Murdaugh Murders: The Movie, on Lifetime

Alex Murdaugh's family had been political power brokers in South Carolina when it was part of the solid Democratic South. They still maintained their influence when the state turned red through their money (fundraising for Biden and Hillary Clinton) and wheeling-dealing legal practice. However, Alex (or Alec) Murdaugh destroyed the family reputation by committing a host of crimes, including (but not limited to) murder. The whole true-crime scandal unfolds in the two-part Murdaugh Murders: The Movie, which premieres tomorrow on Lifetime.

Even though it consists of two installments, Lifetime is calling Murdaugh Murders its 500^th original movie. That is a lot of cheating wives and dentists stalking their patients. A sleazebag like Murdaugh is comfortably fits in their power zone. Of course, he is universally respected when the film starts, as the heir to a dynastic Low Country law firm. However, his son’s legal troubles will ignite his spectacular fall from grace.

Eventually, Murdaugh will be tried for the murder of his wife Maggie and son Paul, but writer Michael Vickerman and director Greg Beeman do not make the latter’s death look like any great loss to society. Thanks to a drunken boating accident, Paul Murdaugh was facing criminal and civil proceedings. Inconveniently, the Murdaugh finances were already precarious, due to Alex/Alec’s mismanagement, so he started stealing his clients’ settlements. He did not merely skim a little extra off the top. He redirected the whole darned payout to accounts he controlled. He also maybe murdered the family’s longtime housekeeper.

Murdaugh’s motives for gunning down his wife and son remain a little vague, but it is clear he was cracking from the combined pressures, also including an increasingly angry unpaid Oxy dealer. Regardless, there is no ambiguity regarding Murdaugh’s guilt, largely due to Bill Pullman’s wildly jittery meltdowns as the sociopathic Murdaugh.

Pullman’s certainly follows Lifetime’s melodramatic style sheet, starting with his weirdly reedy mint julep-and-pimento cheese accent, which slips and slides all over the place. Be that as it may, Pullman’s twitchy showmanship is entertaining. Lauren K. Robek is credibly down-to-earth as Maggie Murdaugh, but Curtis Tweedle is absolutely charmless as the entitled Paul.

Frankly, #500 could have used a strong nemesis to play off Murdaugh, but the cops, FBI agents, and prosecutors are all disappointingly generic. Besides Pullman, only Serge Houde leaves any appreciable impression, as the understated but shrewd defense attorney, Jim Griffin.

The Ballad of Lefty Brown: The Sidekick Rides for Vengeance

Old Lefty Brown’s riding mates have gone on to great things. One is now the governor of Montana and another is a U.S. Marshall. Perhaps most impressively, his partner Edward Johnson is the great state’s senator-elect. Brown ought to sign up with a lobbying firm and peddle access, but that is a city-slicker thing to do. He’s an open range cowboy all the way. It becomes a moot point anyway when Johnson is murdered by outlaws. Brown was always the comic relief, but like Sam Spade, he understands a man has to do something when their partner gets killed. Not a lot of people ever took the sixty-five-year-old bunkhouse cowpoke seriously, but he rides for vengeance anyway in Jared Moshe’s The Ballad of Lefty Brown (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Johnson was a respected rancher, lawman, an opponent of railroad interests. As we see in the opening scenes, he still dispensed justice frontier-style, with Brown right beside him. His wife Laura hoped their upcoming move to Washington would finally shake loose old Lefty, but Johnson was dead set on leaving him in charge of the ranch. Regrettably, that all changes when the two crusty partners walk into an ambush.

Poor, misunderestimated Brown is left alive to face the contempt of Johnson’s widow and ranch hands. Determined to settle the score, Brown sets off alone. Of course, nobody thinks he can do much of anything, so Gov. Jimmy Bierce dispatches Marshall Tom Harrah to retrieve him when they arrive for the funeral. However, Harrah finds his old riding mate is hot on the trail, so he temporarily joins the pursuit instead. Unfortunately, Brown will eventually find he has been denounced as an accomplice back at the ranch, just when he is most in need of help.

It is so refreshing to see a new western that respects the genre and what it represents, as is the case here. Ballad is definitely darker than your singing cowboy movies of yesteryear, but it is not exactly revisionist either. Moshe has obviously processed a whole lot of western cinema, but the films of Anthony Mann really jump out as a likely influence (which is a recommendation in itself).

