As a concept, director Craig William Macneill’s new film Lizzie sounds unmissable. Chloë Sevigny plays Lizzie Borden, the woman who was acquitted of killing her father and step-mother in 1892, but lived on in a nursery rhyme that claims she gave them 40 “whacks” with an axe. Kirsten Stewart plays Maggie, the Irish housemaid who this film posits shared an illicit affair with Lizzie and may have been both accomplice and impetus for the murders. It’s a juicy premise, but one that’s unfortunately drained of life. Despite all it has going for it, Lizzie is a stilted affair that leaves its gifted actresses adrift.
Stewart has only been in a handful of movies not set in the present day and she’s done even fewer with an accent. While her Irish brogue sounds fine to the untrained ear, it’s slightly tougher to buy her as a shy maid. There’s something entirely too modern in the way Stewart carries herself and its easier to believe she’d want to break out of the horrible roles assigned to her sex in the late 19th century rather than to try to disappear into them. The same can be said of Sevigny’s performance too.
There is something dangerous about Lizzie from the beginning. She lashes out verbally at her father when he tries to keep her from going out unaccompanied and then insults a rude woman she meets during that opera outing. There’s a constant prickliness to her demeanor that Sevigny conveys with a stiff posture and a tight jaw. Her Lizzie is a woman ready to snap at the slightest sign that she can escape her oppressive household and the movie is just a waiting game until the moment she does.
Even without those moments, the audience knows this story will eventually lead to a murder and that’s part of the reason a sense of foreboding hangs over the whole movie. Composer Jeff Russo’s score sets the mood right from the first note, a low and sinister hum that plays through much of the film. By contrast, cinematographer Noah Greenberg keeps the images almost painfully bright—particularly in shots that take place during the day. The bright, white light that comes through the windows or shines down on the characters as they walk outside is as stifling as Lizzie’s home life, but the shadows only hold secrets and trauma. They’re effective techniques, but they can also leave the movie feeling too even, with too little variation in tone. Macneill tries to combat that with a few interesting camera choices, but except in the eventual murder scene, they serve to distract more than enhance.
The script is the one place where the film really varies, but the structure is unfortunately one of the biggest things working against it. Writers Bryce Kass and Evan Hunter begin with the most important event: the murder. We hear Lizzie’s scream and the way she calls out for Maggie to send for the police. We see the beginning of the investigation and then the film flashes back six months and fills in the time before the murder. If that were the only way the film played with the timeline, it would still work. Giving us a glimpse of the murder only teases what we already know and makes us wonder exactly what dynamics are at play between Lizzie and Maggie in that moment.
Everything that happens between Maggie’s arrival and the murder builds tension and the murder should be the natural release. Except that’s not what the movie does. Instead, it elides the murder again, showing us the investigation and the sudden awkwardness between Lizzie and Maggie.
As is, we see the change in the women’s relationship first and the reasons for that change second. But the film doesn’t need to justify why committing mutually beneficial murder would change the relationship. We understand how fundamentally this will affect the characters’ growing intimacy simply through Stewart’s terrified and literally naked performance during the murders. So, the film does unnecessary work at the expense of letting its emotional beats play out naturally and keeping its capable actresses from conveying heir characters’ full emotional arcs.
Lizzie should be better than it is. It has a compelling true story, a modern twist on that story and two great actresses to sell that twist. Unfortunately, its dispassionate tone works against all that inherent passion. The story doesn’t need an over-complicated script or an abundance of stylistic flourishes to convey the drama. Everything it needs is right there between Stewart and Sevigny. If only it would pay attention.
