One marriage, two reviews: Landscapers

Landscapers. Photo / Supplied

Greg and Zanna consider the construction of reality.

SCORES
Acting (Olivia Colman): 5
Hubris (Olivia Colman's husband): 5

SHE SAW

I was quite enamoured with the opening sequence of Landscapers: Old footage, black and white, of an historic building. "Oh! Washington!" I exclaimed wrongly. It was the Pantheon in Paris. Then the words "In 2014 Susan & Christopher Edwards were convicted of murder and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison" appeared on screen. I turned to Greg: "That is not what I thought this was going to be about. I thought it was about some lovely landscape gardeners." Simple but significant mistake.

The "black comedy" stars Olivia Colman and David Thewlis as the convicted murderers who became the focus of an investigation when the bodies of Susan's parents were discovered buried in their own back garden - hence the title. We'd just watched Inventing Anna on Netflix. That series opens with the words: "This whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up." One of our favourite shows, The Great, has an asterisk next to the title with the disclaimer "an occasionally true story".

Landscapers opens with "this is a true story", then "true" fades to black. When historians look back at this era in film and television, they will rightfully surmise that this was a period in which people had a fraught relationship with the truth.

Underpinning the theme of playing with the facts, the series dips in and out of a type of magical realism in which the sets are like sound stages on which Susan and Chris construct their version of events. It's fun to watch and quite theatrical, if at times a bit excessive. It's walking a fine line between creative genius and total unbearability and I think it's probably the brilliant performances of Colman and Thewlis that save it from the latter.

The series was created by Colman's husband, Ed Sinclair, who's done almost nothing else and has been quoted as saying he specifically wrote it to give Colman some material that would really show off her acting chops. It takes incredible hubris to decide you're the man to write the role that will truly showcase your Oscar, Emmy, Golden Globe and Bafta-winning wife's talents having only ever written one short film - I mean we've all written one short film. Still, he appears to have pulled it off quite well, which is frankly annoying. Or possibly inspiring? Perhaps the only thing standing between me and my magnum opus is Greg's acting ability. That's my version of the truth at least, until I'm dead and buried in my backyard.

HE SAW:

True crime: we love it and can't get enough of it but it's always much the same thing:
A criminal or two, a couple of cops, some moral conundra and a narrative propelled and sustained by questions of guilt and innocence, typically concluding with a court case. It's a can't-lose business case for the television- and film-makers, who know it will generate an audience no matter what and are therefore disincentivised from spending more money than necessary producing anything that might reasonably be called art.

The real-life crime at the heart of Landscapers is so weird and the relationship between the putative criminals so emotionally and logistically complex, and the actors playing those criminals so brilliant, that the show is even more of a surefire hit. The creators could have asked Olivia Colman and David Thewlis to sit in front of an unadorned backdrop reading an unedited transcript of the original police interviews and that alone would have made for hours and hours of gripping television.

So it's brave and seemingly a little crazy that they chose instead to go quite far in the other direction, doing odd things like using the literal framing device of a theatrical set to recreate some of the events on and around the night of the crime. In making obvious and explicit the highly constructed nature of the show they make clear what they're not doing, i.e. telling a true story. As they tell us at the start, the truth of what happened is contested ground, and as they eventually lead us to ask, what is "truth" anyway?

In Landscapers, 15 years has passed between the crime and the arrests of the criminals. Fifteen years ago, I was depressed, in a dying relationship, working in a suffocating job that was going nowhere. The following year I changed jobs and not long after that I met Zanna and everything changed for the better. That is the truth and I know it's the truth but I also know, because Zanna often reminds me, it's not the truth at all.

We all like to think we're good people acting rationally but we spend most of our lives being buffeted by circumstance and acting primarily on our emotions, then attempting to retrofit rationality and goodness. The stories we tell ourselves and others about ourselves are far closer to theatre than they are to testimony, and that becomes truer the longer we tell them, until the truth is just a memory - and probably not a very accurate one. This is what Landscapers forces us to notice, and this is how and why it's art.

Landscapers is now streaming on Neon.