DEADLY ISOLATION: DTMWaGL #17
Our most sacred and hallowed institution, the San Francisco Gem Museum
Hello friends! Do you remember: the nineties? Did you watch The X-Files? Did you watch Twin Peaks? Did you have a crush on Alex Krycek or Audrey Horne, and would you like to have that muddled around by seeing them as a murderous jewel thief (more of a lateral move for Krycek) or a young widow with an extremely unflattering haircut? Boy, are you ever in luck, because the 2005 film DEADLY ISOLATION offers precisely that! Content warnings for violence and mentions of suicide and cancer.
Two men run through a Maine forest, pursued by cops and cop dogs. One of the men is Krycek! The other is not. They evade the cops by noisily splashing through some shallow water, but a subsequent news report informs us that these two men, the prime suspects in last June’s diamond heist at the San Francisco Gem Museum, can’t be expected to survive in the wilderness very long. I don’t know, they could probably just, leave the wilderness? I’m not really an ideas person though. And yes. The diamond heist at the San Francisco Gem Museum. I literally shrieked with glee upon hearing this sentence.
Ten months later, a guy drives his Buick into a closed campsite. While unloading groceries into a rundown cabin, he gets the bejesus startled out of him by Krycek, who for some reason is named Patrick in this movie? Also, according to his IMDb, this actor has been in like one million things, but I am sorry Nicholas Lea, you are Krycek. But fine. Fine! Patrick and his sidekick Kyle harangue this other man, Daniel, about where the STONES are, they have been hiding out in these woods for ten months, what the hell man! Daniel and I are startled that they’re alive at all, if they indeed have just been in the Maine woods for ten months, and explains that he laid low for the agreed-upon six months, and then he called their other heistmate, Ron, only to be told by his wife that Ron had died by suicide. Patrick and Kyle don’t believe him, because why would a man sitting on twelve million dollars worth of diamonds kill himself? Daniel declares that the wife must have the diamonds, he’s eliminated all the other possibilities, and it’s going to be tricky to get them because she lives on Branford Island and it’s a small town, but don’t worry, he has a plan.
Daniel tells Patrick and Kyle his plan while we watch Sherilyn Fenn, here named Susan Mandaway, take her big handsome dog Nelson on a walk, go shopping, run into her best friend Lisa, and then run into another friend, a cop named Kirby. Lisa desperately wants Susan and Kirby to bone. While this is happening, Daniel is going on about how she paints from 9 to 2 every day, has barely any friends, and never goes out. Daniel might be really bad at this? Regardless, the plan is put into motion when Susan is painting a seascape on her porch and looks out to see a sailboat with its mainsail flapping ineffectually and an unconscious, bleeding man leaning off the side, probably because he took a boom to the noggin. (I know sailing words.) Susan motors out on a dinghy and rescues this man, who obviously is Patrick. This is the plan! It’s good, right?
When Patrick wakes up on Susan’s couch later, he turns on the charm and explains that he was sailing up the coast to Canada from Connecticut, and it sure is beautiful here! He introduces himself as “Jeff Watkins” (oh come on, I am already calling you “Krycek” in my head, now you have another name, that is just greedy) and when Susan introduces herself he pretends to recognize her last name as the same one his art professor at Cal State had. But that’s Susan’s husband Ron! “Tall, good-looking?” asks Jeff/Patrick. That’s the one! The other art professors at Cal State were all real uggos, but not Ron Mandaway. Patrick asks if Ron is here, he’d love to say hi, but no, says Susan, he died. Oh, right. Then the doctor, an older woman named Janet, arrives to stitch Jeff up and tell him he has to rest for a couple days in case he has a concussion. He asks Susan if he can just stay at his boat, tied up at her dock, because that boat is his baby. He birthed that boat from his loins. Even though the doctor points out she barely knows this man, Susan agrees, because he knew Ron! It’s fine. Is that like, a bulletproof endorsement? I’m sure my husband knows lots of people I wouldn’t invite to stay on my property for a few days. Susan also asks Janet to set up a meeting with the medical examiner, because she still has some questions about Ron’s suicide.
