Lizzie adds to Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart’s growing list of intense and enthralling performances. The film explores with Aeschylan tension the intersection of violence, sexuality, and class. As Kristen Stewart’s character chides Lizzie at one point in the film, “We live in this world and not another,” the story of Lizzie Borden projects in sharp relief the cultural-historical pressures that still weigh heavy on girls, wives, and daughters.
The use of time shifts makes for interesting moments in the storytelling. We flash forward at the beginning to the interrogation scene and then flash back to the first time that Bridget arrives at the house, and then our expectation is set that we aren’t going to see the actual murder, because we flash forward to the trial and Lizzie’s captivity.
The nudity is (in Wife’s word) “perfunctory,” and as subversive as it is unexpected. In the two scenes where Bridget and Lizzie are assaulted, they’re both fully clothed. Their shared experiences of trauma are as much a cause for bonding as their romantic feelings for one another. Their nudity is purposeful but also powerful, brings to mind the final scene of Oidipous The King, when Oidipous returns to the stage having stabbed out his own eyes after having seen his wife-mother hung from a noose, her dress undone. There are a few other nice resonances with classical Athenian theater–the image of the strong
Two of the monologues in this film were exceptional. The first when Lizzie confronts her uncle about the threatening notes that the family has been receiving and the second when the two of them meet for the last time at the prison. The first speech shows the uncle’s venom, his willingness to give voice to the pernicious thoughts in Lizzie’s head about how she’s past her prime and not special. The scene is electric and metatheatrical, considering the unique kind of obstacles that actresses of a certain age begin to encounter (thinking of Amy Schumer, Patricia Arquette, Tina Fey, and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss from “The Last Fuckable Day” scene). Lizzie proves that she’s special because (and this is Wife’s point–in a Clytaemnestran way) she can use violence just like the men. The father thinks that he is the only person who can wield violence when he slaps her across the face at dinner, and the uncle thinks that he’s the only one in their relationship who can wield violence when he slides his hand up her skirt during their confrontation.
The stepmother’s line (“I am continually amazed by the ways you find to humiliate yourself in this family”) drew gasps and laughter from the audience.
Wife makes the point that the film’s domestic backdrop (sort of in the same vein as Phantom Thread and The Beguiled) makes it feel almost like a play in the way that most of the action occurs in a single setting at the house, save for three instances: the lawyer’s office, the pawn shop, and the night at the theater.
Just a few more gems from the film: I love the objectivity of sex and violence. It is not stylized or romanticized (as was the case in Nocturnal Animals, when the director arranges the corpses of the raped women in sexually suggestive poses). There’s a scene that’s repeated several times in the film that allows you to watch actors portraying people who are acting, which I think is mesmerizing. We watch Lizzie perform the role of terrified innocent three different times and the contrast with Bridget who clearly doesn’t understand the need for the performance in the intimacy of their own home is so excruciating.
Lizzie is not like other biopics. It is not weighed down by the “this is a thing that happened” narrative structure that so many bad biopics follow. It is narratively interesting, visually compelling, and eminently relevant to the cultural conversations going on right now about power and gender and violence.
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