Elin Hilderbrand’s best-selling novel The Perfect Couple has all the ingredients for a convenient screen adaptation – a picturesque Nantucket setting, an easy-to-despise wealthy family, and a murder with no shortage of suspects. For Indian viewers, the Netflix series of the same name has an added enticement: the high-wattage cast includes Indian actor Ishan Khatter.
Khatter’s Shooter Dival is among the guests at a wedding that gets derailed by a crime. Khatter confidently plays a strong-and-silent hunk with an allure to him.
Shooter’s richie-rich friend Benji (Billy Howle) is marrying middle-class Amelia (Eve Hewson), a union that Benji’s flinty mother Greer (Nicole Kidman) openly dislikes. The naive Amelia’s equation with Benji – they seem to have little in common – is dubious enough at times to justify Greer’s suspicions.
Is Greer and her brood, especially her brash elder son Thomas (Jack Reynor) and Thomas’s catty wife Abby (Dakota Fanning), secretly relieved when Amelia’s pretty bridesmaid Merritt (Meghann Fahy) turns up dead?
Surely the investigation led by police chief Dan (Michael Beach) and detective Nikki (Donna Lynne Champlin) is less of a bother than the prospect of letting an unsuitable outsider into the family secrets?
Greer’s slow-moving, sharp-talking husband Tag (Liev Schreiber) seems to have the most to hide. He is an easy prime suspect, until others start raising their hands too.
Created by Jenna Lamia and directed by Susanna Bier, The Perfect Couple sometimes resembles an over-egged, multi-tiered wedding cake that is threatening to flop on one side. The limited series stretches over six episodes, long enough to stop caring about who the actual killer is, but also the length required to allow the characters to fully demean themselves.
Gossip flows like wedding party alcohol. Illicit hook-ups take place in plain view. Can dangerous intoxicants be far behind?
Revelations are being made right until the middle of the final episode, as though the creators suddenly took the time to look at their watches. A perfect cast animates an imperfect mystery that borders on farce in its privileging of all-round pettiness over focused plotting.
A rash of competitive spitefulness infects the guests in group situations. It’s in the private spaces that the characters truly unburden themselves. The scenes between Amelia and Shooter as well as Greer’s volatile relationship with her spouse Tag are the most revealing.
Among the standout performers is Liev Schreiber, whose perfectly judged Tag is at once infuriating and dangerously seductive. Nicole Kidman, despite distracting facelifts, is superb as a unlikable, nasty woman who is honest too in her own way. Kidman’s visage is less worrying than Isabelle Adjani, whose rubbery face constantly threatens to undermine her sly performance.
Dakota Fanning is wonderfully slinky as the heavily pregnant Abby, who despises Greer with the same fervour with which she tries to emulate her. Donna Lynne Champlin is a scene-stealer, her brusque Nikki the only normal person in a hothouse of nasties.
