‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’ Review: Despite a Terrifying Javier Bardem, Ryan Murphy’s Netflix True-Crime Saga Falls Flat
For 35 minutes in the middle of its nine-episode run, Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story does something special.
The fifth chapter, titled “The Hurt Man,” was written by series co-creator Ian Brennan and directed by Michael Uppendahl. It’s a single-shot conversation between Erik Menendez (Cooper Koch) and his attorney Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor). The camera begins several feet behind Abramson and inches imperceptibly closer to Erik as he recalls his history of sexual abuse at the hands of his tyrannical father, José (Javier Bardem).
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It’s a stunt, but the entire show is a stunt, so why quibble? The writing is precise, uncomfortably explicit and haunting. The formal simplicity serves its purpose, building breathless tension and putting a spotlight on Koch, who strips himself emotionally bare. We see the impact that the expurgation of these memories is having on Erik and, because we cannot see Abramson’s face, we hear through her voice that she is even more moved.
Viewers are supposed to be as shattered by this account as Abramson is, but the drama simultaneously leaves a modicum of doubt on the veracity of the nightmarish memory. Erik was, as we’ve been told previously and we’re going to be told multiple times more, an aspiring actor who once proved his bona fides with a passionate Shakespearean monologue. There’s no concrete suggestion that Erik is lying, but if you’re predisposed to think of him as a master manipulator, this segment won’t dissuade you.
Everything Monsters ostensibly wants to do — balancing layers of skepticism with a yearning for empathy — is captured in that one exceptional episode and, maddeningly, only in brief moments and performances elsewhere. In many ways, it’s similar to how Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, also created by Brennan and Ryan Murphy, professed to not wanting to be a exploitative portrait of the notorious serial killer, but only truly exhibited anything other than voyeuristic gawking in the middle of the season with “Silenced” and “Cassandra.” Most of the rest of that series was well-acted trash.
I don’t think Monsters is as overtly trashy as Monster. But it’s unjustifiably long at nine hours, and it closes with two chapters that are poorly structured, thematically flat and far, far more one-sided in their approach to the Menendez brothers, their professed victimization and guilt than felt convincing.
For those who don’t remember the case or 2017’s NBC miniseries Law & Order True Crime or any of the other countless documentaries and news magazine features about it: In 1989, Live Entertainment CEO José Menendez and wife Kitty (Chlo? Sevigny) were viciously murdered in their Beverly Hills mansion. Sons Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and Erik initially claimed they’d returned home to the gory crime scene, pointing fingers at a possible mafia hit.
Under bizarre circumstances involving their possibly unlicensed psychologist (Dallas Roberts’ Dr. Oziel), the brothers confessed to the murders. Under differently bizarre circumstances involving Oziel’s crystal-loving mistress (Leslie Grossman’s Judalon), the confessions became public knowledge. The Menendez brothers were arrested and became globally notorious.
The media circus around the brothers, the crime and their trial exploded around Erik and Lyle’s claims that they’d been abused and sexually assaulted by their father, and that they’d killed him to protect their own lives and killed their mother over her complicity.
As trials of the century go, it was O.J. before O.J. easily usurped it. In fact, the football star turned suspected murderer plays a small role as part of the series’ completely ineffective effort to make some sort of big-picture observation about law and order in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Simply name-dropping O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, Rodney King and Zsa Zsa Gabor is not the same as building out a meaningful thesis, however. Monsters does much better with the cheap pop culture campiness of the time, with Reebok Pumps, Milli Vanilli and an anachronistic Vanilla Ice montage playing a key role.
Murphy probably shouldn’t have returned to such close geographic and temporal proximity to the tremendous The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story — and, indeed, the two shows have many points of overlap, all of which favor American Crime Story.
But what’s more confusing, honestly, is how Netflix’s Ryan Murphy and FX’s Ryan Murphy allowed for Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story and American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez to premiere within two days of each other. Placed directly side-by-side, these two dramas about the intersection of wealth, celebrity, murder and sexual abuse (with undertones tied to repressed homosexuality) serve up similar attempts at structural flexibility, similarly leering approaches to their doomed, impressively ripped antiheroes and similarly bloated running times of the sort that only somebody with Murphy’s clout could possibly get away with.
The best I can say about this dual release is that watching Monsters gave me more appreciation for American Sports Story, with its scathing takedown of the way the NCAA and NFL harness the aggression of young men, turn it into profit and then spit the men and their violence back into society.
Monsters is less nuanced. Frequently it becomes a gross teeter-totter of credulity that, depending on the moment, runs the risk of cheapening either two brutal deaths or a decade of molestation, all in the name of rehashing a case that has been amply rehashed over the years. I think it’s possible to do a show with this title and treat the identity of the actual eponymous monsters as something ambiguous and fungible. In fact, I think “The Hurt Man” does it well, and the two episodes around it — the Paris Barclay-directed “Kill or Be Killed” and the Max Winkler-helmed “Don’t Dream It’s Over” — have beats that will leave viewers properly conflicted. The more heavy-handed opening and closing entries, however, work neither as exercises in complex storytelling nor as period mysteries.
Mostly, Monsters just trying to have it both ways — or, really, more than two “ways.” Are the monsters the brothers? The parents? Are we the monsters for obsessing over cases like this? Are reporters and storytellers like Dominick Dunne, well played by Nathan Lane, the monsters for feeding off of these narratives and too often dehumanizing the people involved even when they know better?
And where does that put Murphy and his frequent collaborators, churning out so many tales of this type that overlap is unavoidable and future topics are already lined up for years to come? I don’t think Monsters grapples with its own complicity at all, and it’s much the weaker for that lack of introspection.
At least the acting is good?
Bardem is terrifying in a performance that’s wildly outsized but offers enough subtlety to position his howling patriarch as both a chilling villain and as a victim himself — possibly just a cog in cycles of abuse that may represent the saga’s deepest tragedy. I don’t think the show “gets” Kitty at all, but in Sevigny’s inscrutable interpretation, that’s part of the point. Kitty’s become a footnote in an awful history, and that at least feels sad.
Chavez has the more volcanic of the two titular brothers and plays Lyle with an intensity that bursts off the screen at times, occasionally in ways that are intentionally quite funny. But Koch is the real revelation, and “The Hurt Man” should have him in line for an Emmy nomination next summer.
I also quite liked Graynor, whose increased frustration and burgeoning uncertainty as the case stretches on and on became one of the few things I actually appreciated about the final installments. If nothing else, she’s much more natural as a curly haired attorney named “Abramson” than Edie Falco was in the NBC mini.
Over nine tiring hours (and I’m not just saying that because I watched the entire season in one day, since no screeners were provided to critics), Monsters raises plenty of provocative issues. Yet all it ultimately settles on is, “frequently it’s hard to know the truth,” illustrating its point by staging and restaging key moments in the timeline. I get it. I just don’t think it’s done smartly or in a way that offers illumination.
As Lyle’s attorney, played by Jess Weixler, observes of her client, “It’s not that I don’t believe those stories are true. It’s like I don’t believe them the way he tells them.”
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