(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
Betrayed By Love (don'tya just love these titles?) is a little morality Lifetime MOW pointing out for the umpteenth time that it just doesn't pay for a girl to be too aggressive sexually (she always gets treated as trash) and of course that men are no good, your standard Lifetime theme.
Mare Winningham and Patricia Arquette star. Winningham of course is excellent. She has charisma and she can act, and her blue collar, nonglamorous image goes well with the commercials. But Patricia Arquette (not to be confused with her sister, Rosanna, whom you may have seen in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)), is not bad. She plays an unbelievably sensuous poor white trash babe who knows how to surrender. (The sex in these Lifetime MOWs is a little less than explicit, but oh what they love to imply!) I saw her previously in Ethan Frome (1992), as Mattie Silver. She does the old "on her knees, her arms around his leg" number (so we can imagine what she'll be doing next) and lets him kick her around psychologically. "Based on actual events." What I love about that is you can just guess how far off they are from the reality of the real story. I could just see the personality of the woman played by Arquette, a sleazy, desperate bimbo; but of course Patricia Arquette is more like Marilyn Monroe, and you just know the real woman could never be one tenth as attractive; and the married FBI dude she seduces is in real life a sleazy loser himself of course, but in the movie he is a sophisticated handsome sort of guy.
