3 out of 5

Director: Adrian Shergold

‘Lucan’ is certainly one of those stories – I must believe – that carries more weight if its culturally relevant.  The surname has no resonance with me (at all), and yet, the Lord Lucan controversy and subsequent disappearance of the titular Count was apparently plastered all over the papers in the UK in the late 70s, and merits enough recognition for a one-word-title miniseries.  On its own, without this background, Adrian Shergold turns in a moody, (purposefully) oddly humorous, and at times devastatingly raw portrayal of a window of time right around the big to-do… but… like many based-on-fact serials, its hobbled by tossing all of its focus onto specifics which then outweigh the remaining material and, as life has no pat conclusions, neither can ‘true’ stories.  But especially those that really don’t have an ending: we still don’t know what happened to Lord Lucan, so these two episodes – or perhaps ‘The Gamblers’ book on which it was based – can only toss out a guess and mix it with snippets of truth that would lend it some credence.  At stories end, I’m thankful to have gotten enough grounding to know the tale, but I wasn’t compelled enough to sift through the wiki article to determine what was real and what was added.  Interpret that how you will.

So we have Rory Kinnear as Mr. Lucan, nicknamed ‘Lucky’ thanks to some skilled gamblin’… but we’re told that those skills are in decline, generally losing out at the local gaming establishment overseen by eccentric friend John Aspinall, played by Christopher Eccleston.  But that’s all fine and good because Lucan is a Count, and thus automatically subsumed into the upper class, wherein men are Men first and human beings later.  While Kinnear is excellently troubling as Lucan – this frightening blend of bubbling anger and yet willful gullibility of a sort, filtered through a fractured worldview brought on, perhaps, by living with money.  The wiki page does tell me that Lucan was quite the celebrity, sought after by women and considered for the role of James Bond at one point thanks to his penchant for driving expensive cars and leading the dashing lifestyle we associate with reckless millionaires… but that doesn’t come across in ‘Lucan.’  Instead, Shergold pitches most of the first episodes focus on Lucan’s relationship with Aspinall, whom Eccleston plays with quirky glee, spouting Sun Tzu-ish philosophy to justify putting oneself above all others and turning everything into a game where the only option is to win.  When Lucan’s wife, Veronica – Catherine McCormack – gets on him about their dwindling finances, ‘Lucky’ complains to Aspinall, who plants the seeds for – and encourages to grow – an idea about divorcing his wife.  But to ‘win’, he must maintain custody of their children and money.  This leads to plotting to have Veronica considered unfit as a mother… and then begins to twist into figuring out more permanent ways to be rid of her…

And the couple separated, and the relationship continued to deteriorate, Veronica suffering from depression, Lucky paranoiacally taping phone conversations with his wife and constantly discrediting her to any who would listen.  Then one night, Veronica is attacked in her home.  The maid has already been killed.  She would claim it was Lord Lucan.  There were some phone calls, some letters, and an abandoned car with a presumed murder weapon… but otherwise Lucan disappeared.

It’s a compelling story.  And understandably, ‘The Gamblers’ and Shergold would want to give us a logical reasoning for the Why of things, hence the device of Aspinall, who, for the sake of television, must be cast as a one-note villain.  This could all very well be the absolute truth.  I have no doubt Aspinall was as kooky as portrayed, but the time spent making him into the guide and teacher of Lucan shifts our focus away from Lucan’s relationship with his wife, making his motivations not difficult to grasp in a compelling way, just in a non-satisfactory way.  And thus the jump to murder does seem like a jump, all too readily suggested and accepted and supported.  The first episode ends with the attack, leaving the second episode floundering for focus.  Do we really care about the aftermath?  The immediate moments afterward are amazing, with some of the best and most frightening shots in the series – McCormack and Kinnear staring directly into the camera for a deadpan conversation about what’s just occurred – but once that’s out of the way we just start dusting off facts to get to our made up conclusion, which is provided by the framing structure of an author writing about the tale in present day and stumbling across some conclusions in his research.

I will never have a proper suggestion for how to conclude stories of this nature, but ‘Lucan’ could have done without the framing device – which is really just there to tell us, at the start, that it’s a mystery – and certainly could have used one more episode to give us a more complete understanding of the couple before things went sour.  Thankfully the mood is well handled by Shergold and the acting – whether or not the characters are true to life – is phenomenal for how each role is pitched, getting our sympathy or disgust in just the right doses.  But overall the tale still feels sensationalized.  Which is all fine and good, it just gets to sit in the drama category instead of reaching for something a bit more compelling or affecting.