Lesson of a Lifetime (Movies for Women) 3 - It Was One of Us

It Was One of Us tells the story of five old college roommates at their 10 year reunion. When the ladies break into their old suite (which is nicer than anything I ever stayed in while at college), and catch up, they decide to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets. Of course the women all are very different – there’s the successful but lonely business woman, the college professor with commitment issues, the (slightly) overweight married mom/doctor who runs her practice from her home, the yoga/man obsessed stay-at-home mom, and the exotic party-girl who has just returned from overseas.
Their secrets are also varied. They include adultery, addiction, plagiarism, illegal selling of prescription drugs, and insider trading. These secrets are of course told in the strictest of confidence, so imagine the ladies’ surprise when they each get an anonymous letter demanding $20,000 within a week or their secrets will be revealed and their lives will be ruined. They reconvene to figure out how this could have happened, was their old dorm room bugged, and if so, who could be blackmailing them? “It was one of us!” one of them cries. But who? The rest of the movie is about the five former friends spying on each other in an effort to figure that out.
I won’t tell you the details about who did it and why, but I will say that it was indeed one of the five (not who you’d expect, which I liked) but it all turns out okay anyway. After watching nearly two hours of these women lie, go behind each other’s backs, and in one case, pull out a gun and threaten to shoot, the movie ends with a montage of the five of them hugging each other and smiling, while some sappy song about friendship plays in the background.
Hmm… I remember college, and I remember thinking I would maintain the friendships I formed there indefinitely. Now, fifteen years later, I talk to one person I met there on a semi-regular basis, and that’s it. She was never a roommate. My roommates changed every year, and they included an alcoholic with a stalker-type boyfriend, and a group of three girls who already knew each other while I was the odd-one-out. What I remember most about them was that they decorated our entire suite in beer signs. It was horrendous. Other roommates were friends, but due to things like geography, changed priorities, or some deep-rooted emotional issues (theirs, not mine), we fell out of touch.
So who am I to judge? But it seems to me that these women had it all wrong. Amid all the terrible secrets and the eventual bribery that followed, do you want to know the one act committed that was deemed unforgivable? The doctor/mom gained weight during her second pregnancy and never took it off! Every time she wanted a cookie or something that wasn’t a carrot stick, she received reprimands from her size two friends (she was probably a size 10 or 12 herself), and nobody seemed to care that she was a doctor with her own practice.
So what did I learn? It’s okay to lie, cheat, steal, or maybe even kill, but before I go to my next reunion I’d better make sure I’m not carrying any extra weight around. That said, I’d love to reconnect with some old-college friends, if I only had the time and energy to do so. I’d even be willing to be a stereotype if it meant I could have a movie type of life where I’d be part of a group of tight female friends. I’d be the tired working mom with aspirations of a writing career one.


Copyright 2007 by Laurel Osterkamp. All rights reserved.