Murdaugh Murders: The Movie, parts 1 and 2 (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 15) I wanted to watch the four-hour Lifetime film Murdaugh Murders: The Movie, based on the 2021 murder case involving prominent South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh (Bill Pullman) – the last name is pronounced “Murdock” – who was accused of killing his wife Maggie (Lauren K. Robek) and their younger son Paul (Curtis Tweedie) on June 7, 2021 outside a dog kennel on the property of one of their many homes. The film was originally released by the Johnson Production Group and Lifetime in two parts, with part one shown Saturday, October 14 and part two on October 15, though instead of watching the first part on Saturday I decided to wait until Lifetime showed the two parts consecutively. They did that by re-running part one at 6 p.m. and then doing the “premiere” of part two at 8. I might have liked the film better if I’d watched the two parts separately instead of consecutively, because as it stood it just wore me down. Alex Murdaugh himself is a fascinating character, a fourth-generation South Carolina attorney whose great-grandfather’s picture hangs in the local courthouse (at least it did until it’s taken down at the end after Alex is convicted of the murders of his wife and son). Alex is the fourth generation of his family to go into the legal business, and the Murdaugh family firm bases much of its track record on the generations (literally!) of influence it has built up and the number of “strings” it can pull. When Alex needs a favorable ruling in a case, he arranges a country-club membership for the judge and sends the invitation in an envelope that makes clear from whence it came. The film opens at a birthday party for Paul Murdaugh – whom Alex calls by the bizarrely infantilizing nickname “Paw-Paw” – at which Alex gives him the keys to a white pickup truck as his birthday present. Maggie warns her son to drive safely, but Paul has other ideas; he’s into drinking and hanging out with a gang of friends, both men and women.

From this setup we just know something dreadful is going to happen, and it does: one night Paul and his friends take Paul’s speedboat (the Murdaughs are supposedly so wealthy Alex can hand his son both a car and a boat as if they’re party favors, but there’s a dark secret as to how Alex Murdaugh is sustaining this level of affluence: more on that later) for a night picnic on one of the local islands. Paul insists on driving the boat home even though his more level-headed friend Cooper thinks Paul is too inebriated to handle the boat, and eventually Paul crashes it into a bridge and one of the girls, Mallory, is killed. Alex tries to use all his well-honed skills as a legal expert and “fixer” to get Paul off the hook, but he fails not only because the case is so severe – after all, you can’t just sweep a dead body under the rug like you could if Paul’s deeds hadn’t been lethal – but because he’s losing his “edge.” At the time of Paul’s accident Alex’s carefully constructed dual life is starting to come apart at the seams. His addiction to oxycodone – a drug he says he started taking as the result of a football injury in high school – is growing and starting to affect his overall capability. He’s also stiffing his drug dealer, and the dealer is starting to get antsy about being paid; at one point the dealer, who makes it clear he’s just an employee of a larger organization, literally hits Alex in the stomach and leaves a bruise as a warning for worse to come in case Alex continues to welch. Later the police learn from their investigation into Mallory’s death that Alex is nowhere nearly as rich as he seems: he’s been financing his lifestyle with the settlement money he’s won for his personal-injury clients (including a man named Hamilton who’s ended up in a wheelchair, unable to work) by embezzling it for himself.

By the time this movie begins Alex Murdaugh is already on a major downward spiral and is barely holding it together. He’s also got a girlfriend on the side – a young woman who slipped him her phone number at Paul’s birthday party – only that relationship ends when Alex comes over to her place for what she thinks is going to be a round of consensual sex but turns into virtual rape. Ultimately he gets so violent she orders him to leave, and later in the movie, when he tries to get back with her, she tells him the bruises he left on her body took months to heal, so he’s not welcome in her life anymore. Alex is also still very much under the thumb of his domineering father, who’s in the last stages of heart disease and has formally retired from the family law firm but is still very much in the picture, and his dad is a living symbol of the legacy generations of Murdaughs have built up before him. As things turn out, dad croaks just three days after Alex kills Maggie and Paul – and though director Greg Beeman (working from a script by Michael Vickerman, who’s also listed as one of the film’s five “executive producers”) tries to keep it ambiguous by showing the murderer wearing a loose-fitting blue hoodie over his other clothes, he later inserts a flashback that makes clear Alex is the killer. Alex deliberately shoots Maggie and Paul with separate guns – Paul with a shotgun and Maggie with an assault rifle – to make it look like they were killed by different people, presumably as part of a hit team sent by the gang that was supplying Alex’s drugs. What makes this movie simultaneously interesting and boring is the lack of any clear motive for Alex’s killing his wife and son: though the two of them had temporarily left him and moved in to one of the family’s other homes, there didn’t seem to be any intimation of a permanent break. If Alex was afraid that his wife and son would rat him out to the police as an embezzler, there’s no hint of that in Vickerman’s script.

Frankly, I would have found this film more compelling if it had focused on Alex Murdaugh’s life pre-murders: an account of how he slowly started raiding the trust funds he was supposedly keeping for his clients as his drugging and womanizing started getting out of control and he gradually shifted from just another corrupt attorney into an outright fraudster and, ultimately, a killer could have made for a much more interesting drama than the one we have. Murdaugh Murders: The Movie (a clunky title explained by the sheer number of TV shows about Alex Murdaugh, both documentaries and dramatized features, we’d already had before it was made) contains two great tour de force performances, by Bill Pullman as Alex and the young, almost ethereally beautiful Curtis Tweedie as Paul (a very hot twink type with especially nice nipples), but the sheer monomania of Alex’s villainy and his chutzpah in insisting on testifying in his own defense despite his attorney’s very good advice to him not to just wore me down after a while. A lot of Alex’s actions, good or bad, don’t seem to have much of a rational explanation – which may be a fault of writer Vickerman or a reflection of how rarely true-life stories have the sorts of neat wrap-ups we expect from fictional ones. I also didn’t like the way Lifetime edited the movie to squeeze in commercial breaks and keep us watching by setting up false climaxes; there’s a break between Alex’s direct examination and the prosecutor’s cross-examination, and another (and even more annoying one) between the scene in which the jury clerk hands the judge the verdict and the judge actually reads it in court. I suspect there’s a much more interesting story lurking behind the Alex Murdaugh case than the one we got here, and in particular one which would focus on the extent to which having built up so much “influence” over the generations literally spoiled the Murdaughs into thinking they could get away with anything because they always had.