Hello all! I hope each of you has had a wonderful holiday season. A brief message before I get started, because it’s been a little while since you last heard from me. I wouldn’t blame any of you - like the protagonists of the show I’m writing to you about - for wanting to landscape me in your backyard, given the amount of time I’ve taken to get this missive to you. Sisters Under the Mink is really important to me. I started it in January of this year, and it is meant as a space for me to explore the things / personalities / films I’m fascinated by that I don’t have room to explore elsewhere. Alas, I have been juggling so much in the past couple of months that I have found myself behind with the personal projects like Sisters, where I get to indulge all my favourite niches. I can only send my sincerest apologies, with the promise that I have a lot of fun stuff and, most importantly, more time blocked out to send this newsletter to you regularly in 2022. It’s onward and upward from here on out.
On the final day of this year, I wanted to talk to you about a TV miniseries called Landscapers, released early this month on HBO / Sky Atlantic. Directed by actor-filmmaker Will Sharpe and starring the inconceivably good pairing of Olivia Colman and David Thewlis, Landscapers is a four-parter that never outstays its welcome. It’s ostensibly a true crime story, based on a real British murder case, but it’s also so much more than that: a genuinely probing psychological sketch of two helplessly codependent people, a series that consistently sets up expectations only to knock them aside, and one that encourages us to see that we may be asking the wrong questions in the first place.
In 2014, middle-aged couple Christopher and Susan Edwards were convicted for the double murder of Susan’s parents. In 1998, the elderly parents were both shot at close range and buried in their own back garden, where they remained, until a relative of Christopher’s tipped off police. The story immediately interested me because it also may as well be in my back garden. I live outside of Nottingham, England (though I’m not from here) and in rather close proximity to the Nottinghamshire market town of Mansfield. That is where the violent events of Landscapers take place, as they did in the real-life case it is based on.
What can I say about Mansfield that isn’t already the butt of a joke? I don’t wish to be unkind about it, but it is more or less what it’s made out to be: a dreary working-class town in the post-industrial British midlands. Sometimes my husband and I go there when we’re bored to see a film at the ugly 90s multiplex; then we get back in the car and go home again. A friend of a friend once got stabbed in the leg with a screwdriver on a night out there, and when he told a policeman, the policeman shrugged. A few years ago its bus station was listed as one of the worst places in England. It’s named in a Babyshambles song. You get the idea. The Edwards and their so-called ‘Mansfield Murders’ don’t exactly knock the halo off the town’s head.
Writer Ed Sinclair and director Sharpe used real transcripts of the Edwards’ police interviews in custody to get a sense of the characters in the show. The results are surprising; seemingly soft-natured and utterly devoted to one another, both maintained their innocence. The pair claimed that Susan’s father sexually abused her as a child, and that in fact Susan’s mother shot her father. After an argument, she claimed, she then shot her mother in a crime of passion. The police and the courts believed otherwise, feeling that the crime was financially motivated and carried out in a calculated fashion by Christopher, who executed both of his in-laws. The Edwards, both currently serving out their 25 year sentences, have always denied this. When we meet the couple in Landscapers, they are hiding out in France on dwindling funds, but they seem harmless. David Thewlis, the memory of meaner and sharper roles faded somewhat as his angular features go doughy with age, is sensible and paternalistic, with Olivia Colman as his fretful housewife, always owl-like and peering as if awaiting her attendant misfortune. The tiny pleasures the two seem to share include a shared love of Golden Age Hollywood, particularly westerns; in real life, Susan Edwards really did shell out much of her money on old film posters and Gary Cooper memorabilia. When the couple give themselves up and enter police custody, the story opens out, accordion-like, into flashback visions and snippets as conjured by each person. (The two police, played by Kate O’Flynn and Samuel Anderson, are a highlight. Comically bumbling but sincere, they don’t seem like the type who’d shrug if you got stabbed with a screwdriver.) While the flashback versions of events present themselves, we all know they can’t all be true. But the show veers away from cheap narrative trickery or ‘victim or victimiser’ dichotomies, instead unravelling something far more tender.
More than once, Christopher describes his wife as ‘fragile’ and in need of his protection. Inevitably, wary viewers of true crime will look for faultlines in these stories; for suggestions that perhaps it was Susan all along who drove or pushed him to commit the murders of her parents, like some half-baked femme fatale. Instead, Landscapers implies something much sadder and plainer: she really is rather fragile. (Colman has the courage to play her as such, too.)
By the conclusion, Sharpe takes Landscapers to frankly audacious places. Susan, facing long-term separation from her beloved husband Christopher due to their imminent sentencing, sinks into a world of make-believe, aided by her love of Gary Cooper and High Noon. Sharpe uses black & white, superimposition, fantasy sequences, and other flourishes that most programmes under the banner of ‘true crime’ would eschew, deeming them too frivolous or inauthentic for the genre. That’s their mistake. By doing away with the staid formats, superficial rug-pulling and the like, Landscapers allows us to feel a strange empathy for these deeply fucked-up people. There’s something truly tragic about Susan’s romantic Hollywood-esque inventions, even in spite of the fact they may simply be a sociopath’s self-aggrandisement.
The frequent reference point - interspersed clips of High Noon - is the key to the show in more ways than one. Susan knows that this is no outlaw lovers-on-the-run movie, no Bonnie & Clyde. But she She and her husband are far from young and even further from glamorous. This is not murder committed through amour fou, prone to explosion or betrayal or sexual heat. This is a long, steady, have-a-tissue-for-your-runny-nose-dear marriage. True blue. Desperation and poverty don’t encourage them to go up in a blaze of glory. When they run out of money, they - in very pragmatically British fashion - decide to give themselves up to the cops.
Colman and Thewlis are both so excellent at telegraphing a deeply British sort of banality, workaday ordinariness that is also conjured through the show’s brilliant production design. You can practically smell the rising damp in their French flat, envision the tea cosies and the cardigans of their borderline postwar lifestyle. What year is it? Susan is obsessed with Gary Cooper, but it’s not just that: the husband and wife have a quaint, querelous way of communicating, their gender roles are highly traditional petit bourgeois, their style of dress old-fashioned and shabby with long wear. This is 1954 by way of 2014.
This quaintness is not used as a cheap tactic to reveal the ‘darkness’ beneath its characters. They are striving for the banal because it has, through various means - and then their own double homicide - been denied to them. Christopher and Susan are both gnarled inside, brutalised by trauma and abuse, and Susan’s childlike codependence is not a shrewd put-on but an expression of actual helplessness. Their yearning for absolute, dull normality, and their quiet, loving kindness to one another, is a performance of everything they hoped to have and never have been able to keep. Colman, whose acting prowess has never been in question, commits to playing a truly fragile woman who can’t exactly be called a victim. She’s the rare screen murderess whose reliance on a man as her partner-in-crime is not about sex, or exploitation, but weirdly enough, about love.
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Thank you for reading Sisters Under the Mink. If you enjoyed this, please do share it around. Happy New Year!