Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is the second Monster series after The Ed Gein Story to be solely created by Ian Brennan, instead of him co-creating the show with Ryan Murphy, as was the case with The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. No wonder, then, The Lizzie Borden Story ends up sharing many stylistic similarities with The Ed Gein Story. The tone once again freely shifts between exaggerated humor and sober solemnity, and there is a sense of playfulness to the images that swirl cheekily on their own whims. You must have heard the phrase "Dance as if no one's watching." In both The Ed Gein Story and The Lizzie Borden Story, Brennan seems to be playing with the scenes as if no one's watching. With Brennan solely at the helm, the Monster series feels tonally free—and that's not completely a compliment, though let's circle back to it later. The impression one gets is of watching a kid playing with his toys and laughing madly, joyfully. Whether the real Lizzie Borden actually killed her parents is a debatable topic, but Brennan's Lizzie (Ella Beatty) undoubtedly picks up the axe and hacks the two bodies.
This is something that's established in the first episode's opening scene, where Lizzie murders her stepmother, Abby (Rebecca Hall), and her father, Andrew (Charlie Hunnam), rather comically. It's as if Brennan is trying to pull the viewers' legs with his tongue-in-cheek attitude—an attitude that was also present in The Ed Gein Story. If the intention was to shock or sensationalize, then the mission has failed—successfully, in a sense—because what one perceives instead is an attempt to create a farce out of a piece of history. And for a while, farce is what seems to be on Brennan's mind. Lizzie's tormentors, Andrew and Abby, are so cartoonish that they tickle your ribs gently. The affection that Abby showers on her favorite sofa makes her look comically eccentric, and the overblown expressions with which she hurls insults toward Lizzie make those insults sound so exaggerated that you giggle a little. Similarly, Andrew's hateful comments about being trapped with women who don't share his interests in blades and coffins are so direct and dramatically inflated that they naturally sound funny. Here is a sample: "Your stench of estrogen chokes the air." How can you take this man seriously? And, by extension, how can you take Lizzie's oppression seriously?
It's to Beatty's credit that she manages to bring out her character's subdued quality with some believability. There is something stunted about her face, as if years of abuse and neglect have made her so underconfident that she has grown to process information slowly. You notice her "lagging" when Abby suddenly announces to Lizzie that she is leaving the house permanently. It takes her some time to digest what has been said and what is happening, and when she does come to grips with it, she launches her own attack, first verbally, then physically. Before the assault, the show quickly introduces another shade within Abby, that of a bored, frustrated housewife. You see a woman trapped in a loveless marriage and feeling empty from the inside. What she always wanted was an independent life, but she got "trapped" playing mother to Lizzie. Her anger and insults toward her stepdaughter, then, are nothing but the product of her own failures and a domestically confined life. If the series had fleshed out these dissatisfactions instead of providing us with a quick glimpse, the bloodbath would have yielded some juicy, complex feelings. But The Lizzie Borden Story spends most of its time sketching caricatures who, in one scene, fart and vomit profusely, comically, and then suddenly takes a U-turn, declaring these cartoons to be sad human beings—not with weighty evidence, but with mild suggestions and winks.
One part of the show has fun with moments that serve as cheeky foreshadowing devices, such as the decision to open the story with plenty of blood-spilling, followed by menstrual blood leaking onto a sofa admired by Abby, and then showing Elizabeth Báthory (Vicky Krieps) taking a bath in the blood of virgins, followed by an almost identical shot of Lizzie taking a "blood bath" and even saying that she wishes she were covered in real blood and not cherry. What's more, Andrew is whipped with a cane in a way that looks as if he were being struck by an axe prior to his death scene. Then there is the other part of The Lizzie Borden Story that deals with sexual assault, misogyny, queerness, and women's rights with a serious demeanor that's not quite emotionally involving, given that it builds itself on a lightweight surface that's all blithe, comic-like, and breezy. The show is essentially about female rage, and it presents the women's bloodshed as anything but arbitrary. For them, violence is about revenge and justice. Báthory and Aileen Wuornos (an unrecognizable Sarah Paulson) kill because they are raped, while Lizzie kills because she is never loved, never respected, and always belittled.
Like The Ed Gein Story, The Lizzie Borden Story, too, deals with fascinating themes, including the cycle of life inspiring art and art inspiring life (Lizzie seeps into the culture as a boogeyman, and a novel based on her life is a big hit, while Aileen proves to be a diehard fan of Lizzie). The show also ridicules the close-minded patriarchal system by presenting it as a flaw that a cunning woman can readily exploit. But The Lizzie Borden Story pays more attention to its eye-catching props (a mechanical dildo is bought for Lizzie) and bright colors (the pink trees are pleasing to the eyes) than to its meaty topics. The colorful production design embellishes the frame beautifully, even if the beauty is packaged with a superficial story. And more than the superficiality, what prevents the series from being as moving as it wants to be is its caricatural deployment of tropes, characters, incidents, and themes. For most of its runtime, The Lizzie Borden Story gives the impression of being a school play in prestige packaging. It isn't as "important" as it considers itself to be, but that doesn't stop Brennan from enjoying himself, from having a good time. His self-indulgence has its own appeal, and I would be lying if I said that I didn't fully like The Lizzie Borden Story. Then again, what I did like was Brennan's chutzpah and his cackling. He does what he wants with utmost pleasure and happily screams, "I don't give a shit." Of course, there will be viewers who will respond to this Monster with the same sentiment, with the same voice. You can bet that the words "I don't give a shit" won't be heard from just one side of the screen. Brennan will be met with both resistance and indifference. Then again, he doesn't give a shit. He lives in his own world and indulges in his own peculiarities. He is the protagonist of his own show, and its name is The Ian Brennan Story.
Final Score - [7/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times