Elizabeth Olsen plays Candy here, and her performance is sharp but also impenetrable. I promise I won’t spend this entire review comparing “Love and Death” to “Candy,” but I will say that Montgomery felt like a more fulfilled individual on that series. The same goes for victim Betty Gore, who presented herself as a real, albeit flawed, person in “Candy,” whereas here she seems sly and lazy. What exactly is “Love and Death” trying to say about these people? These events? this murder? The murder is depicted in gruesome graphic detail, with a clear lean towards Candy’s version of events, but aside from the feelings of abject horror, one gets the feeling that “Love and Death” doesn’t have a clear picture of what it’s about. wants to be apart from a scandalous soap opera-style story about the dark side of suburbia.
Olsen’s Candy is a sunny church-going woman, married with children. But one day, apparently on a whim, she decides to have an affair. Her potential lover is Allan Gore (no Al Gore jokes please), Betty’s husband, played by Jesse Plemons. It’s an unlikely pairing: Allan is socially inept and more than a little weird, and when Candy flatly tells him that she’s attracted to him, her only response is “Oh, okay.”
Finally, the couple decides to go ahead with the affair. They approach it pragmatically, coming up with rules and regulations that they plan to follow to make sure things go smoothly. However, after a while, Allan decides to cut things short and dedicate himself completely to Betty. Is this what inspired Candy to kill Betty? Was she jealous of being rejected? I don’t know, and watching this series gives you the feeling that no one else knows either. You start to feel like you’re rocking a magic 8 ball and getting “UNCLEAR ANSWER, ASK AGAIN LATER” results.
