On Friday, June 13, 1980, Candace Montgomery, a busy housewife from Wylie, Texas, went to the home of her neighbor and friend Betty Gore to get her daughter’s swimsuit, which she was going to take to the beach. swimming pool. Candace’s daughter and Betty’s had become friends not too long ago, and the latter spent a lot of time with the Montgomery family. Candace had a hundred things to do that morning. Among them, going to a children’s performance, which she did not attend because, while it was taking place, she was taking a shower at her friend Betty’s house after killing her with an axe. Specifically, she gave him 41 ax blows. She then showered, picked up the swimsuit, the mints Betty used to give her daughter after the pool, and continued her busy day, while Betty’s baby cried home alone for the next 13 hours.
wisely, Candy (Disney+), the first of the two series that adapt such a macabre and still mysterious event this year —the other, love and death It will arrive at HBO Max at the end of the year—, it starts that day, and hides what must have happened in that house until the end. A bit like the way Truman Capote makes the Clutter family murder disappear in Cold-blooded at the time it was supposed to happen Candy the murder disappears before our eyes, since all it shows us is a plan of Betty Gore’s house at that time. We see what the neighbors saw. Any. And then we are told the story. What is the story of a wolf in sheep’s clothing? That of a popular and controlling housewife determined to achieve what she has set out to achieve: an affair with whoever she is.
Nick Antosca and Robin Veith, responsible for the miniseries, use different camera filters that undoubtedly give their opinion on what was happening in each of the houses. The Gore house, Betty and Allan, has a yellowish tone, in some sense suffocating, almost identical to that which occurs in Dahmerby Ryan Murphy; while that of the Montgomerys has a nostalgic and cozy air. When things get out of control, in the days after the murder, the atmosphere turns red, in the way that Hitchcock darkened it, to detail what happens when the damage is done. The result is so aesthetically impressive that it distances itself from reality to the point that it is easy to forget that what is narrated happened. Although it did not happen exactly like that, because Antosca and Veith admit, after each chapter, that certain things have been exaggerated in favor of the show, equally chilling.
There is something of domestication in this use of fiction, although the superb work of Jessica Biel in the role of Candy —so Candy that the actress disappears forever to improvewithout a doubt, to the original Candy, endowing her with a narcissistic perfection that becomes psychopathy in looks capable of disassembling the character—, and Melanie Lynskey (yellowjackets) in the misunderstood and lonely Betty, who goes crazy, yes, but within the walls of her house, without taking more than herself ahead. And here is the difference between the two women. While Candy, a caged lion in that perfect house in the suburbs – suburbs that look like a version weird by Wisteria Lane (Desperate women)—, with her perfect, boring husband and her perfect, boring children, she tries to make everything burn around her because she has stopped taking it, Betty tries to rebuild what has been broken.
What has broken is their marriage. And it could not be said that Candy has broken it, even though she is having an affair—almost imposed, by the desire to star in one of the erotic novels she reads tirelessly—with Betty’s husband, but rather that life from another era broke it in the one in which the woman was almost one more appliance in the family home: the one that set everything in motion. There is an interesting approximation, and even depth, in the kind of different madness to which this type of life leads, to how destructive it can be that your life is what happens in the minutes in which you are not taking care of something , or someone, because you simply have to do it, and doing it is supposed to be a pleasure, and not strenuous work. Betty also doesn’t fit in with the rest of the mothers. And Candy, popular the way she is popular in high school, despises her.
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