While eating a home-cooked dinner, Susan and Jeff get to know each other. He says he’s from Highland Park, one of several interchangeable rich suburbs of Chicago. It’s the one with Ravinia? Yeah. He just sold his software company and now he’s puttering around on his boat. Putt putt. As for Susan, she and Ron came here on vacation and loved it so much they decided to stay. I guess Ron decided to quit teaching art and just paint or whatever, or maybe he was a lot older than Susan? Sherilyn Fenn is 40, here. Whatever. It’s fine. She has a lovely home. Patrick goes to sleep on his boat and calls Kyle to update him on the plan. When Daniel anxiously asks Kyle if everything is all right, Kyle drawls, “Well, Daniel, that depends on your perspective,” and shoots him. You really can’t trust your heistmates these days.
The next day is a rich, full day! Susan’s friend Lisa meets Jeff and immediately gets extremely horny for him, Susan and Jeff have a nice chat about Keats, and then Jeff teaches Susan how to play poker. They play for jellybeans. The jellybeans are, incredibly, a plot point. Susan wins, which is fine because Jeff doesn’t even like jellybeans, and then she invites Jeff to stay in one of the spare bedrooms instead of sleeping on his boat. Baby, it’s cold outside.
After a chaste and uneventful night, Kirby the cop shows up at Susan’s house to check up on this man staying at her house. Is there any chemistry between Kirby and Susan, you ask? Not really. But he is a human man and she is a human woman, so there’s…something there, maybe? Patrick, meanwhile, spots the cop car in the driveway and pulls his gun out of his suitcase, but before he can murder anyone Susan calls him down to meet her friend Kirby, isn’t he super? Kirby cops at him and asks him a bunch of questions because “we like Susan an awful lot around here,” which: it is my understanding that people who come from elsewhere to live in small New England towns are outsiders for the rest of their lives and their children’s lives, but Susan is the only person on the island who can tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue, and that will take you far. When Kirby gets back to the police station, he asks a deputy to check up on this “Jeff” “Watkins” “person.”
There’s an extremely stilted scene where Jeff and Susan take a walk and get to know each other some more, and they talk about jazz, and then they have a footrace and then Susan’s dog falls into the water, in a lock. Did Patrick throw the dog in the water? So that he could earn her trust by rescuing the dog? Is that what’s being implied, that in addition to being a jewel thief, he is some sort of dog tosser? Regardless, he rescues the dog. Nelson is a star!
That night, Susan and Jeff drink whiskey while she thanks him for saving her dog, because Ron really loved that dog. Hey, do you think I talk about my dead husband too much? It’s just, he was my husband, and he died, so. Oh, nah, Jeff thinks it’s fine, but he also wonders where all Ron’s paintings are. Susan explains they’re in his workshop, in an outbuilding that she just hasn’t had the energy to deal with. I bet that’s where the STONES are. Somehow this segues into a conversation about being in love, and then Jeff kisses Susan? This makes Susan happy, then sad. I don’t know, I mostly just feel bad for Sherilyn Fenn at this point. She’s doing a good job! Anyway, after they smooch, Jeff just goes to bed by himself.
Lisa and Susan shop for textiles in the morning, while Lisa hornily badgers Susan. “The guy saved your dog and you didn’t even sleep with him?” she asks. We have all seen the chart, one (1) dog saving = one (1) intercourse. Susan protests that they kissed and it was nice, and Lisa replies, “nice is good, but sex is better.” I like Lisa, who seems to have blown onto this island from a much more fun movie. Then Susan goes to meet with the medical examiner and asks him to run more tests on Ron’s blood, because she just doesn’t understand why he would have killed himself. Luckily, the medical examiner has literally nothing else to do because only like a thousand people live on this island and they don’t all die every day.
Patrick jimmies open the door to Ron’s workshop but all he finds is wheelbarrows and oars and et cetera. No diamonds! Not one single chest with a skull and crossbones on it, that when popped open gleams and glitters like the heart of the ocean. What a rip. He calls Kyle and tells him he’s been through half the house and hasn’t found anything and Kyle says, “half the house? Where the hell does she live, Yankee Stadium?” because this movie should be about Kyle and Lisa and the hijinks they get up to. Kyle will be meeting with the guy Daniel was going to fence the diamonds to (I also know crime words), and no, Daniel will not be going with him, “Daniel is finished going places.” Because he’s dead! He gives Patrick 48 hours to wrap this up.
Kirby’s deputy Hank has found some information on the Jeffs Watkinses of Chicagoland, and the closest match is a 32-year-old (lol) Caucasian male, but he died in a car crash six weeks ago. The plot! It thickens! It’s so good that the small town police are here to muddle along sort of solving a crime.
