This is well acted, and the flashbacks didn't bother me like they did a lot of people. It's definitely way too long. Unlike a lot of the reviewers, I thought Chloe Sevigny and Dakota Fanning were excellent... and the guy who played Conrad III / Coco did a good job too.
Where I'm really critical is the creative license part of this. It just felt in super bad taste to me, and really taking liberties with the actual FACTS of the case... versus the stories Carter's defense team spun at the trial.
At the end of the day, I just really struggled with the vast amounts of what felt like full-blown projection by the writer(s) / director in terms of motivations of the involved persons, Michelle Carter in particular. Maybe I've dealt with more narcissists than anyone making this miniseries (difficult to believe in Hollywood, but okay), but this seems much less complicated than this film portrays.
It also makes me wonder how much that quack psychologist who testified for Carter in the trial influenced the director / writers. I don't find him remotely credible personally, and saw a number of psychologists calling into serious question his whole theory of "involuntary intoxication," which they more or less said has zero evidence to back it up, and is basically a made up condition only used in trials.
The naivete of assuming she was somehow innocent / sweet and this was all some "mistake" just really made my teeth grind. It also made me wonder how the filmmakers would have portrayed this if Carter had been, say, a teenaged black boy, or a teenaged Latina girl, etc. I really wish they'd gotten some real (no-agenda) psychologists to talk in more detail about Carter's mental state and what motivates personality types like hers. I wish they'd found at least one psychologist willing to talk about possible motives who DIDN'T testify for her case because he has some ax to grind with pharmaceutical companies. Not like I'm a fan of Rx companies, but he made it pretty clear he's a crusader and in other documentaries with the real man, he sounds painfully naive about Carter because she's young, polite, pretty, and, frankly, white.
The reality is, not everyone can be empathized with because not everyone has empathy. "Normal" people looking for a motivation they can relate to from a narcissist or someone with another antisocial personality disorder aren't going to be able to find one. This feels like a forced attempt to give her a motivation that "normal" people can relate to, and I'm sorry, but it's not credible. It feels made up, by people who AREN'T sociopaths and who are looking for a motivation that makes sense to THEM, not to someone who has this kind of disorder.
I feel like the narcissism of white women / girls (especially PRETTY white women / girls) is totally invisible most of the time. I think antisocial personality disorders are hard for non-professionals to spot anyway, due to the inability for normal people to discern motives that make no sense to them, but with women it's even MORE invisible.
It's just another form of sexism, frankly. As a white woman myself, I've suffered at the hands of female narcissists and it's shocking how many people just refuse to believe a pretty white suburban girl / woman would do something like that. I'm here to tell you, some of them do. Some who pretend to be feminists, or Christians, or whatever other guise they decide to hide behind do. I don't know if Carter is one of those, but frankly, I find it easier to believe than this convoluted attempt to find meaning where there just doesn't seem to be any. It strikes me as a huge stretch, and more about the writer / director than the actual perpetrator of this crime. Sometimes the simplest answer really is the right one.
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