The Girl From Plainville (Hulu series - 2022).....purports to be an account of the infamous Michelle Carter, the high school girl who through, marathon texting, convinced her deeply troubled boyfriend Conrad 'Coco' Roy to take his own life.
In a bold, unprecedented move ,a Massachusetts D,A, prosecuted her for involuntary manslaughter, winning a conviction, for which she did 11 actual months in jail and the rest of her 2 & 1/2 year sentence on probation.
As is the current fashion with streaming mini-series, this sad tale of teen angst gone awry gets dragged out to 8 tedious hour long episodes when the story could've been better told in a compact 2 to 3 hours.......
The length leads to multiple problems......the script writers become forced to needlessly pad out the episodes with endless fictional scenes between Carter and Roy......none of which occurred but serve to reinforce the show's seriously skewed point-of-view.
And that point of view,, reinforced by Elle Fanning's skillful, heartfelt portrayal of Carter, creates a character who may only exist within the confines of this mini-series and nowhere in real life.
Fanning and the show's creators paint an overall sympathetic picture of Carter as a pathetically love-starved needy girl who aches for a sense of belonging.......to the point where she fantasizes herself as a star of her own tragic romance, with her in the role as the surviving partner of a star-crossed couple.
Then this would explain, if you believe the show's agenda, why Carter had to encourage Roy to gas himself while sitting in his pickup truck......so his death would enable her to act out his noble, heartbroken girlfriend, bravely carrying on after his demise and winning the love, symptathy and admiration of everyone around her.
As much as we admire Elle Fanning's riveting, full commitment to this conception of Michelle Carter's character, it left us dubious about the truthfulness of it. To us, it practically smelled like a whitewash, a version of the story that sounds as if it were concocted by Carter's defense attorneys.
It's entirely possible that a different set of filmmakers (who weren't set on making the series a showcase for Elle Fanning's performance) would create a much different version of Michelle Carter.....perhaps closer to how the prosecuting attorneys viewed her - calculating, devious and malevolent in the efficiency of her 'kill yourself' texts to the already anguished Roy.
Which poses the question......which version's more believable? Which one's closer to the truth of the matter? Which one would convince you?
Since we're a major Elle Fanning fan and root for her in every project she takes on, we'll rate her and show separately. For Fanning's work here, 4 stars (****). For the show itself, overwritten, overlength, and too freewheeling in its imagination of what happened, 1 star (*). Proceed accordingly.
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