Kyle meets with the fence and says some stuff that sounds cool, like “Daniel decided to take the rest of his life off” and “the balance of power is always with me.” The fence isn’t that impressed with his whole deal but agrees to give him ten million dollars for the diamonds. If they can find them.
Patrick’s seduction of Susan is continuing apace, as they go to dinner at a nice white tablecloth restaurant. Susan says she’s going to start with the soup, and Jeff laughs like she just made a joke? It is truly puzzling. Ha ha! Soup! At the end of the meal, Jeff proposes that they crash the party that’s going on in a private dining room, and when Susan demurs, he pulls her up and makes her slow dance with him in the regular dining room? Next to other people’s tables? I cannot tell you how annoyed I would be if I went out for a nice dinner at Nando Milano or something and some dweebs decided to have a little moment while I’m trying to eat my arancini. Anyway, they go home, Susan goes to bed, Patrick takes a walk and has a minor confrontation with Kyle, who’s just here now I guess. But when he goes back inside, Susan is up, and he’s like, “I was taking a walk, to think,,,,, about,,,,,,,,,, you?” and it totally works and then they bone. You know, why not just bang every dude you rescue from a sailboat. This was before they had dating apps.
Jeff and Susan have dinner with Lisa and her husband, who seems very nice and writes botanical textbooks, which to me sounds great and to Lisa sounds like the most boring thing on the planet. Lisa mentions that an ex-friend of Susan’s, a guy named Cal, is selling his family house. Susan decides to pay this Cal fellow a visit while he’s in town, and berates him in a parking lot for abandoning her when Ron died. He explains that he hadn’t even talked to Ron for months before he died, because he had become a different person. The last time Cal saw him was when he ran into him in San Francisco. Susan clearly didn’t know he was in San Francisco. But we do! We know! He was robbing the gem museum! We don’t know how he met the other robbers, how he got from art professor to gem thief, or anything else really, but we know this one thing. This one thing.
Lisa and Susan go to an art gallery thing, and Lisa announces that art intimidates her. That is how I feel whenever I go to like, a show one of my friends is playing at, so I get it. Susan delivers her latest painting of boats and clouds to the gallerist and has a conversation with him that shudders the gears in her head closer to realizing that Ron wasn’t selling paintings at the end of his life, he was doing gem heists. Gem heist?
While the ladies are at the gallery, Patrick is rummaging through a very nice secretary desk when Kirby shows up again. He helps himself to some jellybeans from a nice cut-glass jar and tells Jeff that they know he isn’t who he says he is, so can he at least see some ID? Well, sure, but it’s on my boat, ope whoops Patrick very gently murders Kirby now. It seems really easy to murder someone with a sleeper hold in the movies. I wonder how easy it is actually, but it’s not really the kind of thing you can experiment with at home. Then Patrick bundles Kirby’s body into his cruiser and sends it crashing through a work zone. Accidental death: staged. Patrick is a true professional. Unfortunately, Susan and Lisa drive past the scene on the way home and see that Kirby has died.
At home, Susan is sad. The thing about Lifetime movies is that the protagonists only know like five people, because the cast has to be very small, so when one of the people they know dies in an accident, it hits them really hard! Poor Susan. When she goes to pour herself a drink, she notices that the jellybean jar is open. But only Kirby ate those jellybeans! See, I told you the jellybeans were a plot point. She asks Jeff if Kirby came there and he says, “yes, and I murdered him, and my name is Patrick.” No, he says no, and tries to comfort her, but she goes to bed. Alone. Then we get another shot of the jellybeans, just in case you needed to think about jellybeans some more. I don’t like jellybeans. I’m just putting that out there.
In the morning, Susan’s suspicions grow when she spots the top off the jellybeans again and Jeff grins at her that he just can’t get enough of the black ones. Just the black ones! Some guy in real life just died from eating a bag of black licorice every day for two weeks, you seen this, you heard about this? I’m just looking out for you, bud. She also spots some sand on the bottom of his boot that matches some sand at the accident scene, and there’s no other place that he could have picked up sand, on an island, and there’s nothing weird about him putting his boots on to come drink coffee in the morning, but yeah Susan knows something is up. She asks Jeff to go get her some aspirin in town and he sets off on foot. Susan goes through his suitcase, finds the gun, and takes it into the car with her. But Patrick is already in the car! Like some kind of wizard. She stammers that she’s just going to Lisa’s and Patrick gently says, “you’re such a bad liar, Susan,” and takes her keys, and then Kyle startles her into dropping the gun, and this ISOLATION is getting pretty DEADLY.
