Bill Pullman is such a talent.
It’s challenging to capture the essence of a person people have become familiar with during such a high-profile trial.
But without a shadow of a doubt, Bill Pullman slays his role, and we get to see more of his range and his capabilities during Murdaugh Murders Part 2.
It’s nothing short of riveting to watch his interpretation of Alex Murdaugh, and he kicked it up a notch during part two of this movie event.
While the timeline of Murdaugh Murders Part 1 had a lot of heavy lifting to do as far as setting the pace for how the family seemed before everything fell apart and just what started kicking matters into gear with Paul, we had a tighter time frame to work with which made the pacing significantly better and more intense.
Picking up where the previous movie left off, we had Alex after he “found” his dead wife and son, speaking to the authorities on the matter as they tried to figure out what really happened.
From there, we had front-row seats to this man spiraling before our eyes despite having the arrogance to believe he’d somehow get over on the police and convince the world that he didn’t kill his wife and son.
Alex’s chickens came home to roost two times over, but even as the pacing sped up, there was enough of that nuance to leave a bit open to interpretation.
Interestingly enough, with the closing credits, we know that Alex did go to prison for murdering Maggie and Paul, but he’s appealing it and still insists that he isn’t responsible.
Knowing that they played well into Alex’s state of mind and thought process, as he spent the entire film maintaining his innocence while also giving authorities every reason to believe his guilt.
It seems simple enough, but it’s challenging to walk that line and balance things out, and the story and Pullman do that well.
Pullman truly settles into the role in this second half and becomes fascinating to watch with a performance that is certainly notable and memorable.
Through that performance, we certainly understand why Greg Beeman spoke so highly of Pullman, and you very much visually get the sense of the partnership that developed between the two as they brought this film to life.
If the first film focused so much on legacy and the lengths Alex went to uphold it, the second is how every last shred fell apart. Removing a Murdaugh from the courthouse halls as the ultimate act of erasing the last visages of the good Murdaugh name was a perfect endpoint.
Everything that people knew about this family was a pack of lies, and at the center of that was a diabolical Alex Murdaugh who ran everything around him into the ground.
What happened to Mallory and Paul’s scandal barely scratched the surface of how everyone reacted to Alex in the wake of his wife and son’s deaths.
It wasn’t long before he was the primary suspect, and the only surprise was that they didn’t immediately make him one that night. Of course, Murdaughs were always given the benefit of the doubt or far too much leeway.
Alex was a mess. While interacting with the authorities, he was terrible in the aftermath of the deaths. For one, he had a horrible habit of crying without tears, which rarely felt authentic.
The irony is that, despite the violence and the horrendous things that he did, and even how sociopathic his reactions were, seemingly mimicking how he should feel rather than expressing it as much, you still believed that he cared about and loved his family.
It makes his motivations behind the need to kill them in the first place so murky. It’s this senseless act of violence that is difficult even to process.
We’re led to believe that much of how Alex behaved was influenced by the drugs. His drug habit was unfathomable: deep in debt with dealers, getting manhandled for payment, and going through more pills than anyone should be capable of consuming daily.
The notion that he had a $50k-a-week drug habit is outrageous, yet that type of habit could explain the violence or poor way of thinking and his bizarre choices.
Alex paying someone to shoot him was one of the strangest turns of this case. He mentioned wanting to die but attempting to run another scam by having someone kill him so his son, Buster, could get the insurance money.
He mentioned that he wanted to die after losing his family. Still, if anything, it seemed like he wanted to find whatever way of escaping the legal trouble that fell upon him from the endless fraud cases and civil suits.
All the dirty laundry came out once he became a suspect, as the Murdaugh sins were laid bare, and no stone was left unturned.
The films mentioned Buster, but he had little or no presence. However, they alluded to the scandal surrounding the accident with a fellow student.
And many of Paul’s misdeeds were highlighted, including Mallory.
They also reexamined the housekeeper’s death and Alex’s theft from her poor kids, who went homeless because they never got her money.
Many details strayed a bit from the more well-known aspects of the case, and those things came to light as they lay it thick with Alex’s case.
They even brought up the sex worker he assaulted, which may have been a case of artistic liberties taken for the drama of it all.
What was fascinating was how conniving Alex was while also being a fumbling fool who screwed himself and his case because of his arrogance.
It was bold of him to attempt to intimidate and bribe Shelly, his mother’s nurse, when he had no leg to stand on, and she was not inclined to go along with it.
She was a pivotal aspect of the case against him, and he was so confident that she’d get on the stand and they could tear her apart without issue.
One of the biggest problems seemed to be how he wanted to run his own case, making many of the cardinal sins that defendants do in not telling their attorneys the truth while also having the extra arrogance of being a lawyer himself who thought he knew better.
Alex Murdaugh was such a compulsive liar that he made it nearly impossible to defend himself in any capacity.
For someone with legal expertise, it was shocking how much he screwed himself and didn’t consider that his lies would catch up to him, and it was alarming that he thought he could cover his tracks regarding his dishonesty by blaming it on his addiction.
The detective was right about his behavior on the scene, how he cried with no tears. And he should’ve known that his clothes would be a point of contention during the trial.
It made no sense for him to have gone and changed between finding the bodies and the cops getting there, and the time frame wasn’t adding up, no matter how many lies he told.
The video with his voice in the background was quite damning, and Alex spun so many different stories that there was no chance in hell that any jury would hear anything he said and believe and trust that it was the truth.
His hubris got the better of him every bit as much as his addiction did.
I loved all the techniques used to convey Alex’s state of mind as things closed in on him. It felt claustrophobic as if we were right there with him as everything was getting out of control.
Whether it was the camera work and effects as he downed more pills or the way the lighting would cast a shadow on him during certain scenes, it felt as if every aspect of this film came together to tell the story perfectly — every tool in the drawer used effectively.
Even the way the murders were captured was just on the cusp of gratuitous, evoking how heinous those murders were, drawing out the necessary emotion in reconciling the multifaceted nature of this man.
We saw so many sides to Alex throughout this film — the complexity of this person is conveyed wonderfully, thus leaving a lasting impression.
Murdaugh Murders is one of those Lifetime films that will stick with you, unsettling as it may be.
Over to you, TV Fanatics.
What did you think of this film? Were you a fan of the movie event?
Did you have issues with any part of how the story was conveyed and the liberties taken? Sound off below.
