So it’s perfectly clear why Allan carefully overcomes his qualms when propositioned by Candy. She’s offering pleasure-based no-strings motel hook-ups, and she looks like Elizabeth Olsen. What Candy sees in such a quiescent lump of dough is a mystery that may need explaining.
Olsen compels as a perky, sarky minx who, whatever happens later on, snags our sympathy as a neglected housewife to whom the American Dream brings no inner joy. “Where’s the payback?” she asks a friend. She means for dutifully making her husband happy but not herself.
Though pitched further down the social ladder, this is another high-octane dispatch from the pressure cooker of marriage and materialism that has become the specialty of David E. Kelley. See also Big Little Lies and The Undoing. The title was previously used by Woody Allen in his 1975 spoof of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. “Sex without love is an empty experience,” muses Diane Keaton as she vacillates by the bed. “Yes,” Allen pipes up from the between the sheets, “but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best!”
Love & Death interrogates that idea to the max. “This will come to no good,” warns Candy’s pastor with the conviction of an Ancient Greek prophetess. Of course that’s what hooks us, but it’s so far the fine acting that elevates this above shlock.
