The good news about The Perfect Couple, Netflix’s adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s novel about a death at a wedding weekend, is that the finale is a blast.
The pacing is zippy. The solution is satisfying — hard to guess in the moment, yet perfectly logical in retrospect. And the tone hits a wickedly funny groove as the starry cast, finally liberated from the obligation to play their characters’ cards close to the chest, dive headlong into snark, cruelty or heretofore undiscovered levels of DGAF.
The Perfect Couple
Alas, the bad news about The Perfect Couple is … most of the rest of it. Though it’s not an especially long watch, at just under six hours, the road leading up to that ending feels so interminable that I cannot, in clear conscience, recommend anyone take this journey just for the destination.
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Besides, huge swaths of the series feel repurposed from better series you may have seen already. Billy Howle, of FX’s superb Under the Banner of Heaven, once again plays a man (Benji) who brings an unsuspecting normal woman into the fold of his openly disapproving, suspiciously close-knit and ultimately toxic clan. It’s just that this time, his family’s problem is not that they’re too religious but too rich — “‘kill someone and get away with it’ rich,” per one bystander, if not quite “kidnap-rich,” per another.
Benji’s love, Amelia, is played by Eve Hewson, who should know from potentially murderous relations thanks to her role on Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters. The happy couple have gathered with his family in Nantucket for their wedding, to be attended by still more vaguely familiar-seeming characters — including Meghann Fahy as Amelia’s bestie Merritt, a sun-tanned charmer whose effervescence conceals a deeper sadness, not very unlike her Emmy-nominated turn in HBO’s The White Lotus.
Then there’s the Nicole Kidman of it all. Her Greer, Benji’s mother, is yet another gorgeous but brittle matriarch ripped from the bestseller shelves, whose seemingly perfect family shows cracks when someone is killed and/or disappeared in their expensive coastal town. This is a role Kidman already perfected in HBO’s Big Little Lies, and while Amazon’s classier Expats proved she can still mine new gold from this archetype, The Perfect Couple feels like Kidman on autopilot. Even the revelations at the end, juicy though they are, only do so much to dispel that impression.
The premise is a fairly boilerplate mystery — a body is found the morning of Amelia and Benji’s ceremony, though the show will take its time revealing who it belongs to — executed in disappointingly standard fashion. The Perfect Couple’s resemblance to all of those other series does it few favors when, for the vast majority of its six episodes, it struggles to find any voice of its own.
Though it can be funny, particularly when it borrows from Big Little Lies the conceit of a Greek chorus of witnesses who seem more excited for the opportunity to gossip than they are concerned about the possibility of a killer in their midst, it’s not consistently sharp enough to work as a satire. It pokes halfheartedly at larger themes about the impossibility of truly understanding a marriage or a family from the outside — the title refers to Greer and her husband, Tag (Liev Schreiber), whose idealized marriage is a key element of the marketing for her bestselling series of mystery novels. (Yes, it’s all very meta.) But it doesn’t dig deep enough to truly reveal either of their hearts, let alone excavate any fresh insights.
Director Susanne Bier (HBO’s The Undoing, another in the Kidman-as-unhappy-white-lady crime canon) gives the series an awards-bait gloss to go with its high-profile cast. A favorite trick of hers is to zoom in real close on a person’s eye or mouth as if asking us to think, really think, about what might be going on inside. But such games are a poor substitute for actual character development. Hamstrung by the need to keep us guessing for six whole hours, when the plot clearly cries out for the efficiency of a two-hour film, the scripts render most of the Winburys and their associates too one-note to even seem worth getting to know.
A blessed few manage to make an impression anyway. I enjoyed Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Donna Lynne Champlin as Detective Henry, a mainlander whose unfussy intelligence and wry sense of humor provide a welcome contrast from the Winburys’ clueless entitlement — as well as her platonic chemistry with Michael Beach’s Officer Carter, who warms to this outsider bit by bit. On the polar opposite end, I was tickled by Dakota Fanning as Amelia’s prospective sister-in-law, Abby, a mean girl who delivers her cruelest jabs in her most honeyed tones. Filled though it is with mutual loathing, her marriage to Benji’s big brother Tom (Jack Reynor) — also a bully, but a far blunter and cruder one — might be the most explicable romance of the entire series.
Abby may not run that deep as a character, but Fanning tears into her with an over-the-top gusto that’s equal parts terrifying and hilarious. If her performance seems to come from a completely different show than the one Kidman seems to be on most of the time — honestly, I’d rather watch Fanning’s.
As it turns out, The Perfect Couple would seem to agree with me. Late in the series, a family friend (Isabelle Adjani) suggests to Amelia that there’s a reason Greer seems to hate her so much. “When people have spent their whole life caring about what others say, they cannot stand to see someone …” she trails off in French before getting to the point: “It reminds them of their wasted life.”
Too much of the series feels like it’s trying to be something it’s not: a prestige drama, a probing character study, a class commentary, a searing portrait of a family in crisis. No wonder it feels like such a sigh of relief when the finale simply relinquishes all of that and embraces what it was always meant to be: pure popcorn fun, with not much more on its mind than the desire to entertain and amuse. A shame it takes what feels like a lifetime to get there.