Kyle and Patrick stand in Susan’s parlor arguing about if they are going to kill Susan. “She lives, we die, and I sure as hell ain’t dying for no broad,” says Kyle. Do sketchy dudes say “broad” anymore? I feel like that has been fully reclaimed by cool brassy dames. Maybe it was different in 2005. Anyway, Susan is tied to her big brass bed, but not in a sexy way, when Patrick comes to check on her. He tells her that he’s one of the people who helped her husband steal diamonds from a museum, and he just needs those diamonds. Susan swears she doesn’t know anything about this, and asks Patrick if he wants to kill her. He doesn’t! The boning: that was real. “I came here to find what we took, and I found you,” he says. But then there is a knock at the door and Patrick tells Susan to get rid of whoever it is as fast as she can, and if anything goes wrong, he kills her. I don’t know, is diamond theft a capital offense these days? I know it was a lot of diamonds stolen from our most treasured and venerated cultural institution, the San Francisco Gem Museum, but these dudes could really stand to take it down a notch. So, Janet the doctor is at the door, to tell Susan that the medical examiner ran some blood tests and found that Ron was in the early stages of acute leukemia when he died. He just sped the process along. Then Janet leaves. Goodbye, Janet! You did a great job.
Patrick ties Susan to the bed again and again it’s not sexy. It’s actually very haphazard, because she saws through the rope in like five minutes flat. Rare misstep here from Patrick! Kyle and Patrick are tearing up the house when Patrick says, “this is stupid, he could have just buried them in a hole somewhere,” which I have been thinking the whole time. If I had a little sack of diamonds, I would put them in a tree in a city park or something. If someone finds them, well, the diamonds were never rightfully mine anyway. Susan hops off the roof and makes a break for it.
She ends up in a secret room in Ron’s old workshop, where his paintings are stored, which works great until Patrick looks at the building from the inside and then from the outside and realizes there’s a secret room behind a bookcase. It’s always behind the bookcase! Patrick tries to sweet talk her into opening the steel door, but Kyle, always the one to take swift and decisive action, points out that the secret room has no windows and they could just burn it down. Yes, Kyle, that wouldn’t attract any attention from the local police at all, you would definitely have a long leisurely afternoon sorting through human remains in a smoking ash heap to find a little bag of diamonds. Why not get a pizza delivered? Make a night of it. When Kyle starts pouring gas through an air vent, Susan decides she does not want to die in a fire and comes out. Patrick, who is still sweet on her, tells her he just wants the diamonds. Susan has finally figured out the whole plot and tells him that Ron sold the diamonds and now the money is going to be coming to her for the rest of her life. “Which is about ten seconds,” says Kyle, aiming a gun at her. And he HAS a POINT, I mean, Ron did not carry off the San Francisco Gem Museum diamond robbery on his own! He had accomplices! These guys here! That is not fair at ALL, especially since everyone else involved seems like a standard issue dirtbag, and he was a college professor, he is coming at this from a position of privilege and he sold them out! Anyway, Patrick shoots Kyle to keep him from shooting Susan, whom he loves or something, but Kyle simultaneously shoots him. Kyle seems to die immediately, but Patrick is still alive and holding his gun when Hank the deputy finally shows up. He yells at Patrick to drop the gun and literally adds, “I’m talking to you, mister!” Patrick, while very badly hurt, manages to aim at Hank enough that Susan decides the best thing to do is to shoot Patrick. He dies. A big day for everyone.
A month later, Susan delivers a voiceover directed to Ron, about how he knows she was just trying to take care of her but what he did was wrong. She’s going to sell the house and move off the island and she’s done trying to understand him. I am not done trying to understand him. A year from now I am going to sit bolt upright in bed and say, “so wait, how long had Ron been doing the robberies? Was he ever an art professor?” In five years, it’ll be, “did they buy the house with gem money? What does Susan do? Did she ever have a job, or does she just paint boats?” I’m sorry I’m like this, but you subscribed, so maybe I’m not sorry. Maybe you’re welcome. Okay! That’s it! Thanks for reading, it means a lot a lot a lot, share and subscribe if you want!