Whodunit brings us no closer to truth
It’s not quite the oldest, coldest case on the books, but the murder of Andrew and Abby Borden on Aug. 4, 1892, is unlikely to have any fresh light shed on it 126 years later. That hasn’t stopped Chloë Sevigny from becoming the latest to portray maybe-murderess Lizzie Borden in popular culture. Past versions have included Elizabeth Montgomery (Bewitched) in a 1975 TV movie, and Christina Ricci in a 2014 TV biopic that spawned a brief series. There was also a 1965 opera, a 1948 ballet that changed the trial verdict to guilty and an old children’s rhyme that inflated the number of axe strokes in the murders to 81 from an estimated 29. Thus it’s clear that artistic licence has already had its way with history. But director Craig William Macneill goes for a scattershot approach to the crime and its possible motivations. Let’s start with the victims. Andrew Borden (Jamey Sheridan) is portrayed as a heartless businessman and a general nogoodnik who rapes the new maid (Kristen Stewart) on a nightly basis. He’s also a pigeon killer. His second wife, Abby (Fiona Shaw), clearly went to the Disney school of wicked stepmothers. You certainly don’t feel much sympathy for either of them. Then there’s Lizzie as history’s prime suspect. Bryce Kass’s screenplay draws from a hodgepodge of latter-day theories, including one that says Lizzie was an epileptic, and another that posits a lesbian affair with Bridget, the maid. Just to keep us on our toes, it adds a wicked uncle (Denis O’Hare) who may have designs on the family fortune; threatening letters in the mail; and a nocturnal prowler, never clearly seen. All that’s needed is for a vacationing Hercule Poirot to show up and declare that everyone did it. Sevigny and Stewart are well-matched as the old maid (Lizzie was 33 at the time of the murders) and the young maid (Bridget was a decade her junior), tentative and fluttering in their mutual desire, but otherwise emotionally squashed by the oppressive mood of the Borden house and its patriarch. But the film seldom lets them alone, always jamming some anachronistic, thrill-pitched music into the action, or turning down the lights — we’re told Borden thought electric illumination an extravagance — until we can barely see what’s going on. As such, Lizzie operates as a soso thriller and a not-so historical document, more concerned with the prurient details of the murder — like was the culprit naked perchance? — than with a full examination of the case. We may never know the whole truth, and Lizzie certainly doesn’t move us any closer to it.