The Love That Dare Not Axe Murder Its Name
by Jason Adams
In the small city of Fall River, Massachusetts in the year of our lord (somebody's lord, anyway) 1892 the father and step-mother of Lizzie Andrew Borden were found hacked about the head and face with a hatchet until dead - the nursery rhyme says they got forty and forty-one whacks respectively but father got eleven while the late Mrs. Borden got a few more, if not quite twenty. The next eleven months after that moment, until the end of Lizzie's trial in June of 1893, were spent speaking of little else - a well-to-do lady murderess! What a lark!
The case of Lizzie has held a dark fascination ever since, inspiring countless plays and rhymes and episodes of Law & Order: SVU, but it's been an especially Borden-full couple of years now what with Christina Ricci's Lifetime-movie-turned- miniseries-turned-movie and now Craig William Macneill's feature film simply called Lizzie. Out this weekend and starring Chloë Sevigny, Lizzie injects a timely dose of patriarchal oppression and same-sex repression to the mix, theorizing that Lizzie was caught up (not to mention just plain caught) in a love affair with the Borden's maid Bridget (played by Kristen Stewart).
If the life not lived between Lizzie and Bridget represents a road not traveled thanks to the impossible time and place that the women found themselves in, the film Lizzie feels like a venture in the right direction...