Film Review: Lizzie Makes You Rethink Death
Synopsis: Academy Award (R) nominee Chloë Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry, “Big Love”) stars as Lizzie Borden, the notorious woman at the heart of one of the most enduring mysteries in American history. After a lifetime of loneliness, Lizzie finds a kindred spirit in housemaid Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart) and their secret intimacy sparks an unthinkable act. Director Craig William Macneill (The Boy (2015), “Channel Zero: Candle Cove”) explores the days leading up to the savage crimes in a dark tale of repression, exploitation and thwarted dreams.
Is death only physical? The success of Lizzie, as a film, is that it swims the murkiness of this question, and makes you sympathetic to a murderess because, in a way, you see that she died way before she murdered. Of course, no one wants to say a young woman that killed her father and stepmother had reasons, but if you take Lizzie as a cautionary tale, then, you will witness its analysis of how a person’s crushed heart can lead to their lost mind.
Based on the true story of Lizzie Borden, Director Craig William Macneill and Writer Bryce Kass, make Lizzie’s life feel like the novel of a smart woman living in a very sexist, humdrum era. The beginning of the film builds perfectly how sad, lonely, and painfully quiet Lizzie’s life can be. She, occasionally, goes alone to the theater, when there is a show, and is judged by all for being single. During the day, she takes care of her beloved pigeons or reads books under the pear tree. She cannot do much without her father’s permission, despite being more intelligent and compassionate than him. All in all, being a 19th century woman is a snooze, but Chloe Sevigny is a human spark.
Sevigny brightens Lizzie to make you feel like she is a kind genius that is stuck between an unloving stepmother, a verbally and physically abusive father, and a society that believes she is too old and bookishly strange to make a wife. In essence, she was too strong a woman to live in that world and time, which is why she cracked. I want to clarify I NEVER condone violence, and Lizzie, as a film, is not trying to do that. Instead, it does something more uncomfortable; it makes us see how a society/ community can drive a good person to be insanely vicious.
Macnelli and Kass have created a film that shows nobody loses their mind out of nowhere or for no reason. Everything is a process, and the road to madness begins when you can no longer mentally handle the physical and social prodding of those around you. It is as if your mind is a Jenga tower, and all it needs is one little peg to be removed so as to tumble down. For Lizzie, there are two pegs that push her “jenga mind” to crumble. The first is her “uncle” John Morse’s presence, played wickedly by Denis O’ Hare, and his clear aim to steal Lizzie and her sister’s inheritance. Worse, her father, Jamey Sheridan as the sternly degrading Andrew Borden. is ready to give it away to this vagabond because he is a man. This leads to Lizzie’s second “peg”. When she overhears the possibility/ desire of her father to lock her in a mental institution, this sane woman cracks from the desperation and sadness.
Lizzie Borden lived in the late 1800’s. In those days, when a woman had an emotion it was called “hysteria”, and if she did not have a husband by 19, she was the equivalent of a zombie her father had to financially support. I mention these factors because we live in world that complains about societal pressures and oppressions, but continues to systemize them. Even now, we have men questioning’s women’s rights to their bodies, education, and equal pay. While most women, unfortunately, learn to conform and deal with the prejudices of men, this film is about the few women , like Lizzie, whom lose their will and minds to do so, especially if they feel they have no love/ supporting voice.
Kristen Stewart is enrapturing as Bridget Sullivan, and builds a consistency for Lizzie that she is unwilling to love. Both are, again, the lowest of the social caste system, but Sevigny and Stewart’s chemistry is boiling gold. Women deemed too dumb, financially inept, and useless to lead a life of their desire. While we all know how Lizzie Borden’s life ends, their love story is the most exhilarating, hopeful part of the film, and you feel bad at how unabashedly doomed it always was. Even if Lizzie Borden was not a murderess, she could not be an “out lesbian” in 1892. Thus, Lizzie as a film is an example that, when you are apart of an oppressed casting, there are dreams that will never happen for you and that is not so easy to be okay with.
In some ways, Lizzie insinuates that had Lizzie Borden lived in a time/ world where women could be treated equality as citizens/ human beings, she might have been able to save her mind and thus her parents. In another predicament, she would have never become a killer because she would have ha other choices like, the option to leave her cruel father and have the career/ monetary stability she dreamed. It may seem like a crazy notion, but it fascinates because you have to wonder how many bad people could have been better had society been better to/for them. Lizzie Comes Out In Theaters on September 14.
