David E. Kelley Offers Love And Death - And So Much More

 

As we come closer to the time for Emmy nominations it was always likely I was going to end up watching Love and Death. With the Limited Series category wide open due The White Lotus being submitted in the Best Drama category, there were many contenders I knew I would have to get caught up on. I’d have to finish The Patient, get started on Daisy Jones & The Six and finally get around to watching Dahmer. The fact that Love and Death had dropped on HBO Max (soon to drop the HBO) Thursday just meant that it was there.

My lack of eagerness was in part due because the story being told was one that I had, in fact, been told in a limited series just last year. Hulu’s Candy, with Jessica Biel in the title role, had been one of many limited series that had received early Emmy buzz from the streaming service. Dopesick and The Dropout were the ones I ended up following, I refused to watch Pam and Tommy and I’ve only recently starting to look at Under the Banner in Heaven.  Indeed Elizabeth Olsen who plays Montgomery here learned about Biel’s adaptation two months before Love and Death started told her that HBO Max was planning its own adaptation. Biel thanked her and continued to make her version.

Perhaps my eagerness to see this series might have increased had I known that it was the handiwork of David E. Kelley. Kelley since the debut of Big Little Lies has become the master craftsman when it comes to female-centered limited series. Perhaps the only shock is that Nicole Kidman is merely  the producer and not the lead. That choice, as you shall see, was a brilliant one because when it comes to the character of Candy Montgomery, Kidman would have been the wrong choice.

Elizabeth Olsen has been a sensation for her work as Wanda Maximoff in the MCU, and as a result has rarely been able to work in other features in the last decade. This has been a disappointment because since she burst onto the scene in the masterpiece independent film Martha Marcy May Marlene she has constantly been demonstrating what a brilliant subtle actress she can be particularly when it comes to damaged characters. Perhaps that is why she was cast as the Scarlet Witch, who from the moment we meet her  has spent her entire life being damaged and manipulated by the world to the point that she finds happiness in the arms of Vision.

In part that may very well been the reason Wandavision was so riveting. Throughout the series Olsen demonstrated a character so utterly incapable of dealing with her emotional trauma that she was literally willing to destroy the world around her so that she could live in a fantasy no matter how much collateral damage there was. That in most of the ‘episodes’ she was playing a housewife and mother living a happy existence may have been part of the reason Kelley chose her to play Candy Montgomery; in the world of Love and Death, Candy is unsatisfied with the life she wants to live and needs to find a way to break out of the mold.

As the series begins in the small town of Kyle, Texas in 1977, Candy is married to the sweet but dull Pat (Patrick Fugit finally gets his first role in nearly two decades to demonstrate his range.) She has two children, she sings in the church choir, she is beloved member of the community – the perfect mirror of the 1970s comedies that Wanda lived in.

But Wanda clearly wants more. Her major outlet in the first couple of episodes is being part of a creative writing class, one that her husband does not appreciate. Then while playing in the church volleyball league she runs into Allan Gore and is struck by something.

Allan is the husband of one of her closest friends, Betty (Lily Rabe). Betty is something of a control freak, who is trying to become pregnant the first time we see her and directs sex like traffic. Allan is understandably frustrated by his wife who has been going through post-partum depression “since before the baby came.” Jesse Plemons, who has been playing doughy faced innocents since Friday Night Lights, seems to be playing an adult version of Landry, though it is hard to tell just how much of depth he has (we all know there can be more beneath the surface of them in shows such as Breaking Bad and Fargo.) Nevertheless, he is understandably surprised when Candy knocks on the window of his car, gets in and says: “Would you be interested in having an affair?”

Eventually Allan calls her for lunch and talks about the state of his marriage and genuinely tells her that he wants to think it over. We expect the series to cut immediately to fierce pounding in a motel room, but Kelley’s subverts our expectations. Rather we see both Allan and Candy weighing out the pros and cons (Candy on colored indexed cards, Allan on notepads) and they seem to go through weeks if not months of strategizing before they come up with a set of rules. All of this is frankly hysterical, particularly in the final ‘strategy session’ when Candy writes down the ‘dos’ and don’ts.’ Allan nods alone and makes sure that “Don’t fall in love’ gets moved to number one.

Finally they decide to meet for their first rendezvous. Even then, Kelley subverts our expectations. Candy shaves her legs, makes lunch which she puts in a picnic basket, drives down to a motel, neatens it, sets out the lunch and then Allan shows up. They have a sweet meal together and finally the two of them kiss – and Candy is kind of surprised that Allan has never French kissed before. The sex scene happens and then Candy goes into the shower. (There’s more than that before the first episode ends but I’ll save that for later, even though its not exactly a spoiler.

