Lesson of a Lifetime (Movies for Women) #2 - Fatal Lessons: The Good Teacher

Victoria Page is an aspiring authoress, who gets her material by assuming new identities, then swooping down on a happy family and destroying them through lies, manipulation, and poison. In Fatal Lessons: The Good Teacher, she gets a job as a middle school teacher, and worms her way into the family of one of her students by cozying up to the mother, Samantha Stevens. She starts to poison Samantha by slowly giving her homegrown lethal herbs, and that makes Samantha spacey and forgetful. Her husband starts to get pissed of at this, and her life and marriage come apart.
Meanwhile, Victoria records everything that happens into her manuscript, and positions herself to fill Samantha’s shoes as wife and mother after she successfully kills Samantha by giving some herbs that will make it look like she had a heart attack. After it’s all over, she’ll have a great family and a potential best-seller that she’ll never be able to publish because it will be proof of her guilt, so I’m unsure why she goes to so much trouble to execute her evil plan.
About half-way through the movie a sleazy looking guy who knows Victoria shows up and tries to blackmail her, because I guess she’s done this before to other families, and she just kills the husband and kids once she gets tired of them, then moves on. Yet she records EVERYTHING, and we know this because she refers to other “chapters” during her voice-overs, (like the good ski-instructor or the good accountant), but why she does this completely baffles me. Why write a manuscript that you know you’ll never be able to sell?
Also, I have to wonder how Victoria landed such a plum teaching job in the idyllic mountain town where the film takes place. And, assuming she faked her credentials, how she knows so much about teaching that she can successfully do her job. (I know – anyone can teach, right?)
I guess my lesson here is I’m Just Bitter. I actually am a teacher, and I’d like to think – a writer, and I have the sort happy family she aims to infiltrate, yet I’m not nearly as disciplined as Victoria (who was played Erika Elenaik). I don’t look nearly as good in a bathing suit, and my nails aren’t manicured like hers are, and I’m not one of those people who always seem composed and sure of themselves. I’m more like Patricia Kalember’s character, Samantha, who always wears cardigan sweaters, and whose hair is always a little messy, and who seems to find herself apologizing for things she didn’t necessarily do.
Oh well. It is of course Samantha who not only makes it out of the movie alive, but who saves herself and her family in the process, thus proving her innocence and her self-worth. In the end it’s Samantha’s husband who is apologizing, and Samantha’s a lot more forgiving than I would have been.
The moral? It’s okay to be bitter as long as you’re forgiving as well. But don’t be one without the other. Oh – and if an extremely attractive new friend starts offering you odd looking herbs, don’t take them.