Jessica Biel is ‘Candy,’ a disadvantaged housewife arrested after hitting her friend with an ax 41 times

Candy, Hulu’s five-episode true-crime miniseries set in the suburbs of Texas in the early 1980s raises two questions about its eponymous inspiration, Candace Montgomery. One: What made a beautiful housewife and summer vacation Bible study leader use an ax to stab her friend Betty Gore to death? And second: How the hell did she convince the jury that she hit her friend 41 times in self-defense?

Jessica Biel, once the unruly daughter of Camdens on 7th Heaven and then the criminal with the same name above Sinner, now plays another character who is conflicted about faith. A choir singer and Sunday school teacher, Candace Montgomery is a cheery mainstay in her community beloved by both children and adults. She’s the perfect shield for Betty Gore, a saturnine disciplinarian who lost her job as a teacher because she couldn’t keep her class in line without them all being detained. (Many times.) Melanie Lynskey, peeking out from under a degraded bowl-cut wig, plays a sad dead sack with a mixture of bitterness and exhaustion. So, why did Candy kill her?

Both Candy and Betty seem to capture the intimacy of their marriages with kind but lethargic men. Candy’s efforts to rekindle the fire with her devout, devout husband, Pat (Timothy Simons), continue to go up in smoke, leaving her to vent her sexual frustrations in the bathtub – at least. is until she finally decides to marry her lover. Betty, meanwhile, spends half of her screen time begging her husband, Allan (Pablo Schreiber), not to leave her often for weekend business trips. To her, the house was like a prison cell – dark and full of noises she couldn’t control. (Though in this case, the riot was just… children are children.)

As sweet as she is on the outside, Candy’s sugar coating conceals a toxic mess of repressed anger and frustration no different from the outbursts of anger at her friend. While Betty wore her bitterness up her sleeve, Candy hid it at her core.

Jessica Biel replaced Elisabeth Moss as the star of the film last year, and it’s hard to imagine what the movie could have looked like with The story of the maid and Shining girls star in its center. For this work, however, Biel felt like the perfect choice to play Candace — charismatic, dizzying, and wild. She took the lead with gentle smiles and cut them off with strange glances in the distance; Her overly busy housewife character is dodgy and housewife but also athletic and intense.

The rest of the cast takes a similar punch. Lynskey, who has had a while since Yellow jacket explode, swings between sympathetic, pitiful, and disappointing as Betty; Schreiber’s Allan seems to both love and hate his wife, and Orange is the new black‘s resident Porn’ Stache is fun to play as a poor widow. (Come because Allan says he doesn’t know how to change a diaper but his engineering degree calculus will help him figure that out and stay in the moment he finds out what happens when you put it in the dishwasher with regular old dish soap.)

Simons quietly steals the show in every scene he’s in as Pat, a lovable love interest whose fatherly intuition is much sharper than his wife’s insight. And once Law & Order: SVU ADA Raul Esparza is an inspiring choice to play Candy’s attorney, Don Crowder — someone she knows from church and who the show implies knowing Candy is probably a little closer to what they wanted anyhow. No one in the courtroom noticed.

Fan Sinnersaw Biel play another haunted killer character in the first season, would recognize Candyits approach to the elements of real crime. Like the US TV series, the Hulu miniseries takes a “why” approach to its core mystery — a helpful tactic that ensures all viewers, who already know the details of the show, Montgomery’s murder of Gore and those who don’t know, will find themselves scheming. Creator Nick Antosca (Law) and Robin Veith (The Expanse) blends slow crime drama with camp flirtatious humor but never fully embraces it.

However, during its five episodes, Candy hints of a more solid series — or perhaps, a TV movie — could have been. Early scenes like a steamy volleyball game with furry stares and thigh-high punches are filmed with muted humor that, over time, unfortunately gives way to foot-judgement scenes. become more. I find myself always wishing that the show had allowed itself an extra inch of latitude — just a little more humor here, a little energy there. In the absence of real stress, Candy tends to spin its wheel – a slightly sour note on another recipe that is sweet.