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Lifetime movie 'Fatal Honeymoon' takes on story of Gabe and Tina Watson (video) | al.com
(there is a video at this link. I have no clue what it is as it's blocked at work. FYI if you want to watch).
[h=1]Lifetime movie 'Fatal Honeymoon' takes on story of Gabe and Tina Watson (video)[/h] [h=5]Published: Tuesday, August 21, 2012, 6:00 AM Updated: Tuesday, August 21, 2012, 3:35 PM[/h]
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- The principals depicted in the upcoming Lifetime movie
“Fatal Honeymoon” — which is based on the story of Hoover’s Gabe and Tina Watson, whose 2003 honeymoon in Australia ended with Tina dying while scuba diving and Gabe a suspect in her death — aren’t saying much.
Dave Watson, Gabe’s father, says via email that he and his wife won’t watch the movie, and he doesn’t suspect Gabe or his wife, Kim, will watch it, either. Cindy Thomas, Tina’s mother, says via Facebook message that she won’t have any comment until after the movie airs on Saturday at 7 p.m.
But Billy Miller, the “Young and the Restless” star tapped to play Gabe in the movie,
is talking, about the movie’s cast (including Amber Clayton as Tina and Harvey Keitel as her father) and his character, one of the most difficult he has had to tackle.
“These people are still alive, and without contact with those people it’s pretty much left up largely to what the media has portrayed them as,” Miller says during a conference call. “It makes it a wee bit difficult, but at the end of the day, I think we did a pretty good job.”
Through flashbacks and scenes set in the present day, “Fatal Honeymoon” tracks the Watson story from when Gabe and Tina met in high school, their marriage, the honeymoon, Gabe Watson’s imprisonment in Australia on manslaughter charges, and his acquittal of murder this year in a Birmingham courtroom.
Miller says he had heard of the Watson case before the movie came up, and he jumped at the chance to work with Keitel and play such a “complicated” character.
“I was aware of it just like anyone else who pays attention to the national news,” he says. “It’s a heartbreaking story. I obviously looked further into it, as much as I could possibly gather, after I got the audition.”
That included poring over video of Watson.
“There’s quite a wealth of video both on American television and Australian broadcast,” Miller says. “I found that Australian broadcasts were pretty biased to what they considered to be Gabe’s guilt. I haven’t met a single person in Australia who didn’t think he was guilty.”
As for Miller? He won’t say.
“I feel the movie tends to lend to the fact that he did murder his wife, but it doesn’t outwardly say it,” Miller says. “As far as my opinion, I’ll keep that to myself.”
He says the only contact he knows of with the Watson and Thomas families was a letter his co-star, Clayton, sent to Cindy Thomas.
“This is based on a true story,” Miller says. “We weren’t trying to do a biopic here. As far as critique of performance or accuracy of events, Tina’s family, Gabe’s family, they’re all going to have a lot to say or think about it, if they choose to watch it, good and bad.
“We have a difficult, interesting and tragic story that I believe deserves to be witnessed.”
In the end, there’s only one person who knows what really happened, Miller says.
“If people are coming to watch this film for answers to what happened in real life that they didn’t get in the dismissal of the Birmingham trial, I don’t think there is a possible way to get answers for it,” the actor says. “We’re dealing with a story that has no real ending. No one’s ever going to know what happened in the water.”
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http://www.nydailynews.com/entertai...oon-article-1.1143658?localLinksEnabled=false
[h=1]TV Review: Lifetime’s ‘Fatal Honeymoon’[/h] [h=2]Billy Miller and Amber Clayton star in tale of a bride who dives into trouble, inspired by a true story[/h]
Comments (2) [h=3]NEW YORK DAILY NEWS[/h]
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertai...tal-honeymoon-article-1.1143658#ixzz24rZvu3zD
Men tend to be a miserable lot in Lifetime movies, most of them anyway, and it can make for tough viewing.
That’s especially true in a movie like “Fatal Honeymoon,” where we never know if a guy who comes off as a swaggering psychopath will ever face anything resembling justice.
Billy Miller plays Gabe Watson, an Alabama man who takes his bride Tina (Amber Clayton) on a dream honeymoon to Australia, where he wants to dive the Great Barrier Reef.
What we soon learn, however, is that it’s his dream, not hers. He loves diving. She doesn’t even like the water.
Tina isn’t the first bride to take a deep breath, in this case literally, and do what her man wants.
But most of the others don’t end up drowned on the ocean floor. Tina does, setting up the rest of the film, which follows her father’s relentless attempts to get Gabe prosecuted for murder.
Her father, Tommy, is played by Harvey Keitel, which takes a little getting used to. Keitel so often plays the intimidator or the bad guy that to see him play a man constrained by the rules of the system feels odd.
He plays the role well, however, as do the other actors. Clayton suppresses what we know should be all her legitimate worries while Miller makes Gabe thoroughly unlikable at best and often downright sinister.
Because the movie is based on a real-life case, the filmmakers have certain constraints on exactly how explicit their conclusions can be. They leave little doubt, however, that Tina married the wrong man, whether he killed her or not.
At best he’s a self-absorbed bully.
The real-life case, which made headlines several years ago, started with police thinking Tina’s death was a tragic diving accident.
Then they find Gabe has been telling lies about the sequence of events and his actions. Experts come forward to say that things could not have happened as Gabe described them.
It also turns out he encouraged her to wear too much weight for her size, which made it almost impossible for her to surface once she was underwater, and he discouraged her from taking a practice run even though this was her first open-ocean dive.
Underlying the whole story, Gabe and Tina’s father never got along. Tommy considered him slippery and evasive.
In the end, “Fatal Honeymoon” seems vaguely unsatisfying — not because of its conclusion, but because it feels like an extended dramatization that in the end tells us less than a straight news report or documentary could have done.
It also comes off as Tommy’s story, and while he’s the more sympathetic of the two men here by several light years, we could use a third party to say that instead of just taking the camera’s word for it.
Whatever the truth, Gabe should go into Hallmark’s Male Villains Hall of Fame on the first ballot.
