The Better Sister: A Better Who Dunnit

My wife and I binged The Better Sister on Amazon Prime the past few nights, and we really enjoyed it. Here's why:

• Top-notch cast:  I mean, you can't go wrong with Jessica Biel (a sister) and Kim Dickens (a police detective).  And Elizabeth Banks (Love and Mercy!) as the other sister was superb.  (She was also in an hilarious episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm -- actually all its episodes are.) It was great to see Gloria Reuben (playing a lawyer) back on the screen, and Michael Harney (NYPD Blue!) playing Doorman Arty.  Also Corey Stoll and Matthew Modine with less time on the screen, were memorable too.
• The story was pretty strong, too.  I did guess who did the killing pretty early on.  But that's just me, and it was fun to see the story unfold.
• The title itself was good, because it invites you to think about who the better sister is, as the plot unfolds.
• It takes place mostly in New York -- in both the Hamptons and NYC -- always a plus with me.
• It's a summer story, with lots of swimming, that plays all kinds of roles.
• And The Better Sister moves quickly, in a stylish way that avoids swagger. 

All of this based on a 2019 single novel by Alafair Burke, herself the daughter of crime novelist James Lee Burke, and she's also a professor of law at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY (where I used to teach before coming to Fordham) a little over an hour west of the Hamptons.

Will there be a second season?  No current plans for one, but I certainly hope there is one.

A Kind of Murder: Yep, Just That

I just a late 2016 movie, A Kind of Murder, on Amazon Prime Video. It's advertised as "Hitchcockian Noir," which it's not -- somewhere between not quite and not by a long shot.  But, then, again, Hitchcock's work is so uniquely masterful, I've never seen anyone else's work equal to what he did, including some who came close, like Brian De Palma.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

Here's the story:  Walter Stackhouse, a writer in 1960 New York, is in an unhappy marriage with a mentally distraught wife. He's writing some kind of murder mystery, and collects newspaper articles about lurid and/or unsolved crimes-- including a recent case in which the wife of a bookstore owner in New Jersey, Marty Kimmel, turns up dead.  Laurence Korby, a detective who is no Sherlock Holmes and has a nasty violent streak to boot, is sure Kimmel did it.  When Stackhouse's wife, who tried to take her life with pills turns up dead in New Jersey,  Korby isn't sure where her murderer is Kimmel or Stackhouse, because (as we should know from umpteen police dramas), the husband is always the first suspect.

So this is a pretty good, even excellent, set-up.  And the acting (especially Patrick Wilson as Stackhouse and Eddie Marsan as Kimmel, but also Vincent Kartheiser as Corby, Jessica Biel as Mrs. Stackhouse, and Haley Bennett as his girlfriend) and the ambience are excellent.   But the ending chooses to be stylishly ambiguous, rather than giving us the satisfaction of an answer to the whodunnit.

All we know for sure as the closing credits role is Kimmel killed his wife.  He possibly/likely killed Corby and Stackhouse, too, though the scene was so dark you had to look twice to be sure.  And, then, in the last scene, as Stackhouse is on his back, apparently dying from the wounds Kimmel inflicted, we see him going over in his mind all the major scenes of the movie, concluding with him sitting in his apartment at his typewriter, typing "the end".

So is he envisioning all of that including the typewriter in his mind as he takes his dying breath on the damp concrete?  Or is he actually sitting at his typewriter typing "the end" -- the end to the whole story he has typed, which we just saw on the screen?

Well, I do like ambiguity in an ending -- like in "The Lady and the Tiger" or in the last scene of The Sopranos, but as I said, in "A Kind of Murder," that just too ambiguous by half.  Or, as my wife said, maybe that's why the movie, an adaptation of The Blunderer, a 1954 novel by Patricia Highsmith, is called A Kind of Murder.

 

The Sinner season one: Wild, Unconventional, Irresistible Mystery

My wife spotted an admiring review of The Sinner, which just began its second season on the USA Network.   Before watching that, we binge watched the first season on Netflix.  Herewith my review - and then in my next post, a review of The Sinner 2.1.

The Sinner (season one) is a police detective mystery like nothing I've seen before on television.  A seemingly happy woman, married and with a young child, stabs to death a guy on the beach, in front of everyone.   Cora, brilliantly played by Jessica Biel, knows that she did this, but hasn't really a clue as to why.  Clearly, she was the furthest thing from happy.  Fortunately for her, Detective Harry Ambrose, takes an interest in her case.

Bill Pullman does a great job playing Harry, a sort of modern-day Columbo, with the some same schlepish qualities as Columbo, and certainly as smart, but endowed with dark past that, as far we know, Columbo didn't have.  Against all odds, Harry pursues the case and discovers why Cora did what she did.

The burden of the story was enormous - how can someone, who we saw with our own eyes brutally murder a guy who was posing no immediate threat to anyone, have any justification for doing this? But the first season pays off amply and in full at the end, as the complicated motive and all the moving parts fit into place.  The result leaves of us wanting more of this indefatigable detective.

The name Sinner is no accident, since a crucial part of Cora's story is why she was motivated to take her sickly sister out of their house, with a mother whose religious bent crippled rather than supported her daughters.   The locale - the Kingston area of New York - also worked well for the ambience.  Harry would have had much more trouble getting his way had he been obliged to conduct the investigation in New York City.

Anyway, enough said about the plot, I don't want to give anything more away.  Snap this up if you're in the mood for a wild, unconventional, irresistible mystery.  And I'll be back in a few minutes with my review of The Sinner 2.1.