Mark Reviews Movies: LIZZIE (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 20, 2018

That rhyme is etched in memory: "Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks." It wasn't really 40, of course, and technically, it was her stepmother. Whoever killed Abby Borden didn't see what he or she had done, only to give Andrew, the father, 41, either.

The younger Borden daughter had recently turned 32 when her father and stepmother were murdered in the family home in Fall River, Massachusetts, on August 4, 1892. She was arrested, tried, and, ultimately, acquitted of the murders, because the jury of 12 men at the trial didn't think that a woman of her means and station was capable of such violence. No one else was ever charged with the crimes.

That's the official story, and Lizzie, a dramatization of the months leading up to the murders and their aftermath, floats around a few theories about who could have killed the Bordens, what motives these suspects could have had to do it, and why the Borden patriarch might have had it coming. According to the movie, nobody had much affection for Andrew Borden, a wealthy man of miserly spending habits. He bought land from ailing farmers, never thought of keeping his brother-in-law (from his deceased wife) in the family inheritance, sexually abused his live-in maid, didn't try too hard to hide his extramarital sex crimes from his wife, and treated his younger daughter cruelly.

Any one of these people might have killed the man—except his wife, of course, who possessed the solid alibi of having been murdered a couple of hours prior. Bryce Kass' screenplay does a good job convincing us that anyone—an anonymous farmer, the brother-in-law, the maid, or Lizzie herself—could have killed the Bordens, but when the movie arrives at its final conclusion to the mystery, the answer is exactly what we anticipate. Because the movie has spent so much time raising suspicions from multiple angles, it doesn't quite convince in allowing us to understand why the killer actually did it. In a twisted way, the primary purpose here seems to be to justify at least one of the murders in our minds.

The story begins six months before the murders. Lizzie (Chloë Sevigny) has a strained relationship with her father Andrew (Jamey Sheridan), who disapproves of his younger daughter's tendency to go out on the town unaccompanied. Both Lizzie and her elder sister Emma (Kim Dickens) are unmarried, living in the family home, and left to do assorted chores around the house. Andrew's second wife Abby (Fiona Shaw) seems almost as dismissed as her stepdaughters in Andrew's eyes. His mind is always on business and maintaining his substantial fortune, refusing to install electricity or even gaslight in the home to save money.

The Bordens hire a new maid named Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart), an Irish immigrant whose name is "Maggie," denoting her nationality and her disposability, to everyone except Lizzie. The two women bond over feeling constantly subservient in life, as well as, eventually, Andrew's malice toward them and, ultimately, a mutual sexual attraction that could cause a scandal if consummated and discovered. Meanwhile, Andrew is receiving written death threats at the door and calls upon John Morse (Denis O'Hare), Andrew's brother-in-law via his first marriage, to set his affairs in order, lest something should come of the warnings.

For a while, the movie is really about Andrew, only told indirectly through the eyes of these other characters. There's Abby's face, with eyes open and horrified look, as her husband returns to bed after a late-night visit to Bridget's room. John attempts to set himself up as the one man capable of maintaining Andrew's finances, compared to the man's daughters, who aren't looked at favorably by local society. There's Bridget, the victim of Andrew's dehumanization, which begins with the nickname and arrives at abuse. Finally—and most importantly, of course—is Lizzie, who simply wants to live her own life but finds herself the constant target of her father's judgment and scorn.

What we actually learn about these other characters is minimal and always framed within their respective relationships with the Borden patriarch. Lizzie does come into her own in a way as the story progresses, but those details veer between established but trivial facts (She suffers from seizure-like "fits") and sensationalistic speculation (her relationship with Bridget). She is, first and foremost, portrayed as a victim here—a woman held in a domestic prison and subjected to her father's harsh temperament and sometimes harsher actions. Sevigny's performance at least focuses on the character's steadfast rejection of her father's ways, although such minor heroism might be misguided, considering where this interpretation ultimately leads.

The screenplay does briefly touch upon Lizzie's detention and trial, but it and director Craig William Macneill would rather get to the bloody incident that led to those events. The murders do play out in Lizzie, with an assertion of the real killer (and an accomplice) and with gruesome detail. It seems like a reasonable enough conclusion, but since the movie has spent so much time on red herrings and superficial particulars, it also feels like a shallow, nearly exploitative recreation of real-life horror.

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