As fodder for true-crime dramas, the gruesome facts of the Candy Montgomery case are hard to top: On June 13, 1980, nearly two years after Candy (played here by Elizabeth Olsen) and Allan Gore (Jesse Plemons) began their extramarital affair, Candy stopped in for a visit with his wife, Betty (Lily Rabe), and somehow wound up hitting her 41 times with an ax.
The premise is so irresistible, in fact, that it was chronicled just last year in Hulu’s Candy — which, though certainly not Love & Death‘s fault, does it few favors. Creator David E. Kelley does differentiate his seven-part HBO Max miniseries somewhat with a more restrained and empathetic tone, in contrast to Candy‘s sour sensationalism. But despite generous pacing and some fine lead performances, his show has too little light to shed on its notorious central case.
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Love & Death
Aside from a bloody in medias res opening, the first three hourlong episodes play out like a domestic drama under Lesli Linka Glatter’s sensitive direction. In late 1978, Candy is coming to realize she wants something more than the picture-perfect family and home she works so hard to maintain. Allan Gore, meanwhile, has been feeling stuck with a wife who seems to need him more than like him. So when Candy hops into Allan’s car after a church volleyball game one evening and suggests a fling — “It’s just something I’ve been thinking about so I want to say it, so I don’t have to think about it anymore,” she adds so casually she might be brainstorming ideas for a bake sale — he eventually decides, after much hemming and hawing, to take her up on it.
That Allan, sweet but awkward and hopelessly passive, doesn’t seem like anything special compared to the effervescent Candy is part of Love & Death‘s tragedy. The desperation of suburban housewives is nothing new for TV, but here we see how little she’s truly asking for: not fame or fortune or power, just a bit of pleasure, companionship and attention from a man who’s not yet started taking her for granted. “It’s not even like I’m gonna miss the sex,” she reflects as the entanglement seems to near its end. “It’s the friendship. Allan’s been like my best friend.” For those humble privileges, she’ll sort all the logistics, cook all their elaborate lunches, mold him into the sort of lover she needs him to be — and, ultimately, find herself at the center of a murder case.
It’s in the fourth episode that Love & Death finally reaches the death in question, and from there its tone grows darker and more unsettling. In what feels like a more grounded extension of her work in WandaVision, Olsen begins with Candy’s bubbly façade dialed up just a little too high to seem entirely believable — and then, as Candy falls apart, chips away at it to reveal rawer, harder depths. Her saucer-like eyes prove to be her most effective weapon. At times, they seem to shine so big and bright it’s almost unnerving; at others, they court sympathy by flooding with tears or dimming completely.
Through Candy’s case, Love & Death considers how the media and the law distort the truth. What actually happened matters less for either side than the ability to spin a better story. When the papers began painting Candy as a murderous hussy, her lawyer, Don Crowder (a zesty Tom Pelphrey), demands she adjust her hair, wardrobe and weight to look the part of a frumpy housewife. When she takes pills to numb her emotions during her court appearances, Don orders her to stop — it’s a better look if the jury can see how vulnerable she’s truly feeling. And the very public ordeal will leave Candy forever under scrutiny no matter the verdict. “The jury can’t find you innocent. They can only find you not guilty. And there’s a difference,” Candy’s husband Pat (Patrick Fugit) points out.
Yet Love & Death itself too readily takes Candy’s story at face value. The series does not shy away from the grisly details of the incident: We watch the ax lodge in Betty’s skull, hear the squelch of torn flesh, see blood splattered into every corner of the Gores’ utility room. But to make sense of Candy’s actions apparently necessitates turning Betty’s into an unsolvable puzzle. The character starts the series seeming unpleasant (one of her first lines is a passive-aggressive retort to a mild joke by Candy), and ends it seeming unhinged. In contrast to the hours of context provided for why Candy did what she did, very little effort is expended trying to understand where Betty might have been coming from, or why she might have acted as she did.
The reported facts of the Candy Montgomery case aren’t hard to find. Love & Death draws from the two-part Texas Monthly article “Love and Death in Silicon Prairie,” as well as the book Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs by John Bloom and Jim Atkinson. Their sick appeal is clear too, as evidenced by the fact that it’s still captivating audiences more than four decades later. The challenge has always been grasping why it happened — how a lukewarm romance could yield such a grotesque turn, how a seemingly ordinary Texas woman could butcher a friend to death. On that front, Love & Death has plenty to say, but frustratingly little insight to offer.
