Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette
FX
In the fifth episode of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the frequently photographed couple are attempting to sort out their future while standing on a very public New York City street. In between long drags off a cigarette, Bessette explains to one of the most sought-after men on planet Earth why she couldn’t say yes to his recent marriage proposal. “When you asked me, I had to ask myself, do I want this?” she says. The scene is shot partly over Kennedy’s shoulder, as if we, the audience, are peering in on a real, private conversation.
“To be honest, I don’t think marriage is necessary,” Carolyn continues. “But I’m down to do it, with you.” It takes her a second to process what she’s just said — that she wants to spend the rest of her life with this son of a revered American president — and that she actually means it. She breaks down crying.
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It’s a terrific scene, boosted by that fly-on-the-wall filmmaking style from the episode’s director, Crystle Roberson Dorsey, and excellent work by Sarah Pidgeon, who appeared in the Hulu series Tiny Beautiful Things and earned a Tony nomination for her role in the Broadway play Stereophonic before getting cast here as JFK Jr.’s notoriously elusive cool blonde. Unfortunately, the rest of this Ryan Murphy-produced limited series — critics were given eight of its nine episodes in advance — isn’t nearly as focused and effective as that scene.
Created by actor and writer Connor Hines (Space Force) and based on Elizabeth Beller’s book Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Love Story could have followed its source material’s lead and told this romantic cautionary tale much more directly from Carolyn’s point of view. Instead it tries to give nearly equal time to studying John, played by newcomer Paul Anthony Kelly; the dynamics within the Kennedy family; and the concerns of ancillary albeit notable figures in their lives, such as Calvin Klein (Alessandro Nivola), for whom Bessette worked as a salesperson and PR guru, and Kennedy’s pre-Bessette girlfriend Darryl Hannah (Dree Hemingway). Certainly some of this is necessary; it’s impossible to understand who John F. Kennedy Jr. was without taking his unusual upbringing into account. But one wonders how much stronger this season might have been if it had been whittled down to four or five episodes.
5.0 Love Story Like Sarah Pidgeon’s strong and grounded performance as Carolyn Bessette Dislike The season is too long and sometimes awkwardly scripted
Before Love Story even started production, it felt appropriate to be skeptical about how this series could do justice to Kennedy and Bessette, two of the most impossibly attractive and impossible-to-know figures in modern American cultural history. For the most part, those roles have been cast well, though Pidgeon is clearly the standout. She may not look exactly like Bessette, but she comes close enough thanks in large part to those signature curtains of blonde hair that fall in perfect waves around her face. As Bessette, she glides in and out of conference rooms and party scenes with a physicality that is somehow equal parts determined and laissez-faire. She’s ambitious, but she doesn’t care if you notice her. When she listens to other people speak, especially John, Pidgeon’s wide blue eyes appear to be downloading as much data as she can extract from every moment. But there’s a knowingness behind them, too: a secret garden she hides, as Bruce Springsteen once put it.
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Kelly comes as close to resembling JFK Jr. as one can reasonably expect. He’s got the same thick, dark mane, broad shoulders, and chiseled chin that suggests he actually can leap tall buildings in a single bound. The actor also captures the mix of swagger and entitlement that John, a man who has been catered to his entire life, brings to every interaction. But, especially when laid beside Pidegon’s, Kelly’s performance is much more superficial. Part of what made John Kennedy Jr. so charismatic was, obviously, the fact that he appeared to have been assembled in a Perfect Handsome Man Factory. But it was also, as with Bessette, the twinkle in his eyes. Some men have a way of looking at you like they have just heard a really hilarious private joke and are almost ready to tell it to you … almost. George Clooney has that. So did John F. Kennedy Jr., but Kelly isn’t skilled enough yet as an actor to conjure it.
Ultimately the two leads are not the key problem here. It’s partly the writing, which, at its worst, sounds awkward and unnatural. “I just think that if anyone can bridge the divide between politics and pop culture, it’s me,” John says during a casual conversation about his magazine, George, that definitely sounds like something he may have said in an interview that has been repurposed for scripted television. Some scenes, like a montage in Episode 2 of Carolyn repeatedly sending back flowers from John, stretch on far longer than they should. Even the soundtrack suggests the music supervisors were told to haphazardly cram as many alternative and pop hits from the 1990s as they could fit onto an infinite Spotify playlist. The songs are good. Radiohead, the Beastie Boys, Sade, and Fiona Apple are among the artists represented. But like everything about this series, it’s just a lot.
This being a Ryan Murphy joint, there are a couple of moments that border on the ghoulish, including an overdramatic sequence in which Jackie Kennedy (Ryan Murphy-verse regular Naomi Watts) dances with a photo of JFK while listening to “Finale Ultimo” from the musical Camelot and another where, following Jackie’s death, John hallucinates the famous image of himself at age 2 saluting his father’s coffin. In the same breath, Love Story blasts the paparazzi and mainstream media for invading these people’s privacy while also continuing to invade their privacy even though they are long dead. Like so many scripted versions of tragic true stories, this one wants to have its cake and eat it, too, and also criticize the way that other people bake very similar cakes.
Ultimately, a series like this can’t be considered a success unless it imparts some new information about or insight into who John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette really were. Love Story doesn’t quite meet that bar. It comes closer to getting there in its latter episodes, after Bessette has become Bessette-Kennedy and is so besieged by attention from ravenous photographers and reporters that she barely wants to go outside. If Hines and his collaborators had been daring enough to turn their own cameras more frequently on Carolyn and less on John, perhaps we could have truly felt what it was like to be in Carolyn’s head, a place Pidgeon does her level best to center us, when her sense of normalcy imploded. Love Story gives us a sense of what that might have looked like, but it can’t make us understand how it really felt.
Premieres: Thursday, Feb. 12 at 9/8c on FX and Hulu
Who’s in it: Sarah Pidgeon, Paul Anthony Kelly, Naomi Watts, Grace Gummer, Leila George, Noah Fearnley
Who’s behind it: Connor Hines (creator); Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, and Brad Simpson (executive producers)
For fans of: American history, cautionary romantic tales
Episodes watched: 8 of 9