THE BROTHERS DID IT

SERIES TAKES NARRATIVE THROUGH THE PROVOCATION DEFENSE

By PETER T. BUSCH

The Lyle and Erik Menendez story gets spun into a tale about sibling monsters.

Director Carl Franklin goes into the details, right from the start of episode one, about the dysfunctional ultrarich Los Angeles society.

Javier Bardem plays the stern patriarch, Jose Menendez, who rules his family with an iron fist, and if you believe his sons, verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

The hook is that Lyle and Erik Menendez admit to killing their father and mother with recently purchased shotguns, but the brothers claim the murders were in self defence. The series becomes a compelling watch

Chloe Sevigny plays Kitty Menendez as someone who bought into her husband’s ‘love your family with a stick in your hand’ mantra.

Cooper Koch as Erik, and Nicholas Chavez as Lyle, spend a lot of screen time together partly to show they were so closely bonded as to be able to agree to commit the deadly deed together, and in part to show how the brothers were also different.

The series opens with the brothers still free, spending their deceased parents’ multi-million dollar fortune in Los Angeles and around the world. The brothers had been taught well, and remained nasty rich, still living on the family estate where their parents were murdered.

A score wends in behind the dialogue from the beginning to the end, leaving a kind of eery taunt, as if to say, ‘here these kids had everything to look forward to but did everything wrong to spoil their futures’.

Lyle and Erik even do a series of home break-ins for money, instead of using their father as an example and concentrating on going to Ivy League colleges and getting started on their careers.

Jose, the consummate Alpha male patriarch, is not so upset about them stealing from their rich neighbours. The patriarch was more upset about them getting caught, and that he had to bail them out be repaying his victims and explaining to the police that he would give them his heavy hand as punishment.

The Menendez’s are a dysfunctional family with the snobby rich dynamic that seems to accelerate everything horribly, such as when one of the brothers is told he cannot marry the girl at the door because she is a gold digger, or one brother having a toupee that the other brother does not know about, eventhough the siblings appear to be so close as to do everything together.

Franklin and the other episodic directors put this whole surreal layer over everything – with continual flash backs filling in the story about how they got to where they were, which is life in prison, just a bit shy of death row.

The script describes how the brothers are twisted into choosing the other brother over their parents.

And one episode discusses how easy it is for people to buy firearms in California.

There is left this almost comic book layer that shows that the brothers just cannot get anything right, eventhough they know how to. Erik and Lyle are far from the perfectionist that their father is.

So, in the result, the brothers’ murder of their parents is far from a perfect crime. For example, Erik and Lyle know to create a false alibi, but they cannot really get that element planned correctly – making sure people see them, four hours in a bar and grill, when they should have gone home after two hours.

Javier Bardem goes the other way, showing how the patriarch had a disturbing dark side, to the point of perfection. Bardem initially can be missed and set aside in the early scenes because the camera focus is predominantly on Cooper Koch as Erik, and Nicholas Chavez as Lyle, but Jose is revealed more and more as the episodes are released.

Bardem develops a three dimensional character for Jose that is disturbing on one level but more and more complicated, the more screen time he gets.

The narrative is driven with flash backs triggered by various question and answers sessions with psychiatrists and defence lawyers, and even among themselves.

One episode focusses on how the brothers learned to survive in prison.

The brothers even dream forward about escaping from prison with new, cosmetically altered faces and changed public images.

Eventually everyone has geared up for trial, with defence attorneys developing the abused victim defence with highly coached testimony. But the farcical nature of the story continues without redemption, and the trial does not go all that well.

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is streaming on Netflix.