“Nantucket!” exclaims Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). “Look at it – a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.”
In Ishmael’s description, this island off the coast of Massachusetts in the north east of the US is a depleted, weathered place, scarcely distinguishable from the sea. It’s a location for hard and dangerous work, too, as the inhabitants venture into the “watery world” offshore to catch everything from mackerel to whales.
The version of Nantucket we see in The Perfect Couple, Netflix’s new six-part drama, is very different. Here it’s super-rich socialites, not salt-encrusted mariners, who occupy narrative space. They engage in conspicuous leisure, lounging poolside or circulating from party to party. Even Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman), a highly successful writer of popular romances, is most often seen using her fingers to hold a wine glass rather than to hammer at a computer.
Adapted by Jenna Lamia from Elin Hilderbrand’s bestselling 2018 novel of the same name, and directed by Susanne Bier (perhaps best known for directing the BBC’s Le Carré adaptation The Night Manager in 2016), The Perfect Couple intertwines romance and mystery. The Winbury family gathers at its Nantucket beach house to celebrate the wedding of middle son Benji and his fiancée Amelia. A suspicious death occurs in episode one, leaving a tangle of erotic complication and forensic evidence that is unravelled across episodes two to six.
A cocktail of ingredients
A good deal of mixing, both authorised and transgressive, goes on in The Perfect Couple. Contrasting with the licensed partnering of Benji and Amelia, scandalous liaisons take place (many of them involving the groom’s father Tag: a person who has never done a day’s work, according to the local police chief, but someone with unbounded energy for sex, drink and drugs). Narcotics are dangerously combined in games of “prescription roulette” and blackberry mojito cocktails play a minor role in the plot.
All of this mixing and combining at the level of story is suggestive, for in its very composition The Perfect Couple is a synthesis of multiple pre-existing materials. It is put together itself rather in the manner of a cocktail.
Take one part Succession (for fraught family drama), one part The White Lotus (for glamorous setting) and one part Big Little Lies (for Nicole Kidman’s star presence). Mix liberally with Rian Johnson’s duo of detective films Knives Out and Glass Onion (for murderous intrigue among the super-wealthy). Finish with a generous glug of Agatha Christie: there’s a knowing nod towards this influence in episode three when Greer discloses that she had “an Agatha Christie obsession”.
The Perfect Couple’s weakness, however, is that it resembles these precursors only cosmetically, failing to carry across what makes them compelling or memorable. No equivalent is offered for the startlingly inventive language of Succession, say, or the graphic sexuality of The White Lotus.
And while The Perfect Couple could easily be retitled Christie-style – Murder on Nantucket Sound, perhaps? – the series underwhelms also as murder mystery. The police station’s doors revolve rapidly in episodes five and six, as multiple suspects are questioned; yet the interrogations lack jeopardy or tension (even, at times, plausibility). The plot is complicated, certainly, but in the final analysis un-nourishing – rather like the oyster canapes served at a Winbury party.
The view from inside
Traces of another forerunner can be detected in The Perfect Couple. Confronted by its drama of the super-rich in maritime New England, and the unravelling of financial, romantic and criminal strands, viewers may find themselves thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).
In comparing The Great Gatsby and The Perfect Couple, however, it is instructive to consider the question of perspective. Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald’s narrator, brings an outsider’s critical eye to bear on the wealthy world he encounters. If he sometimes swoons – taken in momentarily by “floating rounds of cocktails”, by “the champagne and the stars” – he is usually attentive to the exploitation, even the violence, that underpins such luxury.
By contrast, The Perfect Couple does not emerge from sardonic or abrasive assessment of the super-rich realm it documents. There are candidates for the outsider role occupied by Nick in The Great Gatsby: the detectives investigating the murder, perhaps, or Amelia herself, someone not born into wealth but previously a worker at a zoo (helpfully specialising in snakes). Yet any jaundiced observations they offer are fleeting, not sustained.
Instead, the wealthy in The Perfect Couple are usually viewed from the inside. The housekeeper herself has internalised the master’s perspective. And when, in episode five, the camera makes a rare foray into the catering kitchen, it is not to access the views of unprivileged folk but to find a spot for makeup sex between Amelia and Benji.
Before each episode of The Perfect Couple are ads for Chanel perfume. Ultimately, ad and series share a worldview, putting expensive things on display for our gratified gaze. When the murder is finally shown, the victim is immaculately turned out as they breathe their last. Not even violent death can be seen to ruffle this moneyed part of Nantucket.
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Andrew Dix does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
