My wife and I have watched all but the final, 9th episode of Love Story -- the romance of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette -- on Hulu. I decided to review it now.
First of all, I've felt for a long time that the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon were the most significant public events in my lifetime -- other than landing on the Moon --not to mention heartbreaking, in different ways. And given that JFK Jr was the son of JFK, and the nephew of RFK, I was bound to be very interested in any television series about him.
At the same time, I've been telling my students and writing for years that docudramas are inevitably very different from the realities they retell in their stories. I realized that many years ago, when my wife and I were watching Ike, a docudrama about Dwight Eisenhower starring Robert Duvall in the title role. As we were watching it, I began thinking, and said to my wife, that, you know, maybe Eisenhower had more charisma than I'd realized, watching his boring public statements and speeches when I was a kid. And then I realized that of course I was thinking that, watching Duvall's performance as Ike, because of Duvall's charisma not the real Ike's.
The fact of the matter is that even a documentary inevitably commits lies of omission. You can't put everything, not even every significant thing, in a movie, or even a TV series. But the docudrama takes this to an extreme, inventing not only conversations but often even characters to tell its story. And knowing that as I watched Love Story, I was nonetheless moved to tears, because it accurately portrayed the burden that JFK Jr, along with Carolyn Bessette, bore. And though I get that Daryl Hannah was very upset with the way she was portrayed -- and I wish her well -- that didn't affect the impact Love Story has had on me. Because it reminded me how much we lost with the assassinations of JFK and RFK, and might well have lost with the tragic deaths of JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr, Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette, and Grace Gummer as Caroline Kennedy brought these real-life characters admirably to life, as did Naomi Watts as Jackie Kennedy and Jessica Harper as Ethel Kennedy. And the writing was sharp, funny and tragic when it needed to be. And if many conversations were products of the writers -- Episode 8 (co-written by Juli Weiner and series co-creator Connor Hines) was 100% John and Carolyn talking, with no one else there -- well, I don't care, that's more than fine with me. Because those conversations provide a reasonable enough take on what those conversations actually were. I'm not saying Love Story is Shakespearean -- though it does have elements and echoes of that -- but I don't recall anyone attacking his ten history plays because he made up conversations among his characters.
So thank you Hulu and everyone involved for giving us a plausible not literally factual story of one of America's and the world's tragedies. And as for reality -- well, if I lived in his district, I'd 100% vote for Jack Schlossberg (who criticized this docudrama as "a grotesque display") in the upcoming Democratic primary.
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