Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Review

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story begins as camp, its first episodes directed by Max Winkler with such rapid-fire theatricality that Baz Luhrmann would need a breather. (Winkler also works in some Wes Anderson-esque compositions at times.) That tone doesn’t match with the two episodes directed by Sarah Adina Smith, whose episodes are among the stronger ones this season. I wonder if binge-watchers will stick with The Lizzie Borden Story through those zanier early episodes in order to get to Smith’s.

The over-the-top performances by Rebecca Hall and Charlie Hunnam initially portray the murder victims as undeserving of any sympathy at all. The show wants the viewer to see them get what’s coming to them. Later, Abby and Andrew each get their own episode that humanizes them enough that you understand why they became the people they did, so that when their murders are revisited the viewer is being asked (a bit too late) to have mixed feelings about what Lizzie, with Maggie’s assistance, does to them.

As a stepmother more wicked than any Disney animated movie could conjure, Hall milks every contemptuous line in Abby’s many cruel putdowns, wielding words as sharp as the axes Andrew keeps. Hunnam’s boorish, stammering Andrew oozes with disdain for women, drowning his sorrows with booze and affairs until he becomes a Jack Torrance-like maniac in his final moments (before literally seeing the light).

Both Beatty and Krieps do what they can with the material they’ve been given, but they can’t elevate it. Beatty’s blank-eyed, timid Lizzie evolves into a more cunning and confident young woman through her romantic relationship with Maggie. Alas, there’s no evidence either way if Lizzie and Maggie were lovers. The show omits Maggie’s testimony at Lizzie’s trial, and also largely erases Maggie’s Irishness to accommodate the Luxembourg-born Krieps, with her aged-up character garbed like a Victorian Annie Hall.

In a household where a maid gets her face scalded over making the wrong soup, we’re supposed to believe Maggie could come to work at the home of the richest man in town with purple hair and keep her job? You couldn’t even go to work at an office like that in the 1980s let alone in the 1890s. I bring this up as an illustration of how much : The Lizzie Borden Story strains to jam a modern overlay onto its period story.

The contemporary portions of this season, where it follows Aileen Wuornos, is where Monster has a better grasp on what it’s trying to say about feminine rage. You can’t take your eyes off Paulson’s Wuornos, although there are a few comedic moments in the “Bed & Breakfast” episode where she comes perilously close to channeling Kate McKinnon’s “Colleen Rafferty” character from SNL.

While Wuornos’ fascination with Lizzie and her trip to the Borden home is entirely fictional, the final episode made me wish this season had just been about Aileen Wuornos with Lizzie Borden as the side story. Or, Wuornos’ story could have been its own standalone season of Monster, in which case The Lizzie Borden Story might have benefited from having a shorter, more focused story that allowed itself to pick a tone and stick to it.