Outrageous
I am perhaps not the best judge of this show. I might be a tad obsessed with the Mitfords. I have poured over everything these prolific sisters have written and therefore know their history. I know what came before and what came after so I don't know if someone who at the very least hasn't read Mary S. Lovell's biography from which this show is adapted would get it. Does Outrageous tell you enough that you understand the dynamic or are you like my Dad asking me questions every two seconds? But in fairness, my Dad asks me questions no matter what we're watching, I just knew all the answers this time around. On the other hand I might be the best judge of this show because I know they got it right. They chose the perfect inflection point in the lives of the Mitfords to show how this family fractured. How the fanaticism of fascism broke this family apart. And the thing is, you don't have to be a British family in the 1930s split by political ideology to understand this. Just look at America today, families are being torn apart, and not just because of evil policies by the government, but by political beliefs within families. This show isn't just relevant, it's so timely it's spooky. Bessie Carter is the perfect Nancy Mitford, she has her mom's hair, her Dad's nose, and the talent to match both. She's wry and exasperated, she is the voice of the audience wondering how her two beloved sisters, Diana and Unity, are drawn into Hitler's orbit. And, like a good sister, she tries to understand, she actually goes to one of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists rallies and she is horrified. How can people she love be drawn in by this hate. And I think the scene where Diana and Unity go to their first Nazi rally captures it all. It's terrifying. The fervor, the fanaticism, the fashionable branding. Really, the Nazis had the branding, which is why to this day the swastika brings such primal fear and hatred with it. But their expressions show how caught up these two siblings are in the Reich. Joanna Vanderham playing against type as Diana is luxuriously evil. She is genuinely shocked that people don't love what she stands for. As for Shannon Watson as Unity? She is sheer perfection. When reading about Unity it's hard to get a read on her because of what came after coloring her history. Unity was so split by her loyalties between her family in England and her love for Germany that she attempted to kill herself when war was officially declared. That hasn't happened here. Yet. God willing we get more seasons. But the enfeebled state in which her life continued after she put a bullet in her brain makes her be treated in a certain light by historians. She reads as developmentally disabled or autistic. She may very well have been autistic with her fanatical obsession with Hitler. She literally went to the same cafe Hitler went to day in and day out just for the chance of seeing him. And Shannon Watson plays this to Aryan superiority. She portrays that naivete combined with cruelty. A wide eyed innocence that publicly decries the Jews because it's what Hitler believes. She is someone you can totally see killing the family pet. Something this series totally baits you with. If this show has any faults it would be that, for the moment, they are downplaying how dangerous Mosley was, in particular the Battle of Cable Street which was handled so exquisitely in the reboot of Upstairs Downstairs, and there just aren't enough episodes. Six isn't nearly enough. More!
When I heard they were making a miniseries about the last woman executed in England I decided then and there that there would be no way I would watch this series. It would be too depressing. And then I decided to drop my BritBox subscription. I will never let a single day go to waste with a streaming subscription so I started to look for short shows to fill in this two week gap. After exhausting all the Agatha Christie I hadn't yet watched and hearing rave reviews about A Cruel Love, I caved. I blame Bessie Carter. I can do four episodes of about anything so I should have been able to handle this. Well, I should have stuck to my gut instincts. This was beyond depressing. A sort of fever dream of domestic abuse filmed with an almost Lynchian glamour of a woman battered and bloody and bruised. Yet there felt like there wasn't any grounding in reality. They just showed little vignettes of Ruth's life and her love affair with her "victim" David Blakely. Though I think "love" is a stretch. There was no love, cruel or otherwise here, it was people colliding into, using, and destroying each other in whatever way they could. The show seems to be wanting to say that it was the unspoken rules of society that Ruth dared to breach by aiming to better her life that lead to her death, which, while partially true, in that it lead to her being railroaded at trial, doesn't take into account her upbringing at all. She was raised to believe that all she deserved from life was abuse. She suffered at the hands of her father and then all her lovers, even the one "good guy" who basically turned this broken woman into a killer. And yet this is all told elliptically. In little flashes. The horrors of her childhood are mentioned in a throwaway line from her sister, who it should be noted was another victim of men having been raped and impregnated by their father. I just felt like this REAL LIFE STORY has something so important to say. It changed the law, as she was the last woman executed, and within a decade the death penalty was abolished. And yet the weight isn't there. It's more snippets of her degradation while still looking glamorous. There's no real history, what history I read about was thanks to the internet, and seriously, someone has to get onto how Ruth's mother was connected to the Cambridge Five. Now that's a true crime show I do want to watch. But this. This was a woman whose life was destroyed by men and her story is told and controlled by men. She doesn't really factor in until the end. She's about an eye for an eye and a stiff upper lip and not showing how her repeated abuse, her trauma, is what led her to this desperate act. She doesn't want to be seen as a victim and that is exactly how abusers get away with their crimes. They make their victims carry the blame and shame. Only at the end does she realize that she was sticking to a morality the others weren't playing by and by then it's too late to save herself. But maybe that's what makes this work, on some level, at least in the eyes of the reviewers who raved, because it was men who controlled, ruined, and then ended her life, and therefore, it's not really about her, it's about the patriarchy. Personally, I think it should have been about Ruth. But maybe I'm alone in this assessment.
