Re-imagined true crime mostly works in ‘Girl From Plainville’
In “The Girl From Plainville,” Elle Fanning plays Michelle Carter, who became infamous in 2015 when she was indicted on a charge of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III (Colton Ryan), to kill himself. The ensuing trial (historical fact spoiler alert), which found Carter convicted, was national news, covered in well-researched magazine pieces and barely informed social media posts. It’s also the subject of the 2019 HBO documentary “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter” and the 2018 Lifetime movie “Conrad & Michelle: If Words Could Kill.”
Michelle and Conrad met in real life on vacation in Florida; they lived not terribly far from each other in Massachusetts but conducted their subsequent relationship remotely, mainly through texts, a flurry of words out of which they built a disastrous bubble. It was these texts, which demonstrated Conrad’s determination to kill himself and Michelle’s to help or make — that is the question — him do it, that constituted the bulk of the case. And it was a text from Michelle to a friend confessing (or claiming) that it was her fault that Conrad died that led to her conviction: In the midst of gassing himself in a truck in a Kmart parking lot, he got scared and got out, Michelle wrote, and she told him to get back in.
Created by Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus, the new miniseries is thoughtful and intelligent. Like most such series, it is, at eight episodes, longer than it needs to be, but
individual scenes are wellwritten and well-played, with a minimum of filler. The tone is neither sensationalistic nor judgmental. It touches the main factual bases, with customary adjustments for narrative convenience.
Notably, text exchanges between Conrad and Michelle are enacted by the characters face-toface — in one another’s bedrooms, on a country road at night and so on. (We soon glean from context clues that they are not actually together.) It’s a sensible alternative to forcing the viewer to read the texts, or having them read in voice-over, and it allows the actors to bring emotional context and dramatic shape to exchanges; it lets “Plainville” be a love story rather than a crime story. It makes a case different from what one might have read in the news.
The series, which encompasses the police investigation, trial preparation and courtroom scenes, moves forward on dual tracks: one beginning with Conrad and Michelle’s meeting, the other progressing from the discovery of his body. They join up in the end in an episode that does not stint on poetic license to suggest Conrad’s state of mind on
his final day: slow motion, shallow focus, sunlight, scenes of nature. Given that the end is established in the beginning, there is a sense that we are waiting, a long time, for things to come to a head.
The show belongs to Fanning, to Chloe Sevigny as Conrad’s mother, Lynn, and, to a lesser extent, Ryan, although Conrad’s character is somewhat fixed, inward and opaque; his rarely wavering suicidal intent makes him as much a catalyst as a victim. Sevigny is excellent, worn in different ways before and after her son’s death, handling him with care but not kid gloves in life, more sorrowful than vengeful afterward. In a nuanced performance, Fanning finds surprising variety in Michelle without making her seem too self-contradictory.
“Plainville” may get you thinking more generally about responsibility, of media that sells kids deathwrapped images of love, of how ready we are to believe we know what we only think we know. It may at least remind you that, in an age fueled by reductive statements about everything under the sun, nothing human is as simple as it seems.
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