Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Jesse Plemons, Lily Rabe, Patrick Fugit, Krysten Ritter, Tom Pelphrey, Elizabeth Marvel, Keir Gilchrist, Amelie Dallimore, Liam Pileggi, Harper Heath, Olivia Appelgate, Jennifer Neale Page, Bonnie Gayle Sparks, Aaron Jay Rome, Sara Burke, Richard C. Jones, Matthew Posey, Beth Broderick, Fabiola Andújar, Brian d’ Arcy James, Mackenzie Astin, Adam Cropper, Bruce McGill, Drew Waters, Sunday Dangerstone, Charlie Talbert, Robert Walden, Brad Leland, Boo Arnold, Dave Maldonado, Christ Freihofer, Christin Sawyer Davis, Deke Anderson.
We can only be thankful that science and the various challenges met by the branches of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are available at a point in history where the measure of defence against the charge of murder is perhaps more gossamer thin than ever.
Murder is murder, but there are degrees of guilt driven by extraneous circumstance that require investigation; for very few are driven by a sense of the psychopath within, and truth be told the act of taking someone’s life is by accident, by dissociation, by defending your own life when you are pushed into a corner…but also the slow burn rage from another moment in which you could not express the damage done to you…it may not seem like much of a defence, but it can make the difference between freedom and life in prison.
There are court cases which feel like a circus, and then there are defining moments which can change the outlook of how we proceed with prosecution of crime, and in 1980 the apparent senselessness of a slaughter of one woman by another thrust the sciences of the self into the spotlight arguably like never before.
The death of Betty Gore sent shockwaves into what was considered Texas polite society. The fact that the victim and the perpetrator were both respected members of the local church was not just shocking, but an appalling scandal, a wicked act as many called it, but for Candy Montgomery, portrayed by the sensational Elizabeth Olsen, it was one born out of past trauma, out of guilt for her affair with Betty’s husband, Allan, and one that without the aid of hypnotic regression might never have been explained as anything more than evil by those prosecuting the case.
Love & Death maybe seen as sanitised, many even slightly sensational to British viewer’s eyes, but it serves a purpose to the explanation of how all murders are not as cut and dried as one may think.
On the face of it, the town on which the two women live may be considered to be one of typical allusion to perfection, neighbours all working together for the greater good, all God fearing, butter wouldn’t melt; and yet thankfully the rot of boredom will rear its head in such a setting, for such a scene of domestic bliss is a false drama waiting to explode, and the inevitability of that will lead it to show its true face to the world.
It is in the hypocrisy that Love & Death revolves, and whilst the belief of pursuit of truth must be sacrosanct, it also must be taken into context, and as a case study, like that offered by Alan Dershowitz in Claus von Bülow’s trail in the accusation of murdering his wife Sunny, it is how we view law, how we view the degrees of murder.
With superb performances by Elizabeth Olsen, Tom Pelphrey, and Lily Rabe, Love & Death is a production of powerful persuasion and damage control.
Ian D. Hall