The real Betty Broderick might have been believable, but the Betty Broderick I watched made me furious up till the very end and that was through a long stretch of eight episodes of 'Dirty John's' season 2 on Netflix. Before I watched this series, I had a few misconceptions that had been fed by my mini reviews of some tweets and comments just to know what I needed to prepare for and they included the following:
No.
Just No.
I did not feel this way. Knowing my proclivities for siding with criminals in movies (Good girls, Narcos), I found this new deviation from me a bit surprising.
Here's my break down:
Betty Broderick, to me, did not to be feel like a woman scorned. Maybe in real life she was, but we're again sticking what how Netflix portrays it as that's all I really have to go by. More than anything, I felt I was watching a woman with no regard for the future and with no willingness to acknowledge the realities of the obstacles she was up against. She came off as a toddler who felt her only option in a bad situation was to throw a tantrum by breaking things, doing irresponsible things, wicked things, that negated the precedence she was trying to set in court.
All the time I kept thinking was what does she really want? For a woman who was a bread winner for a while and in-between multiple pregnancies as she waited for her husband to first become a doctor and then a lawyer, who finally got her dream life when he became all those. A woman who was offered what I believe was a fair divorce compensation of having visitation days before having that taken away from her because she refused to adhere to the rules of no trespassing, no cussing and no vandalizing of her ex-husband's property, she threw it all away for the flimsy reason that this man had found a younger and loving secretary to share the remainder of his life with.
Yes, a woman who has been betrayed and lied to for a while is a woman I understand.
But a woman who refuses to let go of that past life no matter how difficult, when she's not starving and when she has the love of her children and could get shared custody if she was well behaved, but instead decides to slut shame her husband's new wife and finally kill both of them in a premeditated act of rage, that woman I do not understand. I cannot buy the story of being so angry you do not remember you committed murder. Maybe for someone else. But not Betty Broderick.
There are some useful themes to examine. One is that it is a pitiful thing for a man to gain sole custody. Why is this looked upon as a bad thing? Don't men equally get to feel the same level of attachment mothers experience with their kids? It would have been a different issue if Dan Broderick was a bad father. He was not perfect or always there, but when he got those kids, he listened to them, loved them, protected them from the swearing Betty like any responsible father would do. Is he to blame for your ideas of who a wife should be? No way do I believe a mother just because she was female and fragile in our collective consciousness deserves to have her kids more than a responsible father, regardless of how cunning he was in court.
Another issue I had was the slut shaming of Dan's new wife Linda. I thought she was a brilliant girl, who made efforts at work. She did not come off as a scheming, calculative secretary trying to rip Dan off.She made the effort for him, was better aligned with his career and truly had her heart on this man. Not much could be said about Betty with her expensive shopping to get back at Dan. I mean for how long is a man to be grateful because you did something you thought a wife should do. The entitlement she felt and the need to have him indebted to her for life was frankly, disgusting to watch.
I kept thinking, how does a woman kill the father of her kids because of her needs to be wanted and validated when those kids love their father. Now, they have neither parents and yet, somehow your mental anguish for the unfairness of life is elevated? How was she hoping to ever come from that to wrap her arms around her young sons when those arms were stained with murder? I have not judged a movie character this much, but the lack of remorse on her part, her happiness with the messages she received from fans in jail who understood her and wished there were more like her, to teach men a lesson was repulsive in every way.
Like the prosecutor said, I concede that her life did not turn out the way she hoped it would. Divorce hurts, she did not deserve to be cheated on, but that is how life turned out. Dan was nowhere close to the monster she wished she could make him for. He was human and flawed but did not deserve to die. No one exists to make you happy. No one exists for you to make them to sole reason for your existence. But Betty made the choice to do so and could not let go of that reality, so she paid for it with 32 to life in prison.
Like her lawyer said, the only healing I thought possible for her was old age; a time to hopefully reflect on her crime of passion and see how she would have done things differently.
