IIf you didn’t know it was true, you wouldn’t believe it. That’s the permanent meaning left by HBO Max’s latest miniseries (shown here on Sky Atlantic), The Staircase. The eight-part drama tells the story of Michael Peterson, whose second wife, Kathleen, died in December 2001. He claimed he found her at the bottom of the stairs she had fallen down while drunk and cradled her while he called for services. emergency and she breathed her last. Police in Durham, North Carolina, confronted with a body whose head “appeared to have exploded” and who appeared to have exhaled her last breath long before the call, estimated he beat her to death. Peterson was arrested for first degree murder. Further investigation revealed a thousand layered sheets to the man, family and history.
If this all sounds familiar, it may be because it’s already been the subject of another eight-part miniseries: Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s 2004 Peabody Award-winning documentary of the same name. I’m not sure how much anyone who has seen that meticulous work, let alone the five follow-up episodes that appeared in 2013 and 2018, needs what is effectively a dramatization of all the ground covered there. But for those who haven’t, this last one is certainly a who/if/how/why wasn’t very convincing. For those who have, think of it as a more sophisticated and prestigious version of 1984’s Fatal Vision rather than gutted Gallic thought and see how it goes.
It opens, briefly, in 2017 with Peterson (Colin Firth) dressing up and mentally preparing himself for what appears to be another normal day at work. He then transports us back to that fateful December night 16 years ago when he makes a hysterical 911 call for an ambulance. Then we flash back a few months earlier, when Michael, Kathleen (Toni Collette) and their children/guardians (one from Kathleen’s previous relationship, four from Michael) got together for a family dinner and college farewell for one of them. . There are some disputes between the children, but basically everything is fine. The American dream lives.
The drama moves in and out of various timelines: 2017, the months (then weeks, then days, carefully counted in the corner of the screen) leading up to Kathleen’s death, and the build-up to Peterson’s trial. It’s about to get disorienting, particularly when Lestrade (Vincent Vermignon) and his documentary crew show up to make their film, but timeline jumps usually add to the mounting tension.
And what tension is there? At first the family is united by horror. But under pressure, cracks form. As the evidence against Michael mounts, if not evidence of murder, at least the fact that he is not the man they thought he was, the family begins to fracture. Kathleen’s sisters turn on him (Rosemarie DeWitt as one, Candace, is pure, cold fury); the children change their allegiance or cling with an increasingly blind and furious faith to their belief in the only father they have left; and his Uncle Bill (Tim Guinee) is tested to the limit as the revelations pile up and he is caught off guard at every turn. Like Alice, he and the viewer sometimes feel like they’re being asked to absorb six impossible things before breakfast. This is where the central credibility of the documentary form is needed: the need to dismiss some of the turns the case takes, when you know you’re watching the actors perform, is almost overwhelming.
The American legal system is also under dramatic scrutiny. We see the lawyers, Jim Hardin (Cullen Moss) and Freda Black (a gorgeously flint Parker Posey), amassing facts but deciding the best prosecution “tricks” to present them with, and others along the way nudging would-be errant players. in position. Like the documentary, it is both a portrait of how we construct a truth and the impossibility, once humans in all their messy complexity get involved, of ever discovering a single, brilliant, objective one.
Firth and Collette are, unsurprisingly, brilliant. The former is slippery and arrogant, delivering a performance that teeters on so many boundaries — deeply loving yet coercive of family, numb with grief yet sociopathically distant, self-indulgent yet narcissistic — that you can’t help but watch to see if and how he . he will fall Collette is given less to work with, but she nonetheless makes for an impressive turn as a loving wife who periodically finds herself in impossible situations. We see her navigating turbulent domestic waters and divided loyalties in a tired, occasionally desperate way that many will recognize.
In short, a ladder well worth climbing.
Reference-www.theguardian.com