For a while Above Suspicion, a little known 2019 movie featuring Emilia Clarke that wasn’t released in America until 2021 was in the top 10 on Netflix views. The movie had actually been filmed in 2016. And anyone tuning it can see why it took so many years to get released and why it just made a worldwide gross of over $25,000.
It’s your basic Lifetime thriller with a lot of profanity and graphic violence thrown in to make it seem like it’s a gritty movie. But it’s nothing more than a generic poverty porn exploitation. If anything else, it’s an answer to whatever happened to Thora Birch, who plays a hairdresser with one funky-bad wig whose name is none other than Jolene. There might have actually been a Jolene in this “Based on a true story” movie, but it’s just one of the many tropes the movie has.
Considering the director, Phillip Noyce, once helmed some great movies like Dead Calm, Rabbit Proof Fence, The Quiet American and two of the Jack Ryan thrillers Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger (both featuring Birch), this is a huge fall from grace for the director. He throws in every cliche and trope about Appalachia that you feel you should play Bingo cards. There’s spousal abuse, so many drug abuse scenes, barfights where skanky women beat up each other in honky-tonk bars and just about every character in the movie is a Deliverance stereotype.
The movie is based on a true case in which a hotshot rookie FBI agent Mark Putnam (Jack Huston) looking to be assigned to the bigger cities finds himself in BFE Kentucky. Susan Smith (Clarke) is living in a run-down trailer with Cash (Johnny Knoxville) who is lazy and worthless. They’re on the border with West Virginia so they’re able to get two welfare checks from the government through a fraud scheme that’s never explained. One check is from Kentucky, the other is from West Virginia. The town used to have a mill or mine before it closed leaving the residents desparate on the government for assistance.
It’s typical of Appalachia where people don’t have money or the resources to do anything else. Or maybe they just don’t have the desire to do anything else. More or less, Susan works out a way to be a confidential informant for the FBI so she can get some money. At the same time, she begins to have an affair with Putnam, whose wife, Kathy (Sophie), welcomes Susan temporarily when she needs a place to stay.
Eventually, things go sour as Putnam’s career takes off as Susan’s testimony gets him a promotion to the bigger cities. But Susan is left with nothing to do but watch the man she think she loves leave as she’s left to be ridiculed, harassed, threatened and assaulted by the same people she’s known her whole life. In the end, Putnam kills Susan and dumps her body out in the wilderness when he discovers she’s pregnant. He would later be convicted of her murder but only serve 10 years of a 16-year sentence.
There’s a better story here. There’s a story about how Putnam was given a slap on the wrist as he knowingly had an affair with Susan and killed her when he got her pregnant. Would they have offered the same sentence with leniency to someone like Cash or another person in Appalachia? Also, Putnam was having the affair with Susan while working as an FBI agent. Doesn’t that account for anything?
Not at all. Why? Because the FBI and the government saw Susan and people like her as nothing more than hillbilly garbage. Susan says the government gave her money to relocate and she spent it on drugs. When Putnam also gives her some money, she foolishesly buys a Mustang and gives the rest to Cash who beats her. No cops are called even though the ambulance is.
I grew up in Appalachia and while towns and communities are like these, there is more seedy underbellies than what people know of. Most of the the bad people have the most money or come from affluent neighborhoods. The dudebro jocks are daterapists and many people frequent salons like the one Jolene operates to make themselves look less like the skank-ho fishdogs they are.
Thankfully, now, people are pushing back against these movies. And the reaction to Hillbilly Elegy in 2020 shows that enough is enough. Maybe one day, another filmmaker will do the Smith/Putnam story better. But this movie is just as you would suspect it is.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 