The Louise Woodward case reduced to black and white
It is almost 25 years since the Louise Woodward trial, and one detail has stuck in my mind all that time. Not the photograph of smiling baby Matthew Eappen, or the sight of Woodward sobbing as the jury convicted her of murder. It was the footage of her supporters, gathered in a pub in her hometown of Elton, Cheshire, popping champagne corks and singing: “She’s coming home,” to the tune of a football anthem, after news that a judge had reduced her conviction to involuntary manslaughter. Behaving as if it’s Cup Final day when a baby has died? Unbelievably crass.
As The Trial of Louise Woodward (ITV) showed, it was a case that split opinion along international and, perhaps, class lines. Was Woodward, then aged just 18, and two months into a job as an au pair in Massachusetts, guilty of shaking Matthew to death? The prosecution said he was a clear victim of “shaken baby syndrome” and a head injury consistent with being bashed against a hard surface. The defence said that the medical evidence was flawed: there was no evidence of shaking and the brain bleeding, they said, could have been the result of an earlier, undetected injury.
The programme edited the trial and the associated hoopla down to a series of chapter headings, and efficiently took us through events. There were no revelations, and by the end of it I imagine your feelings about her guilt or innocence were unchanged.
James Mates, who covered the case for ITN, made an interesting point: Sky News only began broadcasting in the UK midway through the trial. “What they’d been watching wall-to-wall,” he said of Woodward’s supporters, “was the defence case.” And what we got in this film, largely, was the defence case. There was old footage of the prosecution case, plus an interview with the pathologist who conducted the autopsy and stated unequivocally that Matthew’s death was down to “one person and one person only, and that was Louise Woodward”. But the majority of screen time was given to Woodward’s lawyer, Barry Scheck, a big gun hired after helping to secure OJ Simpson’s acquittal. Woodward, wisely, did not appear.
Scheck told us, again and again, that Woodward was innocent. The verdict says otherwise, of course – the film did not include the judge’s final declaration that Woodward had caused Matthew’s fatal brain injury through a combination of “confusion, inexperience, frustration, immaturity and some anger”. It was a curious omission, because it presented a believable scenario, rather than seeing the case – as prosecution and defence did – in black and white.
There are popular actors and then there is Paul Rudd. Everybody aware of the existence of Paul Rudd loves Paul Rudd. This week he was named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, which prompted neither scorn nor jealousy but a happy acceptance that Paul Rudd, despite being no more conventionally attractive than at least five per cent of dads at the school gate, is absolutely deserving of this accolade.
So The Shrink Next Door (Apple TV+) starts with an advantage, which is that it stars Paul Rudd. He plays a sociopathic psychiatrist and scam artist who inveigles his way into the life of a people-pleasing dupe (Will Ferrell) and steals his money, his lifestyle and his sanity. But it’s impossible to hate him because he’s played by… you get the picture.
It’s based on a strange-but-true story: Ferrell’s character, Marty Markowitz, who inherited a New York fabric business from his recently deceased parents, went to see psychiatrist Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf for depression, panic attacks and a lack of self-esteem. Herschkopf spent the next 30 years ruthlessly taking advantage. Markowitz’s sister, Phyllis (Kathryn Hahn), is onto dodgy Dr Ike pretty quickly, but Marty won’t be told.
The Shrink Next Door is adapted from a hit podcast. It has garnered lukewarm reviews in the US, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It does occupy a sort of no-man’s-land between comedy and drama, being neither very funny nor very dark. In the hands of another writer or director it could have gone in either of those directions, and would have been a richer experience, but it is still a great yarn, entertainingly played and buoyed along by Rudd. The chief writer is Georgia Pritchett, whose experience as a writer on Succession has given her an ear for smart dialogue.
The period details – we begin in the Eighties – are lovingly recreated. Everyone plays it very Jewish (Rudd actually is Jewish, Ferrell isn’t) and the accents are laid on thick. It would all seem a tad daft and overblown if it wasn’t for the fact that it all really happened. Just with a less attractive psychiatrist.
The Trial of Louise Woodward ★★★ The Shrink Next Door ★★★★