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The rerecorded ending of Adrian Lyne’s 1987 Fatal attraction is one of the most successful blunders in Hollywood history.
Certainly, turning Glenn Close’s scorned Alex Forrest into an almost ineradicable slasher villain undermined everything that was thematically interesting about the character and the film. But it also delivered a rousing climax that cheered and helped make the bloodthirsty audience Fatal attraction a blockbuster.
Fatal attraction
It comes down to
Unlike Alex Forrest, it will probably be ignored.
The conclusion was so at odds with the draft of James Dearden’s script that it’s no surprise we’re being treated to a lengthy reimagining of Fatal attraction; it’s a surprise it took this long.
“There’s only one way something can end,” claims Alex (Lizzy Caplan) in the eighth and final episode of Paramount+’s Fatal attraction. “There is only one decision to make. How are you going to reach that end?”
Unfortunately, despite all that certainty, the new ending offers no improvement over Lyne’s ruthlessly efficient original and the bloated journey to get there is rarely more satisfying. Despite some exceptional achievements, this Fatal attraction can’t find the desired middle ground between voyeuristic tension and psychological nuance, and despite many tempting options, can’t plant its flag in an important piece of the zeitgeist.
Oh, and no rabbits are harmed in this production of Fatal attractionwhich I will leave to you to interpret as positive or negative.
Series developers Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin J. Hynes moved things to Los Angeles (or to cheap soundstages, with some shooting in Los Angeles) and split the story.
Today, Dan Gallagher (Joshua Jackson) is on parole after serving 15 years for the murder of Alex Forrest. After his professional fortune, family and hair are destroyed by his incarceration, Dan tries to reconnect with daughter Ellen (Alyssa Jirrels) while working with his investigative buddy Mike (Toby Huss) to clear his name of a murder he insists that he didn’t. to connect.
In 2008, we see Dan approaching his 40th birthday as a man who seemingly has it all. He is a fast riser in the district attorney’s office with a judicial office possibly in his near future. He has a beautiful and endlessly patient wife in Amanda Peet’s Beth. Then, in a rare moment, he meets Alex, who is doing sketchy things for the city’s victim support department. They flirt over shared annoyances and meatballs and margaritas, and soon they’re floating on the kitchen island of her studio apartment. For Dan, it’s an error of judgement. For Alex, it’s a breakthrough in the pervasive isolation she feels in a new city. Things quickly become obsessive and, inevitably, deadly.
News of this remake was greeted with a predictably banal grit of teeth in the, “Oh dear, I bet they’re going to make Dan the bad guy because he’s a successful white guy and turn Alex into a victim!” vein. This is easy to reject on two counts. The first is that if you go back and watch the original movie, Michael Douglas’s Dan is a total putz. In the end, Alex escalates too much and it’s no longer what Dan deserves, but for a long time? He’s a dummy.
Simpler however, the new Fatal attraction is not out to get Dan Gallagher. Yes, he is portrayed as a paragon of white privilege, a fake baby who got his job and, even when he stumbles, has never experienced a consequence in his life. But if we accept his claim that he didn’t kill Alex, the only consequence he faced was disproportionate. He’s a dummy, but he’s not a villain.
This is also not Fatal attraction set out to completely redeem Alex. In Caplan’s capable hands, she is a more sympathetic character. But despite the series aiming to be sensitive and empathetic in its depiction of what is more clearly a recognizable mental illness, the escalation remains disproportionate. She is a victim in her own story, but in the series she is still the villain.
If it sounds like that Fatal attraction want it from both sides, it absolutely does. It’s full of nods to the movie that range from petty (Alex likes black leather, if not quite the movie’s black leather trench coat) to blatant (Alex really doesn’t like being ignored) to silly (I said there no rabbits were harmed, but damn if they didn’t put rabbits in the show anyway), but at the same time, it thinks it’s superior to the movie’s non-stop adrenaline rush.
That means that after a certain point the series stops trying to be shocking or exciting or sexy – the kitchen bopping is limited to a single episode and also limited in its eroticism – and instead tries to do thin intellectual work around the skeleton of the story. There’s a full court case, complete with so many logical blunders I couldn’t help but giggle. There’s an episode devoted primarily to Alex’s backstory, and while I don’t want to spoil any revelations, let me hint that her problem predictably rhymes with “schmaddy schmissues.” And worst of all, Ellen is a psychology student and spends episode after episode listening to lectures about Jung that invariably match exactly what we’ve learned about Dan and Alex. One character even has to say out loud that there are similarities between “that shadow thing” Ellen studies and things in her life.
For all new material Fatal attraction has little to say about its modern context. Dan facing consequences is ultimately not a commentary on the cancellation/consequence culture. Making them a workplace affair ultimately doesn’t give a #MeToo shade to the Dan/Alex dynamic. Mike has a whole monologue about the flaws in the justice system and the criminal justice rehabilitation process, but I don’t think that’s what this Fatal attraction is about either. And while it is stated that in 2023 “murder is a brand” that fascinates people, there is little connection to our insatiable appetite for true crime – which is strange considering that Cunningham is the more perceptive Dirty Jan anthology.
This is not to say that there are no positive points to the elaboration of this story.
Caplan is a flammable delight in the gaudy role that earned Close one of her Oscar nominations. She’s scary, but never in a way that becomes cartoonish and gives the character a powerful loneliness.
Peet, so good at that second one Dirty Jan Seasons, and Jirrels in particular are very good at capturing the wreckage and reconstructing the life that tore Dan to pieces. I actually always watched the movie thinking about the impact of all that trauma on little Ellen. Wouldn’t the answer be primarily a proclivity for Wikipedia summaries of Jungian archetypes.
Best of all is Huss, who is funnier yet more authentic than anything around him in a glorified “best friend” role that he elevates to something totally watchable. The 2023 scenes where Mike becomes van Huss and the newly released Dan Weird coupleroommates in style are also Jackson’s best moments. Otherwise, I was left wondering why the hair and makeup team was so mean to him and why, after years spent on a more layered exploration of infidelity (Showtime’s The affair), the actor wanted to force those comparisons here.
Returning to endings, without spoiling anything specifically, I will say that the new Paramount + Fatal attraction has two endings: one silly and anticlimactic, the other ludicrous and silly. I could work to justify the first ending in emotional terms and the second in pop psychology terms. It still wouldn’t be enough to make the show worthwhile.