A little bit of lesbianism would’ve gone a long way in Betrayed: A Story of Three Women (1995), its heartache perhaps averted if only Swoosie Kurtz and Meredith Baxter had found love with each other, and not unreliable men, back in college. Our cad here, the dashing Rob (John Terry, whose other woman was a man in Change of Heart), belongs to Amanda Nelson (Baxter), who is best friends with Joan Bixler (Kurtz). And if you think the widowed Joan is upset when daughter Dana (Clare Carey of Coach) drops out of law school, just wait until she catches her in a compromising position with Rob.
“You’re referring to yourself and Rob as ‘we’? You two are a ‘we’ now? Oh, I think you had better rethink that little pronoun,” she rants to her daughter, who took afternoon naps in the Nelsons’ marital bed as a tyke. “‘We’ is in your imagination. ‘We’ is not even a possibility.” Before leaving in disgust, she hands her an old family photo, showing an adult Rob beside Dana, then a child. “It’s almost incest,” Amanda says of the affair, a sentiment neither viewers nor Joan disagree with, but it wouldn’t be a betrayal without blow-ups and breakdowns and even a good face-slapping (administered by Amanda to Joan in a grocery store parking lot) along the way.
“I think we’re both angry at the same people,” Joan tells Amanda in their most dramatic showdown, and she’s absolutely correct. Their feelings are shared by the Nelsons’ almost-grown sons, Paul (John Livingston) and Eric (Breckin Meyer), who aren’t torn between their parents—they unreservedly support their mother. Even Rob is angry at himself, crying and shaking in the middle of the night before coming clean to Amanda. When he and Dana are kicked out of their respective homes for their transgressions, he is rendered impotent. “Couldn’t you have just gotten a sports car and a few speeding tickets?” his disappointed boss asks after his messy personal life intrudes at work.
While Kurtz plays a wider range of emotions—Joan is angry, blunt, and finally understanding—Baxter is handed sharper feelings. In her best scene, Amanda gazes at Paul’s environmental research project and deflects his questions about whether she’s OK (she’s visibly not) with the sort of dialogue Baxter mastered in the ’80s as America’s mom on Family Ties. “I can tell my age in maps,” she says. “I’m looking for countries that don’t exist anymore. I guess we just rename the bits and pieces and go on. Because boundaries shift, you know, and you don’t know where you are. Maybe the world should be drawn in pencil so there’s less mess when you lose a country.” She pauses, not changing her tone: “Your father’s moved out.”
Betrayed was directed with a light touch by William A. Graham (Death of a Cheerleader), but it’s James Duff’s screenplay that sets it apart from countless films with similar subjects. He doesn’t overload the plot with suspense or warring factions, and he isn’t particularly concerned with whether the Nelsons reunite. The only relationship that matters to Betrayed is the one between Joan and Amanda. Duff, who cut his teeth on TV movies like this and the gay classic Doing Time on Maple Drive, went on to create The Closer and Major Crimes, popular series that put wry, warm women like Joan front and center. I would trade 10 humorless TV dramas for one by a writer like Duff.
Terry, Baxter and Kurtz lend Betrayed: A Story of Three Women a bit more class than is typically found in cheating husband fare, and I’d be remiss not to note that Kurtz—or, more specifically, her wonderful performance in The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom—emblazoned itself not only on my heart but on this blog, where it inspired the “Wig Fur” tag that’s applied to reviews of movies featuring notable wigs. She gets most of the laughs in Betrayed as well, but Baxter, who had come a long way from The Cat Creature, is in on its darkest joke. As Amanda prepares to enter Rob’s office, son Eric asks “You don’t have a gun or anything weird like that on you, do you?”, a nod to Baxter’s memorable turn as Betty Broderick in 1992’s A Woman Scorned.
Streaming and DVD availability
Betrayed: A Story of Three Women is available on DVD and can be found on YouTube.
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… But wait, there’s more!
The opening credits manage to misspell the names of both Swoosie Kurtz and Breckin Meyer, two glaring mistakes I’m surprised weren’t ever corrected.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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