“I am as American as any man,” Matthew Macfadyen says in the opening scene of Death By Lightning (Netflix). His character, Charles Guiteau, is attempting to downplay the Frenchness of his name, but we might raise a smirk, as it’s coming from yet another well-heeled British thesp playing an American historical figure – in his case sporting the transatlantic drawl he projected as the vile, if intermittently lovable, Tom Wambsgans in Succession.
Guiteau was the man who killed James Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, believing it would put his name in the history books. He was right, of course; it’s just that this is precisely where it has stayed ever since, a footnote in the story of Garfield, who is himself a footnote in the history of the presidency.
This is both a blessing and a curse for any show aiming to dramatise their lives. Yes, Garfield’s six months in office lacks the star power of a Lincoln or Roosevelt presidency, but his obscurity also renders this story new and fascinating to viewers who’ll know few details.
I’ll admit to being easy meat when it comes to this period in the United States’ political history, of horse-drawn cars trundling through the muddy streets of Chicago and Washington, DC, depositing senators into whale-oil-lit halls where extravagantly sideburned men backstab each other over mutton and claret.
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Death By Lightning is, however, a portrait of both politician and assassin, as they progress towards the fateful moment when their lives finally, and fatally, intertwine.
Garfield, played with gruff tenderness by Michael Shannon, is an earthy man of the land, an Ohio congressman who would prefer to be farming at home yet falls upward into the Republican nomination ahead of the 1880 election.
He’s a solid, dependable character of fine oration and great moral fibre, aided by his loving and capable wife, Lucretia (an egregiously underserved Betty Gilpin).
Guiteau, by contrast, is a sad-sack fantasist who, having failed in his bids to become a lawyer or start a newspaper, steals everything his sister owns and departs for Washington to pursue a career working for the man who will be president.
In his quest, Guiteau is, sometimes literally, laughed out of several rooms. Indeed, his progression through this world is a daisy chain of rebuffs and humiliations, rendered with mortifying brio by Macfadyen’s nervy performance.
Rarely has embarrassment been so electrifying on screen, nor its avatar more perfectly suited to the role. Macfadyen’s Guiteau is an insipid, writhing worm, possessed of an anti-magnetism that is both compellingly awful and awfully compelling, especially in those moments when his plans bear unlikely fruit.
Against this performance, all others have a tough act to follow, though both Nick Offerman, in his blustering turn as Chester Arthur, Garfield’s vice-president, and Bradley Whitford, as the scheming Senator Blaine, acquit themselves well.
Shannon’s Garfield, in some sense, draws the short straw. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay him is to say that, as Guiteau solidifies around his eventual course, I’d grown to admire this footnote of a president and dread the footnote of that footnote making his way to Washington with a gun in his pocket.
Death By Lightning is a handsomely mounted historical drama, and a queasy, timely insight into how far people might go to rise in a society they feel is stacked against them.
In its best moments, Netflix’s other big recent release, The Beast in Me, channels something of this same vertigo. Claire Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, an author struggling to defeat writer’s block while grappling with the grief of her son’s death some years earlier.
Into her plush Long Island community moves Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys), a fabulously wealthy property tycoon, notorious among New Yorkers for the mysterious disappearance of his former wife, whom many presume he murdered.
Jarvis is the sort of galactically rich billionaire whose wealth has the side effect of conscripting even an upper-class professional like Aggie as our proxy in the class war. She is, after all, a Pulitzer-winning author who lives in the nicest house I have ever seen, but she frets about her dwindling advance, and her floorboards creek and the pipes don’t work.
He, on the other hand, has a house that hers could fit inside of, with a staff and a security detail and a biohacking regimen that records his every calorie.
The two do not hit it off, but they soon arrive at a collaboration that might benefit them both: she’ll write a book about him, allowing her to scrap the tedious biography of supreme-court justices that’s slowly driving her toward gilded poverty, and giving him a chance to salvage his public reputation via a long-awaited tome from a well-regarded author.
What follows is a palatably lurid psychological thriller, in which Aggie gets close to Jarvis and his circle while trying to get to the bottom of his wife’s disappearance. We witness multiple break-ins, some light hacking and several highly improbable twists and turns.
There is, to put it mildly, some hoky fare within. At one point Aggie is given news that might implicate Jarvis, and by extension herself, in a horrible crime. There follows an exquisite performance from Danes as she pieces together its ramifications in her head.
It’s a masterclass of wordless acting – but, clearly, someone in the show’s production disagreed, as there follow several flashbacks spelling out, with thundering literalism, the very thoughts her face had just silently conveyed, ending with a visual effect in which her face is reflected on to a photo of Jarvis on her laptop screen – all but screaming at the viewer to recognise that, you know, maybe they’re not so different, she and he.
The show would, in fact, be little more than extremely well-shot tosh were it not for Danes and Rhys, who form a pairing nearly as dazzlingly mismatched as the show’s executive producers (who include Jodie Foster and Conan O’Brien).
Danes is in her pomp, displaying the woman-on-the-edge-of-a-nervous-breakdown flintiness so brilliantly on show in Fleishman Is in Trouble, from 2022. Rhys – another British thesp affecting his own computerised American drawl – resists the urge to play your typical charming tycoon; Nile Jarvis is neither preening devil nor silver-tongued sophisticate. He’s frequently abrasive and unpleasant – which, in this media trend of billionaire baddies who remain perfect red-herring gentlemen until they become violent psychopaths in the third act, feels somewhat novel, at least.
Aggie carries with her a constant sense – one Charles Guiteau might recognise – that entering Jarvis’s orbit would solve almost all her problems, rendering every nugget of small talk pregnant with multiple meanings.
Is Jarvis delighted by his straight-talking new friend or plotting her demise? Is his pleasant new wife attempting to ensnare Aggie in a web of fealty or seeking a friend in her arid and impersonal world? Would it really be so bad if just a little bit of their cash helped renovate Aggie’s home or gave her ex-wife a leg-up in her career as a struggling painter?
It adds great ballast to one of the more addictive thrillers I’ve seen in ages. A broadly familiar creature it may be, but The Beast in Me is its own animal entirely, and some of the most watchable telly you’ll see all year.
