A common complaint I hear from my wife is, “Why don’t you ever write about movies I like?” Our tastes in film do not have a lot of crossover, so I have rarely written about any movie she has seen or even wanted to see. And since I’ve started primarily writing about older films from my personal collection, this has gotten even worse. A couple weeks ago, after I posted my Letterboxd entries about all nine Saw movies (I’ll post a ranking later this month), she asked me again to write about something she likes. When I asked what I should watch, she didn’t have an answer. With no recommendation, I decided to check out her DVD collection and start a monthly series about it.
I’ve been making fun of my wife’s DVD collection for years. As someone who takes his movie collection far too seriously, her haphazard collection of movies features some headscratchers. She has three copies of The Blind Side, a copy of Saw IV (so she should have loved my recent Saw-fest), Gothika, and plenty of random crap she didn’t even know she owned (like the movie the I watched for this, for instance). Over the years, I have bought a few movies for her that range from movies that we have a personal connection with, like Snakes on a Plane (the movie I took her to on our first date, which put our relationship on hold for a few years), but mostly I have bought her copies of movies she loved from her childhood. So after this first tongue-in-cheek article, you can expect more popular nostalgia picks from the ‘90s.
But for this first week, I had to go with the title that spoke the most to me: The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story. My wife had no idea she owned this. As you can tell from the picture, this was picked up at a video store sale, and I hope it was part of some kind of “Get five movies for $10” promotion or something. If she paid $7.99 for this made-for-TV movie, she got ripped off.
Too Soon, Too Soon
Aside from the joke of picking this movie for the title, I thought a made-for-TV true crime movie starring Dean Cain would be something that wouldn’t take up too much of my time. Just breeze through it and ramble on about it for about five hundred words. And that was the case until I reached the end of the movie.
I know nothing about Scott and Laci Peterson (in fact, multiple times while prepping for this article I tried to Google “Drew Peterson” instead of “Scott” because I didn’t even remember the first names of this case). It’s just one of those inexplicably popular cases that I completely ignored back when it actually went down. I knew people were fired up about it, and since Scott is currently in prison, I just assumed he was clearly guilty. The end.
So as I was watching this completely fine TV movie, the only thing that I could think to comment on was Dean Cain’s performance. He comes across as an unfeeling, untrustworthy weirdo. It’s perfect casting because the main thing about this case is Scott’s reaction to the situation and the revelation that he had been cheating on Laci. But according to IMDb trivia, Cain claimed he had been performing the role as if Scott was innocent, because the movie had been made before the trial ended (much more on that in a bit). If that’s true, then Cain failed terribly and his natural mediocre talent inadvertently led to a great performance. I find that hilarious, and aside from Roy from The Office (David Denman) appearing in this as the world’s most loyal friend, nothing about this movie stuck out to me. Until the end.
The movie ends with Scott being arrested. The imagery of that along with Cain’s performance and the film’s focus on all of his odd and/or dirtbag behavior made it very clear that he was guilty. You can’t fault the filmmakers, though, because he had been declared guilty by the public at this point, and the film was just giving the people what they want. Because let’s be honest about the intended audience for this film; this was meant for those rabid people holding signs outside the courthouse. And my wife…and eventually me.
I was willing to let it go at that, but then I ended up in a YouTube rabbit hole that ended with me thinking Scott might be innocent. But the dude is a proven liar. I only question his innocence based on physical evidence. Anyone who claims he's innocent because they know him and "he couldn't have done this" is forgetting that this is the guy who was still telling his girlfriend that he was in Paris while he was dealing with his missing wife. Anyone capable of lying like that can lie about anything. You can do your own research, but based on the evidence presented in the shows I watched, this dude was not proven to be guilty. He was proven to be a piece of shit, sure, but that’s not illegal. In the material I watched, the defense of Scott Peterson is pretty much that it was decided that he was guilty because he was so unlikable in the media’s eye. And a few of the investigator’s found his behavior so odd that they simply knew he was guilty even without any strong forensic evidence.
The existence of this TV movie is evidence that the general thought was guilty. But the movie doesn’t show Scott killing Laci or anything like that. It just shows all the circumstantial evidence mounting against him (the bodies being found in the bay he was fishing in that day, the motive created by his affair in which he told a girlfriend that his wife was dead, his general aloofness throughout, etc.) as everyone starts to suspect him. So with this coming out during the trial it was just added to the pile of the public assumption of guilt.
While the goal of The Perfect Husband was not to inspire the audience to look into the case on their own, that was the effect it had on me, and in that way the movie surprised me. One thing that didn’t surprise me is the subtitle of the film: The Laci Peterson Story. That is just a lie. Just like most of the stuff I watched online about the trial, someone always feels the need to tack on something at the end about how all this is really about the tragedy of Laci and her unborn son’s deaths. But if they were the focus, they wouldn’t be tacked on as an afterthought. And that’s a big problem in the true crime genre in general: we all get so invested in these trials that it’s easy to forget the victims. And I’m guilty of it, too, only bringing it up at the end of this article, but I’m just sticking to the formula of the genre.
Despite the sad subject matter, my first pick from my wife’s DVD collection was a success. It still doesn’t make this DVD worth $7.99, but I certainly got more out of it than I expected. But next time I’ll definitely pick something a bit more light-hearted.
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