Have we run out of good murders, then? That is the question begged by the latest addition to the thriving true-crime genre beloved of every streaming platform. Love & Death is a seven-part dramatisation of the story of 1980s Texas suburban housewife Candy Montgomery, who killed her friend and neighbour Betty Gore with 41 blows from an axe. She claimed self-defence and was, controversially, acquitted of murder. This recounting of the tale comes less than a year after the miniseries Candy on the same subject from Disney+. The latter starred Jessica Biel in the eponymous role and Melanie Lynskey as Betty. This time round, Candy is played by Elizabeth Olsen, taking a break from her superhero duties in the Marvel movies and WandaVision to go as naturalistic as it is possible to go (although she eschews the tight perm Biel sported to emulate the real Montgomery’s uber-80s aesthetic). Lily Rabe plays Betty.
Love & Death has been created and written by David E Kelley, the impresario behind such glossy hits as LA Law and Ally McBeal and, more recently, Big Little Lies. This is both good and bad news. On the one hand, Kelley attracts good casts, knows how to tell a story and likes to concentrate on women. On the other, he is better at form than substance. He doesn’t dig much beneath a story and he is not as good at writing women as I suspect he thinks he is. Olsen is absolutely mesmerising in the part, but it is despite, rather than because of, canny writing.
The problem with the Candy Montgomery story – especially if you are telling it for the second time in less than 12 months – is that it is one you have to dig beneath. Love & Death (at least in the four episodes made available for review) does not offer us much we have not seen before, or even that we might have surmised after reading the barest summary of the case.
Those first four episodes are a lead up to the death by 41 allegedly defensive axe blows from Montgomery. As in 2022’s Candy, the good, comfortable, church-centred life led by the two women and their husbands is lengthily detailed. It is made clear how the smiling Methodist sameness of it all could easily drive anyone temperamentally unsuited to such constraints to generate some excitement for herself; sometimes too clear. The script is frequently guilty of delivering clunkers such as Candy’s explanation to her best friend Sherry (Krysten Ritter) for her dissatisfaction. “Men get to live in their jobs and go out,” she says. “We just stay home and that’s supposed to be enough!”
Failing to find enough of an outlet for all her urges and yearnings at the local creative writing class, Montgomery conceives a passion for just about the only man in their small town potentially available to her – Betty’s husband Allan (Jesse Plemons). He is unprepossessing but malleable, which is all Olsen’s Candy, who is a slightly more self-centred version than Biel’s, really needs. After much planning and overcoming of Allan’s initial resistance, they begin an affair, albeit the least torrid in human history. She is the first woman ever to french kiss him. But he does, she tells Sherry, “have the most perfectly shaped penis”. I have so many questions for the next Methodist I meet.
After that – well, not much happens for what feels like about eight hours, to be honest. The affair goes on for ages, they get a new pastor no one likes, Betty continues to be intermittently depressed, and the viewer begins to long guiltily for the axe to make a showing and liven the thing up. Which it does, eventually.
What Love & Death doesn’t do is give any clue about how this woman came to kill – let alone in the ultraviolent way she did. We know plenty of men kill, especially over affairs and sex. But what made Montgomery one of the rare women who did? And if frustration with small-town life alone was enough to provoke the frenzied attack on Betty, why isn’t America filled with Lizzie Bordens from sea to shining sea?
Neither last year’s miniseries nor this one (so far) has proffered anything like a convincing theory. It may be, of course, that there isn’t one. But in that case, it isn’t worth trying to make a story or any kind of art out of it. It doesn’t teach us anything. It doesn’t expand our understanding of anyone. It makes us voyeurs without a redemptive aspect. And it makes Betty – especially here, where she is notably underwritten – no more than a plot point. Some stories should perhaps be left in peace.
Love & Death is on ITVX in the UK now and on Binge in Australia.
