Candy review: Needless, sexist true crime strikes again

Jessica Biel’s performance is good – she slips between canned charm and quiet desperation as the murderous Candy Montgomery. But why has this show been made in the first place?

“Based on a true story” used to be a titillating phrase when it appeared on screen – the promise that what you were about to watch would be all the more chilling because it really happened. A story so compelling you couldn’t make it up.

These days, those same five words fill me with absolute dread. Not just because they appear too often – which they do – but because they almost always indicate that what you’re about to watch is based on a real crime. A story so tragic you wish it was made up.

Candy, a needless, sexist five-part miniseries from Disney+, is based on a true story. In 1980, in the sprawling Dallas suburb of Wylie, Texas, a wife and mother named Betty Gore was struck with an axe 41 times and left for dead. The woman who did it was Betty’s husband’s former lover, Candy Montgomery. For reasons never explained, the miniseries tells Candy’s story.

Jessica Biel, hiding behind Eighties bug-eye spectacles and a closely cropped perm, plays the murderous if effervescent mother who seemingly has it all – a husband who never forgets a greeting card holiday, kids who laugh at the breakfast table, a group of loyal gal pals to kvetch to. She goes to the same church as Betty, played by Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey behind a curtain of blunt fringe. Betty is Melanie’s opposite, a person so dour that other parishioners joke about whether she loves even her own children. At first, I thought Betty might be suffering from postpartum depression, but even in flashbacks she hardly smiles.

Created by Robin Veith and Nick Antosca, who worked on 2019’s “based on a true story” miniseries The Act, Candy fails to make much of the duality it takes such pains to draw out. But women – even ones this thinly drawn – aren’t what they seem. Sad sack Betty takes in foster children. Picture-perfect Candy reads smutty novels and sleeps with Betty’s husband. The point, I guess, is that you never know who’ll turn out to be an axe murderer.

That illuminating revelation is as far as the series goes in its attempt to justify telling this horrible true story from the point of view of Betty’s killer. When halfway through the series Candy transitions to a courtroom drama, Betty shows up to haunt the proceedings. I welcomed the weird intrusion simply as some assurance that Candy hadn’t entirely forgotten the real-life person at the centre of this tragedy.

The performances work. Biel is dexterous as Candy, slipping easily between her canned charm and her quiet desperation Betty isn’t given backstory enough to support Lynskey’s fine turn as a woman so scared to be alone she calls her husband’s boss to object to his work schedule. For a series that devotes time to developing feminist themes about traditional family structures and desire, its women spend undue time quibbling over who threw who a baby shower.

If you really like true-crime dramas, you’ll probably like this one. But if you like true stories – ones that create layered versions of real people and use them to illustrate something universal about the human experience – Candy won’t hit the sweet spot.