Lizzie (2018)

When researching films about Lizzie Borden, a tale most of us know from a children’s rhyme, one finds there are quite a few exploitative takes on the story of a woman who allegedly, but was never convicted of, killing her father and step mother. The tale is delicious for the traditional patriarchal message of the dangers of allowing women to be independent. She is vilified in the way women who reject the need for male control in their lives often are. So in this day and age it isn’t surprising someone would turn the tables on that and make a feminist examination of the story.

Director Craig William MacNeil does this full out. He films his story methodically. He starts by showing us Lizzie is a strong and abrasive woman. Then he shows us just how monstrous her father is in his attempts to control her (which pretty much always fail) and the way he exploits the powerless but lovely housemaid who Lizzie befriends. He also shows us quite plainly how the whole social structure is set up to give her father power and take hers away. None of this is shocking to anyone who understands history at all.

He films his story in a quiet, gaslit, soft focus which is typical of art house period pieces. This adds the air of familiarity to the sort of story he is trying to tell, to legitimize and make serious his tale. He wants weight here. I’m just not sure he gets there. His story is so clearly laid out, so expected, so monolithic, that he removes any sense of power or fear. We know how this is going to go.

Then he fakes us out a bit, making the inevitable murders which we all know are coming, happen off screen, We wonder how delicate his Lizzie Borden story is going to be. But that is just a short reprieve. He flashes back to the murders, having his heroines strip naked and Lizzie brutally weird her axe, not out of delight or evil, but out of necessity. He has already made his case for why this violence was necessary and the only moral option. But the gore and unity here is titilating, directly in contrast to his quiet somber take so far. Perhaps he is saying the revolution is to be that radical from the status quo it is overturning.

But for me he film which just laid out its story so paint by numbers and in such a black and while manner, left little room for the passion I would need to feel in Lizzie’s story. There is a real urgency to the resistance to oppression which felt missing. In Lizzie it feels like we are just supposed to accept it rather than live it or feel it. It all remained rather cold for me.

However, MacNeil’s take on this legendary tale is certainly heads and shoulders above what we have seen in the past and for that he gets some credit. I just wonder if it could have found a way to make the story of these women more lived in and less text book.

Lizzie
Starring: Chloe Sevigny, Kristin Stewart, Jamie Sheridan, Fiona Shaw, Kim Dickens, Dennis O’Hare
Director: Craig William McNeil
Writer: Bryce Kass