It says something as to how remarkable I found the first episode that I came as close to breaking my rule of binge watching. Rather than wait my self-prescribed week, I watched the next episode roughly forty-eight hours later.

To be clear, there’s a lot of sex in the second episode (though by the standards of HBO and indeed even some broadcast TV, it’s almost chaste by some standards.) But what the second episode does very clearly is show the relationship between Allan and Candy beginning to change. They discuss details of their lives they are either proud of or ashamed of (you need to hear what Allan’s is because its kind of delightful). They go to a county fair together. They have discussions about how poor the new minister of their local church is compared to the one who has just left. And it is clear to both of them that the relationship is deepening, but neither Allan nor Candy want to let go of it. Allan, however, feels that he has to try and save his marriage to Betty and they go to the church version of marriage counselling.

It is a measure of how good a writer Kelley is that having spent much of the first two episodes making Betty look like a harridan, he then does everything he can to reveal that she is vulnerable and is in pain. She does want to be desired by Allan and Allan genuinely loves her. How they begin their reconciliation is indeed hysterical (let’s just say she uses an f-word that would not get censored anywhere) but there’s something genuinely sweet about it when you see the two of them renew their vows. Unfortunately, Candy has been babysitting the past week and even if you don’t know how the real-life story (I didn’t  but the opening shot of the episode does) you know this won’t end well.

Love and Death is another in a string of masterworks Kelley has done so far in the 2020s and its clear from the start that his choice of Olsen over his regulars Kidman or Reese Witherspoon was absolutely perfect. Olsen has the ability to show vulnerability in the same way both of those women to do but while she is as sexual a being, there’s something less glamorous about her appearance that is far more fitting to the role of Candy Montgomery. It’s clear that Candy is a precursor to so many of the housewives at Monterey – as she tells her minister before embarking on her affair, she has the same doubts about whether this is all there is -  but there’s clearly an anger about her that is far more obvious. When Allan gives a hint that the affair might be coming to an ending, there’s a spark of bitterness that is not present in any Kelley heroine so far, and when she goes out for a night on the town, she seems angry when confiding in one of her best friends: “He didn’t know how to French kiss before I met him.” The second episode ends with her silently grinding meat with a blank expression that bodes no good.

The rest of the cast is superb: Plemons and Rabe are up to their usual level of brilliance, Elizabeth Marvel, as she does so frequently, has a great early role as the voice of reason (and as her characters almost always are, it is ignored). I have yet to see Ozark’s Tom Pelphrey in the role of her attorney, but I expect to see good things. Only Krysten Ritter, who plays Candy’s confidant, isn’t used to her full potential in the two episodes I see her in, but perhaps it’s because her usual bad-girl energy is being toned down.

As is the case with every Kelley limited series, music and film is a big part of the series: the opening credits show over ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,’ the Bee Gees and the Hustle are everywhere, and disco tunes are prevalent. (I almost wonder if Kelley chose this subject just so he could have an excuse to the seventies music that is at the background of every series that he’s written have a legitimate reason for being there; he used a Janis Joplin number that he wrapped up the second season of Big Little Lies with at the end of the second episode.) But unlike all his other series, the church is a far bigger factor in Love and Death. All the regulars are involved with the choir and church business and meet there as part of the community; people are outraged when Marvel’s character leaves Lyle and some believe it has to do with her divorce, and there is a lot of hostility towards the new pastor both when it comes to his sermons and how he treats the community. Perhaps Kelley is using this in symbolism: with God not involved in the characters lives they way they were, sin and evil have snuck into the town of Lyle and may never be truly exorcised.

It is very likely Love and Death will be a major contender for Emmys this year: Olsen is a near sure thing for a Best Actress nomination and I could easily see Kelley and Plemons getting a fair amount of love as well. Yet even if it is not a major contender, I still want to see how it ends regardless. I know that I’ll have to wait a little longer due to the new way series are being dropped these days (the first three episodes dropped this weekend, it will air new ones until May 25^th) but honestly I’d gladly wait every minute of it not more. Love and Death demonstrates not only the mastery of Kelley’s craft, but the way television should work when its firing on all cylinders. Even if you watched Candy and see no point in seeing the same story told again, I think the viewer should see Love and Death any way. There are always more than one side of every story, and there’s always more than one way of telling it.

My score: 4.75 stars.