love their mother and at first believe what she tells them; they are scared of their grandmother; Chris and Cathy are worried about the younger kids-- but partly because I already knew how the plot unfolded, partly because Heather Graham does not act for one second like she gives a damn about those kids, and partly because pretty much everything that happens in that attic is Just Awful, I just wanted them to leave and be done with it.  Mostly, I wanted to not be watching it anymore, and I probably should have just turned it off.  When it ended, my main thought was, "That movie was terrible and the book probably was, too."

Kiernan Shipka was smart, determined, and sassy as Cathy.  Ellen Burstyn was sufficiently scary as the grandma.  I also enjoyed Cathy's closing voiceover as they escape, which basically boils down to, "We made our escape, but we WOULD see our mother again someday, and she WOULD feel shame for what she did for us."  I'm pretty sure the plot of the second or third Flowers book is Cathy returning all grown-up to seduce her mother's husband and otherwise ruin her mother's life, and I remember it being pretty awesome.  The movie as a whole, though, was not good or even particularly entertaining.