Elizabeth Olsen’s Performance Is Way Too Good for Soapy True Crime Drama Love & Death

At this point in her career, I will watch Elizabeth Olsen do pretty much anything. She’s a grieving widow in Sorry for Your Loss? I am crying with her. She’s a badass superhero in any one of like four different Avengers movies? I am in the front row. Oh, whoops, she’s now suddenly a comic book supervillain in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness? That’s wild, but I stand ready to defend women’s wrongs. She’s playing an…ax murderer? Um, okay, I guess?

This is a lot to say that Olsen is the primary reason anyone (including me) is going to bother to watch the new Max (née HBO) drama Love & Death, a prestige true crime piece based on a grisly real-life murder in a small Texas town in 1980 that has already seen several onscreen adaptations (one of which, Candy, aired just last year on Hulu). And, to be fair, her performance as Candace “Candy” Montgomery, the housewife who was charged with killing her friend Betty Gore (Lily Rabe) by striking her 41 times with an ax, is mesmerizing from start to finish, a master class in restraint and emotional complexity. Unfortunately, the rest of the show isn’t nearly on her level. Love & Death doesn’t seem to quite know what it wants to be—a paint-by-numbers crime drama, a courtroom procedural, a tale of the sublimated rage of American housewives—and as a result often finds itself absolutely nowhere. 

Though the series opens in medias res with a brief glimpse of the bloody crime that will become its narrative center, the story of Love & Death begins two years before Betty’s murder. When we first meet Candy, she’s a bubbly, personable housewife and mother of two, a woman who often comes across as if she stepped out of a glossy ad for kitchen appliances. An active member of her local community, she sings in the parish choir, serves on the church council with her nice if mostly boring husband Pat (Patrick Fugit), and has satisfying gossip sessions with her besties, church pastor Jackie (Elizabeth Marvel) and beauty shop owner Sherry (Krysten Ritter, who is both utterly wasted here and forced to wear a deeply terrible wig).

Her interior life, however, is less satisfying, and the series’ initial episodes poke listlessly at Candy’s general unhappiness without ever really giving a reason for her ennui. (Bored housewives are just bored, I guess!) And the same ultimately can be said for her affair with Allan Gore (Jesse Plemmons)—a chance close encounter on the volleyball court leads to her basically propositioning him on what honestly feels like a whim. Their illicit relationship is surprisingly business-like, an outlet for Candy’s often reckless desire for something more, rather than a genuine connection.  (“I wasn’t looking for what’s best,” she says at one point. “I was looking for something more transcendent.”)

The series hails from David E. Kelley, which probably means no one should be but so surprised that the drama seems more interested in prioritizing the story’s soapiest elements—marital troubles, lies, infidelity, the dramatic court case, and the spread of local small-town gossip—than he is in doing what might be called real justice to this tragic story. Love & Death’s version of events seems incredibly eager to cast Candy as the victim, sympathizing with her to a degree that is almost shocking at times. It never questions her versions of what happened, and even its grisly reenactment of the murder doesn’t really stray much from her point of view. 

The weird thing is, Love & Death probably would have been better served if it had actually been a work of fiction. Then, at least, the truth of Candy’s guilt, the outcome of her trial, and the detailed specifics of Betty’s horrific death wouldn’t be known to the audience in advance. The series wouldn’t have had to compete with another, barely year-old adaptation of the same story on Hulu that hit many of the same emotional beats, and did so in a more compelling and complex fashion. And most importantly, we as viewers wouldn’t have to feel quite so queasy about the fact that not only does the seven-part drama essentially encourage us to root for Candy, it almost entirely erases the very real victim at the story’s center. 

While Love & Death works overtime to present Candy sympathetically—we see how frustrated and trapped she feels in a life that offers her little but ever-increasing expectations about who she should be and what she should do—her victim, Betty, isn’t offered anywhere close to the same depth or interiority. Instead, she’s presented as a sort of deranged shrew, a desperately unhappy and often unhinged woman who is intensely unlikeable, so much so you may wonder why it takes so long for someone in this story to off her. This is, of course, not just a complete waste of the brilliant Lily Rabe but a deeply uncomfortable portrayal of a real-life murder victim, who may or may not have not been a great time to hang out with, but who at least deserves to be treated with more respect than the average villain in a summer blockbuster. 

Even for fans, true crime can be a tough genre to navigate—after all, these are real people’s stories being dissected, reimagined, and repurposed for the enjoyment of viewers whose lives the violence depicted within them will never really touch. It’s easy enough to become desensitized to the idea that this is simply entertainment like anything else, which is perhaps all the more reason we should take the responsibility of telling these stories seriously and treat their subjects with care. Unfortunately, Love & Death seems to think it’s only Candy’s story that matters.

Love & Death premieres on Thursday, April 27 on HBO Max.

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.

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