Expect terrible reviews and huge ratings when Lifetime unveils “The Client List” on July 19 at 9 p.m.
With an irresistible mix of down home wholesomeness and porno tease elements, this tale of a nice Texas wife and mother who becomes a massage parlor hooker in order to bail her family out of financial chaos is hard to beat as a TV guilty pleasure. (Millions of sophisticated people will watch this movie and then play dumb if you ask them about it.)
Lifetime sent me a “rough cut” of “The Client List” last week and it kept me happily appalled and amused by a story that could be viewed as an encapsulation of America’s hopelessly conflicted views of sex, “family values” and male-female relations. It is also a dandy summary of the way Lifetime can surround a lurid story with what the cable network believes are socially redeeming elements as well as marketing hooks (i.e. post-feminist sisterhood and the basic cluelessness of men).
Jennifer Love Hewitt stars as Samantha Horton, a former beauty queen married to a handsome construction worker (Teddy Sears). They are the proud parents of three adorable kids.
Sam’s mom Cassie (a very lively Cybill Shepherd) swoops in and out to deliver corny Texas maxims (“It’s hotter than a Marfa fur coat”) and to remind her daughter to put her family above all else.
As the story begins, the couple is reeling under the effects of America’s financial collapse — she’s lost her job as a physical therapist, he’s been sidelined from work by a back problem, and the bank is about to foreclose on their house (the Hortons fell for the same un-fixed rate mortgage, re-financing mania that caused the national real estate market to implode a few years ago).
Sam sees an ad for a health spa in a nearby town that is looking for massage therapists and races off to get a job that can save her family.
The Lifetime promotional material for the movie fudges the facts of their tawdry tale, noting in a PR release that “Samantha accepts an offer to work at a massage studio…not realizing that the other staff members are actually prostitutes who service a clientele of wealthy and powerful businessmen.”
Whoever wrote that release must not have watched the movie because Sam learns the terrible truth of the real business at the spa during her job interview and agrees to close her eyes and think of England for the sake of her husband and kids (“A MOTHER will do ANYTHING for her FAMILY,” as the poster art puts it).
The goofy fun in “The Client List” is in the way the filmmakers tease the viewer while hewing to basic cable standards — Sam’s encounters with her clients don’t contain any nudity but they are filled with hilarious visual obscuring devices of the sort that the Austin Powers movies have mocked.
The movie is so insanely determined to present Sam as a “good mother” that it includes a risible plot element in which she refuses to use some cocaine she has been given by a client — as an energy booster at work — only to slide it out of her purse a few hours later so that she can pull an all-nighter making an elaborate cake for one of her daughter’s school fundraising events.
It’s too bad executive producer Hewitt couldn’t have made “The Client List” as an R-rated theatrical release. With a little bit of extra massage parlor spice — and saltier language — this could have been a camp classic on the order of “Road House.”
