On Screen: “Love Story”
Love Story
Ryan Murphy’s “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” is a cautionary Cinderella fable embellished with trimmings of “The Crown” and wrapped with nods to Hallmark movies. But — unlike a Hallmark movie — this has a tragic ending.
The nine-part anthology series begins on July 16, 1999, as Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon) lingers over a manicure, keeping her impatient husband John (Paul Anthony Kelly) and older sister Lauren (Sydney Lemmon) waiting on an airstrip to take off in a small passenger plane — piloted by John — for a family wedding on Martha’s Vineyard.
Flash back seven years to 1992, when chic, captivating Carolyn was working as an ambitious sales associate for Calvin Klein (Alessandro Nivola), who first spied her folding sweaters in a Klein boutique in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
At the same time, John, who just failed the Bar exam a second time, was desperately trying to hold onto his job as an assistant district attorney and maintain a romantic relationship with actress Daryl Hannah (Dee Hemingway), whom his manipulative mother, Jackie (Naomi Watts), allegedly disliked intensely.
As happens so often in romantic stories, Carolyn and John ‘meet cute.’ She’s cleverly coy and he’s cooly curious. They seem incompatible but chemistry takes over, igniting a tumultuous courtship and high-profile wedding.
While John invents George, a glossy magazine about politics, impeccable Carolyn is unable to cope with the necessity of prioritizing appearances over relationships, an integral part of the perpetual press scrutiny that accompanies fame in contemporary celebrity culture.
Created by Connor Hines, based on Elizabeth Beller’s 2004 biography “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” it’s slow and repetitive. Sarah Pidgeon acquits herself admirably but it’s obvious that Paul Anthony Kelly is — first and foremost — a male model who bears a remarkable resemblance to the then-Sexiest Man Alive.
Perhaps the most neglected people in this tragedy were Carolyn’s divorced, Greenwich, CT-based parents, William and Anne Marie Bessette, who lost two daughters at sea. In a wrongful death lawsuit, Anne was awarded $15 million from the Kennedy estate after federal investigators concluded that pilot error and inexperience caused the crash.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” is a superficial, sycophantic 6, streaming on Hulu and F/X — with new episodes every Thursday night.
Susan Granger is a product of Hollywood. Her natural father, S. Sylvan Simon, was a director and producer at M.G.M. and Columbia Pictures. Her adoptive father, Armand Deutsch, produced movies at M.G.M.
As a child, Susan appeared in movies with Abbott & Costello, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Margaret O’Brien, and Lassie. She attended Mills College in California, studying journalism with Pierre Salinger, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism.