Watcing the third installment of Lifetime's complete adaptation of V. C. Andrews' (and Andrew Neiderman's) Casteel family saga, "Fallen Hearts," is like watching a car crash: you're at once sickened by the situation and revolted at yourself for being gripped by it and unable to turn yourself away. As the writers pile on insanely melodramatic situation on top of insanely melodramatic situation, the actors mostly seem to forget everything they've ever learned about acting: one can almost sense them thinking, "Get my line out ... hit my mark ... turn to the person I'm supposed to be talking to ... get my line out and hit my mark again." "Fallen Hearts" has one genuinely good performance: Jessica Clement as Fanny Casteel, alone among the people in this movie, has found a way to reconcile the aspects of a V. C. Andrews character: her sexuality, her sleaziness, her greed and the traumas she's lived with all her life that have made her that way and shaped her evil. Other than that, the acting in this movie is at a strictly professional level, not downright bad but not particularly good either.
I've long had a theory that actor-directors seem to have a unique gift in getting understated performances out of their casts - even actor-directors who as actors were unmitigated hams, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles. Among modern-day (albeit getting on in years) actor-directors I've especially liked Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford for not only selecting compelling stories to film for their movies in which they direct but don't act (and sometimes, like Redford's "The Horse Whisperer," in which they direct and do act) but for getting their actors to play in subtle and understated ways. Alas, either Jason Priestley doesn't have the chops in terms of working with fellow actors Eastwood and Redford do or - as I suspect - he realized early on in this project that a V. C. Andrews/Andrew Neiderman story requires a certain amount of scenery-chewing and that trying to get understated performances from his cast would have only made the movie seem even sillier.
No doubt there's still an audience for this sort of Southern-fried Gothic melodrama - Lifetime's first forays into Andrewsiana, "Flowers in the Attic" (based on Andrews' 1979 debut novel) and the sequel "Petals in the Wind" were huge ratings winners for them - but I've found myself alternately infuriated by the movies in the Casteel sequence and drawn to them in a sick fascination, wondering just how low these storytellers can go and how many plot contrivances they can stick on top of each other until Verdi's notoriously nonsensical opera "Il Trovatore" looks like cinema verité by comparison.