He also gets an award caliber performance out of the always reliable Bill Pullman, possibly doing his best work since he was on Broadway in The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? It is a tricky role playing the goofy sidekick forced to become deadly serious. In past eras, maybe a Walter Huston could have handled it, but he nails it cleanly. It is not just his partner who died, it is his way of life that is also slowly expiring, which viewers can just see in his sad, but still hawk-like eyes.

Jim Caviezel is entertainingly slimy as the governor, while Peter Fonda clearly enjoys his brief time riding tall in the saddle as the hard-nosed Johnson. However, Tommy Flanagan nearly steals the picture from Pullman, as the morally conflicted and profoundly haunted Marshall Harrah. It is a rich supporting turn, with range worthy of the frontier.

Clearly, just about everyone involved made the most of their opportunity to work a genuine western with an A-list cast, because Ballad looks just about perfect. Cinematographer David McFarland captures the sweep of the Montana plains and badlands and the design team gets all the period details right, in a Spartan kind of way, that never overshadows the grungy, archetypal drama. This is a film that people will definitely see over time, because there is a hunger out there for good westerns, like In a Valley of Violence and Slow West, but the target demo is naturally skeptical. Moshe’s film can hang with both those recent westerns, which is also saying something. Enthusiastically recommended, The Ballad of Lefty Brown opens this Friday (12/15) in New York, at the Village East.

Tribeca ’17: The Sinner (pilot)

Meursault from Camus’s The Stranger would understand. You’re at the beach, its hot, so you just kill some random dude. However, Cora Tanner does it in front of her husband and several dozen horrified witnesses. She would have the world believe she did it in a moment of madness, but the grizzled detective in charge suspects Tanner had more personal motivations than the Imp of Perverse in Antonio Campos pilot for The Sinner (trailer here), which premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, in advance of its USA network broadcast.

Tanner has a domineering mother-in-law and a weak momma’s husband. She works all day at the family business, then she and the spineless Mason pick-up their toddler from his parent’s house, where they have dinner, before turning in for the night in their next-door home. We wouldn’t blame her for killing someone, but we have to question her choice of victim.

Granted, his girlfriend was being kind of obnoxious, but it was the entitled young man-about-town whom Tanner Ginsu-ed up like a vintage 1980s slasher-killer. She immediately confesses, but says little else. She implies it was a case of temporary insanity, but refuses to say anything to establish her case. It all makes slightly pervy Det. Harry Ambrose deeply suspicious. He is determined to sniff out some sort of motive before Tanner’s guilty plea seals her fate, but nobody wants to help him—least of all Tanner.

Again, The Sinner shows the challenges of showcasing episodic work at film festivals. The pilot is definitely cinematic, as one might expect from a stylist like Campos and cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes, who has considerable film credits as a DP and a director of his own projects. However, it just feels like it barely began when the forty-five minutes are up. Granted, that can and probably should be taken as a good sign, but it would have been nice for audience members to have a chance to see more of the give and take between the series two biggest stars, Jessica Biel and Bill Pullman playing Tanner and Ambrose, before the post-screening panel discussion.

Still, the pilot ends with some promising revelations—or rather more accurately, hints of revelations. It definitely leaves viewers intrigued and wanting to see more of the mystery unspool. However, you can live a full and satisfying life without watching Bill Pullman (who happened to star in the Broadway production of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?) engaging in a d/s humiliation session with his ex-mistress.

Be that as it may, Pullman is mostly very good as the haggard but incisively intelligent Ambrose. It is also impressive how thoroughly Biel glammed down to play Tanner. She just looks like an average person in Sinner, except when she is drenched in blood splatter. However, even at her Plain Janest, it is hard to believe Biel’s Tanner is hitched to the putzy Mason and his sad excuse for a beard, played with tiresome whininess by Christopher Abbott.

Based on the German novel by Petra Hammesfahr, The Sinner pilot suggests it will offer a few twists on the unreliable narrator “Girl” thrillers, while providing the staples fans of the sub-sub-genre enjoy. Even with that awkward bit, the pilot shows potential, but it is still hard to judge whether the entire series should be recommended when the first season starts August 2 on USA, following its special screening at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.