Love & Death Review: A Psychological Portrait As One-Dimensional As a Headline

The series seems content to recreate the events of the case rather than explore them in any deeper psychological or thematic fashion.

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Love & Death
Photo: HBO

There are few phrases better suited to move newspapers or draw clicks than “axe murder,” especially when the grisly ordeal goes down in a sleepy, suburban town. Written by David E. Kelley and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, the seven-episode limited series Love & Death revisits one such story from 1980, but it fails to dig very deep behind the headlines.

The series effectively conjures the suburban setting of Wylie, Texas, capturing the transitional period between the ’70s and ’80s with a raucous soundtrack of disco hits and rock anthems. The story proper begins in 1978, with Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen) living the life that every American is conditioned to dream about: She has a starring role in the local church choir, a charming home, a couple of kids, and a front lawn kept in immaculate condition by her doting husband, Pat (Patrick Fugit). And yet, she still finds herself wanting something more.

Adapted from John Bloom and Jim Atkinson’s 1984 book Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs, Love & Death sees Olsen playing a sweet-as-apple-pie suburban homemaker a la her character in WandaVision, this time with a smoky Southern drawl. She speaks warmly but doesn’t beat around the bush, bustling cheerfully between household chores and community events. Whether she’s arranging the next church picnic or planning an extramarital affair, she does it all with the same cheerful brusqueness.

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The affair in question involves fellow choir member Alan Gore (Jesse Plemons), whose initial reservations about straying from his marriage are quickly overpowered by Candy’s forthrightness. His own wife, Betty (Lily Rabe), has spent the last few years in a cycle of miserable pregnancies and post-partum depression, and he’s desperate for an escape. Candy and Alan begin meeting regularly at a cheap motel, enjoying the packed lunches that she prepares for them before having sex and showering together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z778sJGKB3E

Throughout Love & Death, Olsen and Plemons make a compelling pair, her effervescent energy contrasting nicely with his docile charm. Alan seems like a man who processes everything half a step too slowly to get a handle on a world that’s rushing past him. Candy, on the other hand, is often shown behind the wheel of her car, driving purposefully toward her next objective.

Sadly, Love & Death itself doesn’t move with the same sense of purpose. The early episodes meander through each stage of Candy and Alan’s relationship at a pace that quickly becomes tedious. Each decision they make seems to require several separate conversations in which the same points are repeated over again, dragging out each story development without providing any further insight into either character. Even when the series turns into a full-blown courtroom drama with life-or-death stakes, the pacing remains frustratingly sluggish.

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In an attempt to generate some sense of intrigue, Love & Death opens with flashing images of a bloody crime scene before pulling back two years to recount the story from its beginning. When we finally get to the murder, the act itself isn’t shown so that the full incident can be revealed via flashback during the courtroom scene. The problem is that there’s really nothing to reveal; even if you haven’t perused the Wikipedia page about the crime before watching, the initial episode shows us exactly what happened immediately before and after the killing, who the killer is, and roughly how the crime played out. Later, the flashback merely fills in the blanks we already sussed out, making you wonder why they bothered to withhold the details in the first place.

The only mystery that remains is why it happened at all. And that question seems to be the real purpose of the series, an attempt to peel back the layers of its pristinely arranged suburbia to reveal the dark elements festering beneath. After all, that’s what makes stories like Candy’s so compelling in the first place: How could a place that seems like a picture-perfect vision of wholesome family life ever play host to such a gruesome crime?

Unfortunately, Love and Death doesn’t have much to offer on that topic either. The later episodes dramatically reveal a traumatic episode from the killer’s childhood that the series offers up as the key to unlocking the motivations for the murder, but it’s a pretty one-dimensional psychological portrait of someone who butchered their neighbor with an axe.

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To her credit, Olsen works hard to imbue her character with more nuance as the strain of events begins to grind Candy down. But the series itself seems content simply to recreate the events of her case rather than explore them in any deeper psychological or thematic fashion. After seven hours, we end up with no more insight into what happened on that fateful day in Wylie, Texas than if we had just stuck to the Wikipedia page.

Score: 
 Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Jesse Plemons, Lily Rabe, Patrick Fugit, Tom Pelphrey, Elizabeth Marvel, Keir Gilchrist, Krysten Ritter, Beth Broderick, Brian d’Arcy James  Network: HBO Max

Ross McIndoe

Ross McIndoe is a Glasgow-based freelancer who writes about movies and TV for The Quietus, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Wisecrack, and others.

1 Comment

  1. Is this the same story that Jessica Biel and Melanie Lynsky did a few months ago? It was called “Candy” I think.

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