Hello from the Berlin Film Festival, where everything is gray and strange! I’ll have a dispatch about that experience on Monday, but in the meantime here are some thoughts about stuff that’s out this week. 

Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette (FX, February 12) 

One of the most under-the-radar families in America is the Kennedys of Massachusetts and New York. Who are they? What has happened to them over the last century? No one is really quite sure, and yet we do know that they exist, occasionally hearing their names in reports on politics and high society. Finally, a television series has endeavored to give us a peek at this supposed dynasty’s inner workings. 

Well, okay, there have maybe been a few other pieces of media about the Kennedys, but Love Story does, in a strange and perhaps troubling way, make a case for its existence. As its subtitle suggests, Love Story, from producer Ryan Murphy and creator Connor Hinds, concerns the late son of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, the American prince who took a chic wife before they both died, along with Bessette’s sister, when their small plane crashed near Martha’s Vineyard in 1999. It’s a sad tale, one that sold us on the poetic tragedy of the Kennedy Curse before John’s cousin Robert recently reminded us that it can also be crassly malevolent. 

One sees Murphy’s name attached to this show and worries that it will be another of his leering excavations of pop history, the serial killer here being a dynastic jinx rather than, say, Charlie Hunnam wearing a lady mask in a farmhouse. And there are elements of the show, which traces the courtship and troubled marriage of Kennedy and Bessette, that do cross into that kind of sensationalized prying. Scenes involving a soon-to-be-dead Jackie (Naomi Watts, doing a good job despite some clunky writing) are far too rote recitations of known Kennedy woes, complete with a lonely dance to Camelot that is lifted right from Pablo Larraín’s film Jackie. Really, any time the conversation turns to the big family legacy of it all, the series wobbles.

But there is another side of the series, one mostly found in its first half, that achieves something rather striking. In sumptuously grainy photography set to the melancholy breezes of composer Bryce Dessner’s score, the show’s early episodes tease out a budding relationship in compellingly wistful, sexy fashion. The New York of the 1990s is not conjured up so much by elaborate period detail, but by a pervasive mood, a sense of summery possibility as a city lurches out of a dark era and toward the gloss and excitement and consumer optimism that would birth the likes of Sex and the City, which in turn gave way to an entirely new age in New York’s history. 

There is Carolyn at the center of it, blonde and aloof but not exactly cold. She’s played with impressive restraint by Sarah Pidgeon, so memorable in her Tony-nominated role as an other-world Stevie Nicks in Stereophonic. Pidgeon may be accused of acting flatly here, but I think she’s on to something really interesting, locating the distinctly alluring cool of women like Bessette: understanded in their glamour, sophisticated and distant but not exactly stuck behind museum glass. Pidgeon’s mix of good-times earthiness and elegant poise captures a memory many of us hold of Bessette, as an ultimately all-too-mortal being who was perhaps divinely designed to be a fitting, if formidable match for all of John-John’s privilege, expectation, and scrutiny. 

If Paul Kelly, a hunk they found wandering in the Canadian wilderness just as he was about to quit acting (this is sort of biographically accurate), is not exactly a dynamo in the Kennedy role, his bland charisma does articulate something that very well may have been true about the real man: one can sense the fattedness of his pampered position in the world, the parts of him that have atrophied or perhaps never developed at all that might otherwise have told him that there were limits to his life. As played by Kelly, Kennedy is a puppyish, slightly bratty dilettante, aimlessly trying to manage his family name while he waits for the call of higher political purpose. It’s convincing, even if Kelly lets the Canada slip out too often. 

Together, Kelly and Pidgeon render the private but intense supernova of this doomed affair: how heady and risky it was for Bessette to let herself get swept up in a vast machine while falling in love with one particular man, and how thrilling it was for Kennedy to find something (or, someone) that he felt he’d discovered all on his own. It proves intoxicating, all the way through their reclusive Cumberland Island wedding. 

What comes after that is more plodding. Poor Bessette can’t handle the demands of being an American Princess Di (a parallel that the show heavily, but not unpersuasively, draws in one episode) and it leads to fighting and an eventual estrangement from her husband. I haven’t seen the last episode yet, but we of course know where this is headed. That inevitability, once an ineffably sad thing in the distance, starts to weigh on the show in a bad way, as does a lot of awkward expositional language that lays out the two sides of this marital war in thick, starchy brushstrokes. 

Still, there is much to savor, with a slight hint of guilt, in this lushly mounted and sometimes disarmingly delicate series. Dree Hemingway does a great approximation of a jilted Darryl Hannah, Grace Gummer is a suitably tightly wound Caroline Kennedy, Constance Zimmer keenly locates the bitter loss of all this as Bessette’s worried mother, Alessandro Nivola finds interesting shading as Bessette’s one-time boss Calvin Klein. Throughout, Dessner’s gorgeous music is complemented by a shrewdly curated playlist of ‘90s tunes, from Sade to Blind Melon to Portishead to Mazzy Star. We are gently, nostalgically carried back to a moment on the edge of a seismic shift, in which two young lovers imagine a bright, vast future ahead of not only themselves but of their generation and the ones following behind them. How terribly wrong they were, in so many ways, but what a mighty idea it was for a little while. 

Wuthering Heights (in theaters February 13)

I’ve already written in full about this movie, but re-reading my review I can’t believe I forgot to mention the costumes, particularly those created for Margot Robbie’s Cathy Earnshaw. Director Emerald Fennell has instructed designer Jacqueline Durran to put Robbie in a senseless array of outfits, from bucolic milkmaid to a cellophane dress that is half Josie Grossie thinking she’s going to prom and half Evelyn Couch wrapped in Saran for her husband. It’s more evidence of this movie’s baffling ugliness, a posh Public-school conviction that gaudiness can be so profound and insistent that it circles around to refinement. (See the elaborate fascinators the richies of England wear to royal weddings, perhaps. Or watch any number of exceedingly wealthy upper crust Britons’ home-tour videos on YouTube and note the garish, defiant clashing of patterns.) 

Anyway, just an additional thought about this movie, which is out this week and is, sigh, perhaps worth a look if you can afford it. Because it really is the buzziest movie of the month and probably should be confronted at some point. You could wait, but then you’d miss all the discourse! And wouldn’t it be horrible to miss out on DISCOURSE?!

Okay, that’s it for now. I’ll see you again tomorrow for Traitors and then I’ll spend the weekend devouring Berlin so I can report back to you. Well, I might not devour it exactly because I have a cold and the weather is crummy, but I’ll try to have something interesting to say about it next week. Until then, happy viewing and safe flying.