by Maureen McCabe
The Staircase, the dramatic version, is twisty, riveting true crime drama created by Antonio Campos and based on the French-English Language documentary of the same name. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s original, critically- acclaimed version was first shown in 2004 and then updated with additional episodes in 2018 and can be seen on Netflix. What makes the case worthy of two such prestigious productions about it? The facts of the case are compelling: Michael Peterson, a writer and failed local politician, calls 911 after finding his wife’s Kathleen bloody body at the foot of the stairs at their home in Durham, North Carolina. Michael claims he was outside after having sharing some wine with his wife earlier by the pool; she went in beforehand to prep some work for her job, and he came in later to find her dead or dying from the serious head injuries she sustained in a fall down their mansion’s steep staircase. But almost immediately the police are skeptical: they suspect foul play and that Kathleen’s terrible injuries arose from a brutal bludgeoning meted out by Michael. Michael maintains his innocence even as he is arrested, charged and found guilty of his wife’s murder. After serving years in prison, Peterson is awarded a new trial after an expert’s blood-spatter testimony in his original trial was found to be perjurious. After seven years he enters an Alford Plea to the voluntary manslaughter of Kathleen, and is sentences to time lesser than he had already served and released. An Alford Plea is a type of plea deal where the accused can reassert their innocence while pleading guilty. It essentially says that the accused recognizes that there is enough evidence to likely convince a judge or jury of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, although he is standing by his initial claim of innocence. Several family members, most notably Kathleen’s sisters, and the Durham society at large take the Alford Plea deal to mean that Michael is in fact guilty and is using the legal loophole to try and avoid going back to prison. And therein lies the essential conundrum of the case: is Michael a loving husband who was wrongfully accused, or is he a vicious murderer? The only two people who know the answer to that are Kathleen herself, who of course can’t enlighten us, and Michael, who, as the documentary unfolds, is shown to be a manipulator and a liar.
Colin Firth is excellent as Michael, displaying his charm and temper and narcissism in turns. If Firth doesn’t fully capture the real Michael Peterson’s off-putting oddness, he does a great job of portraying the essential blankness at the center of his personality, which allowed so many people to read into his character the traits that they hoped he possessed. By including the original documentarians producer Denis Poncet (an excellent Frank Feys), director de Lestrade (Vincent Vermignon, charismatic and persuasive) and editor Sophie Brunet (Juliette Binoche, wonderful in a difficult role) as characters in his version, Campos is able to use them as a lens to portray shifting perspectives of Michaels’ innocence or guilt as new facets of his life unfold. This may also have been a way to pay homage to the debt he owes the original filmmakers for the years of research they did, the access to their files they provided him with, and for making people care about the case in the first place, although several publications have reported that neither Brunet or de Lestrade have been happy with their inclusion. Brunet, given grace and depth by Binoche, has complained that HBO’s The Staircase wrongly portrays her having an affair with Michael while she was working on the original documentary. While she did engage in a several years-relationship with him, she maintains it was a slow-building one that didn’t begin until after her work on the original project was long finished and both she and de Lestrade are upset at having their journalistic ethics come under fire.
Campos’s The Staircase further expands the scope of the original to more fully showcase the effects of Kathleen’s death and Michael’s trial and imprisonment on his family and friends. We are given multiple moving scenes that illustrate how greatly his children suffered throughout the years of the case and after his release. Sophie Turner and Odessa Young are excellent as the grieving sisters Michael adopted as very young girls after the death of their parents, who were family friends of Michael and his first wife Patty. In one of the most damning and stunning facts of the case, Martha and Marjorie’s biological mother was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in her home in Germany, with Michael believed to have been one of the last people to see her alive. Turner and Young display a genuine sisterly chemistry, alternatingly tender and frustrated with each other. Patrick Schwarzenegger and Dane DeHann are similarly very good at portraying the sometimes supportive, often resentful, relationship between Michael’s biological sons Todd and Clayton, although their parts seem more underwritten than the sisters. We also see glimpses of the lives of attorneys involved in the case. Michael Stuhlbarg does a fine job as Michael’s powerhouse attorney David Rudolf, who after years of working on the case feels the need to distance himself from his client and Parker Posey is nothing short of phenomenal as prosecutor Freda Black. She captures Black’s real-life thick- as- molasses Carolina accent and provides glimpses of the toll her work takes on her. In later episodes she is shown as a frazzled, hard-drinking dry-cleaners worker, after having been dismissed from the district attorney’s office. Some more information about what occasioned Black’s tragic downward spiral would have been welcome. She was found dead in her cluttered home in 2018, and the cause of death was later ruled to be end-stage liver disease due to chronic alcoholism.
The non-linear narration the show employs is at times somewhat confusing, as in the latter episodes where scenes from Michael’s original trial and Alford Plea deal are intercut. At other times it dissipates the rising suspense when a scene abruptly switches to a less-interesting flashback. What the narrative technique does give the show and what makes it pay off, is a sense of Kathleen as a real, vibrant person. Toni Collette portrays her as a lovely, funny, very hard-working woman with a high- powered job who is fraying at the edges from the burdens of all the often-conflicting expectations people have of her. She gives Kathleen a genuine warmth that makes it clear why she is the glue that holds her extended family together and highlights what a tragedy her death, either accidental or murderous, really is. And at the very end, we’re still not sure which it was. Most viewers will have strong feelings one way or the other, and may be surprised to learn that the person sitting next to them watching it feels the opposite. It is precisely the ultimately unknowable resolution of the crime that lies at the heart of what makes The Staircase so intriguing.
– Maureen McCabe.
