The Perfect Couple Review: Nicole Kidman’s Mystery Is A Delight

Greer Garrison Winbury gets some supposedly sage but implicitly questionable marital advice from her mother on the morning of her wedding in Elin Hilderbrand’s 2018 novel, “The Perfect Couple.”

“The most important skill required in marriage was picking one’s battles. Make sure they’re ones you can win,” her mother tells her.

In a marriage, there’s a tension that exists between the outward facing facade the rest of the world sees and a relationship’s internal and war-like workings. This is the force that drives both Hilderbrand’s novel and the Netflix TV series adaptation of the same name. That and the big-name cast, exclusive setting and luxuries of unimaginable, multi-generational wealth.

The combination of murder mystery meets high society in an exotic coastal location is not a revelation, and the show has elements and cast members from both “Big Little Lies” and “The White Lotus.” However, the six-part series is neither a prestige drama nor a satire. Instead, the show is its own escapist, highly bingeable delight. Its enjoyability and No. 1 spot in Netflix’s Top 10, is also a reminder of how much we all crave a good “beach read” (or its television equivalent), and it’s time to stop pretending that’s a bad thing.

“The Perfect Couple” stars Nicole Kidman as Greer Garrison Winbury, the matriarch of her obscenely wealthy and highly dysfunctional family. The limited series opens with idyllic scenes of summer in Nantucket, the small, exclusive Massachusetts island to the south of Cape Cod, where all of Hilderbrand’s books are set. There is plentiful sunshine, a sandy beach, a whale breaching the blue Atlantic water, and a scrolling script inviting viewers to escape into this dreamy world.

“You are invited to Benji & Amelia’s Rehearsal Dinner,” the text reads before zooming into a white party tent on the beachfront estate (aptly named Summerland) of Greer and Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber).

Within the first few lines of dialogue between Greer and her three sons — Thomas (Jack Reynor), Benji (Billy Howle) and Will (Sam Nivola) — it’s apparent that nothing is what it seems.

“Pretend to be nice,” Greer says to her sons when the oldest makes fun of the youngest while being recorded by the rehearsal dinner videographer. Greer laughs off their behavior as sibling antics, but there’s a clear undercurrent that the cherished memories the videographer is supposed to capture are also giving viewers glimpses of moments that aren’t supposed to be seen.

As the videographer moves into the tent, capturing the rest of the impeccably cast characters, everything, like the housekeeper Gosia (Irina Dubova) taking the underage son’s drink for herself, could be brushed off as funny and normalized behavior, especially in a world so far-removed from the viewer’s, but it’s clear that there’s more going on under the surface. At times, the dynamics feel too forced: from the oldest son brushing a woman’s hand who’s not his wife to the maid of honor Merritt (Meghann Fahy) teasing Amelia (Eve Hewson) and Benji that she is going to move into their guest room. By the time the best man Shooter jumps into the shot, asking where he is going to be left in the future, the moment feels entirely too contrived to be anything but a cover-up for all of the secrets these glamorous people are hiding. The scene belies the celebratory smiles and jokes and clinking glasses.

In other words, in an opening sequence that is less than four minutes and looks beyond picturesque, it’s impossible to miss that something — or everything — is a little off at Summerland.

“I love this woman to death,” middle-son Benji says as he twirls Amelia in a sweet moment. It becomes foreboding when the beachfront party of well-dressed people eating oysters and drinking champagne (or blackberry mojitos) fades into the image of a moon hanging over dark, inky water, and the music is replaced with Amelia’s screams.

“We gotta floater,” Deputy Carl (Nick Searcy) reports to Chief Carter (Michael Beach) early the next morning. The first episode is a who-is-it, flashing back and forth between everything that happened before the rehearsal dinner as the viewer tries to figure out who died, and the investigation is made more fun because of the colorful commentary from Tim Bagley as the wedding planner, Roger Pelton, and snobby sister-in-law-to-be, Abby Winbury (Dakota Fanning).

The five episodes that follow take the form of a traditional whodunnit, flashing back and forth between the past and the present, revealing that no character in this heightened world is who they seem to be, and almost everyone appears guilty of the crime at some point, creating a complicated investigation for the chief and Detective Henry (Donna Lynn Champlin) who is a pure pleasure to watch as the mainland detective working with the chief to solve the crime.

I won’t spoil the show by giving anything away because each episode is too much fun. And it should be. It’s based on a book by Hilderbrand, the veritable “queen of the beach reads,” and I don’t think that’s a bad thing or that A-list actors such as Kidman should be questioned for choosing to act in shows that are creating the “beach-read cinematic universe” so many of us want to consume.

“Some of Kidman’s TV characters are victims, some of them are villains, but most of them are glamorous, wealthy women with shitty husbands and secrets. If this time she’s playing an author of actual beach reads — that unofficial genre of frothy, easy-to-consume, low-culture romances/mysteries marketed mostly to women — it’s worth asking how and why did Kidman seemingly become the go-to actor for what can only be described as ‘beach TV’?” asks David Mack in Slate.

This is the wrong question. In a country where women drive the publishing industry, both as authors and readers, calling books a “beach read” or TV shows “beach TV,” undermines their cultural and entertainment value. Even though Hilderbrand says the label doesn’t bother her, the term “beach read” is an oversimplification that undervalues the work women choose to make and consume.

This escapist quality is obviously intentional in Hilderbrand’s book, which is the first of her 27 beach reads to be adapted for the screen, and it holds even greater importance for her since her surgery and treatment for breast cancer. The experience helped her realize “how desperately people who are sick want to go somewhere else in their minds. Escapism is real! That I have been able to provide a mental vacation to people who are undergoing treatment has given me a different way of thinking about the purpose of a ‘beach read.’”

And the show’s creator, Jenna Lamia was intentional about maintaining that escapist quality. “I told Netflix and the producers that I wanted to do something fun with the show,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “The script could have gone in either direction — toward the mournfulness of somebody dying or toward something lighter, something that I think elevates it. It does not mean to say that I don’t have huge respect for things that have other ambitions, but this was very consciously made for people to watch.”

Maybe actors like Kidman choosing to bring their weight to shows like “The Perfect Couple” is a way to elevate a genre that people, especially women, want to watch and ensures that more authors primarily read by women — authors like Emily Henry and Carley Fortune — will have a space for their stories to become “beach TV” (the first screen adaptations of their books are in production now).

Maybe, more importantly, it’s time to stop adding caveats to our enjoyment of shows like “The Perfect Couple” as a soapy, highly watchable treat that is “profoundly unserious.”

There’s nothing wrong with audiences, especially women, enjoying what they read or watch. One could argue that this is more important now than ever as women navigate the very real stresses of a post-Dobbs world at a moment when the surgeon general is warning us about the high levels of stress that parents face.

Instead of making “beach reads” or “beach TV” one more thing that people, especially women, feel guilty for liking, let us watch them and enjoy them, too.