The Perfect Couple Goes Way Harder Than the Book
The Netflix adaptation of The Perfect Couple, one of Elin Hilderbrand’s wildly popular beach reads, treats its source material extremely liberally. The basics of both plots are the same: The maid of honor at the wedding of a wealthy Nantucket family turns up dead on the morning of the ceremony, then everyone becomes a suspect. But the streaming version developed by showrunner Jenna Lamia and directed by Susanne Bier unfurls way more freak flags — see: Tag Winbury’s drunken performance of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” at his wife’s book party — than the novel dares to even imagine. It also views the members of the Winbury family and their enormous privilege with a much more blatantly cynical eye, which is directly reflected in the resolution of the murder of that maid of honor, Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy).
Hilderbrand’s version of this story takes its time to absolve every single rich person who could have contributed to Merritt’s demise, including the person most responsible: Abby Winbury, the pregnant daughter-in-law of Tag and Greer Garrison Winbury. Abby, an extremely peripheral figure in the book, drops a sedative into a glass of water intended for Featherleigh Dale (yes, that is the character’s name), the British cougar who becomes French femme fatale Isabel Nallet (Isabelle Adjani) in the series. Abby is frustrated by her husband Tom’s ongoing affair with this woman, but because no one in the book ever does anything truly dastardly, she doesn’t intend to kill Featherleigh. Abby just wants to knock her out for a bit.
But that glass of water is instead consumed unwittingly by Merritt, who ultimately dies when the drugs start to weigh down her body as she tries to retrieve a ring — given to her by Tag, with whom she was having an affair — from the sea, drowning as a result. The cops never figure it out. No arrests are made. The only person who knows what happened is Greer. “The police have ruled Merritt’s death accidental—and an accident it indeed was,” writes Hilderbrand. “Abby may not even realize she’s to blame, and Thomas will never put two and two together. The secret resides with Greer, and with Greer it will remain until her death.”
Abby’s motive is intertwined with the theme embedded in the book’s title: that no couple is perfect because everyone hides their sins, even people like Greer and Tag or Thomas and Abby who might seem to have it all. That’s even reflected in the final sentences of the novel that describe Merritt’s last moments alive: “Where is the ring? There it is. She sees it. Like love, she thinks. It is just beyond her reach.”
Lamia’s version of The Perfect Couple is certainly filled to the brim with adultery, but it’s far more interested in another theme: that extremely privileged people suck. The motive for murder in her story is rooted in what always drives people like the Winburys — money. So the Netflix series includes a huge plot point that is completely absent from the novel version, that the trust money owed to the Winbury sons is about to kick in, when the youngest, Will, turns 18 in a few weeks. The fact that Merritt is pregnant with Tag’s child, which is the case in both the book and the show, threatens to upend that plan because it would mean everyone will have to wait 18 more years for Tag’s fourth child to grow up before they can get their money. Several Winburys and some of their associates have legitimate reasons to not want that child to be born, which provides a much juicier reason to kill than the comparatively tepid desire to force your husband’s mistress to take a long, deep nap.
Without the interior monologues that soften readers’ impressions of the characters in Hilderbrand’s book, each of the members of the Winbury family comes across as an unrepentant narcissist who seems potentially capable of resorting to nasty behavior. Any of them could have done it. But as in the novel, it all comes down to Abby, brought to life via a terrific, slyly catty performance by Dakota Fanning.
In the book, Abby’s depicted as a social-climbing sorority girl and the daughter of a Texas oil magnate. Like the Winburys, she comes from serious money, and seems largely oblivious to how much her social status naturally cocoons her from harm. The Dakota Fanning version of Abby is much more self-aware. While she didn’t grow up middle-class like Amelia (Eve Hewson), who’s supposed to marry the Winburys’ son Benji (an intentionally cryptic Billy Howle), her lilies aren’t nearly as gilded as the Winburys. She’s enough of an upper-crust outsider to come across as a wannabe — she’s constantly thirsty for her mother-in-law’s praise — and to credibly make fun of all the opulence around her. “Jesus, it looks like Lily Pulitzer projectile-vomited all over this place,” she drawls as she enters Greer’s book party. But she’s also so invested in living a luxury lifestyle — and in her husband collecting the money he’s owed — that she’ll do anything to maintain it. Including, as it turns out, murder.
In the TV version of A Perfect Couple, there are no accidents. As we learn in the finale, Abby knew exactly what she was doing when she stuck a barbiturate in a glass of cold-pressed orange juice that she handed to Merritt, sitting distraught on the beach, her foot bleeding from having stepped on glass. “If you want something done right,” she says darkly while Merritt gulps down her glass of citrus poison, “you have to do it yourself.” Abby suggests a swim; as Merritt starts to lose control of her faculties, Abby dunks her head under the water and holds it there, until the expectant mother who threatens to delay her husband’s inheritance can no longer breathe.
The book never gets anywhere near this ghastly — it doesn’t have the stomach for it. It also doesn’t possess the sense of the dramatic required to actually hold any of its central figures accountable. This is not a problem for the Netflix series! In one of the most satisfying moments in The Perfect Couple, police show up at the Winbury estate to arrest Abby for Merritt’s murder and she does what every entitled brat does when forced to answer for her actions: tries to get out of it. “I’m pregnant,” she says haughtily, as if the police can’t take a woman into custody if she’s nearing her third trimester. It’s a particularly canny line because of its subtext: Abby thinks that having some genuine Winbury blood in her body will protect her. But she’s not really one of them. She’s just a carrier, an expendable dragged off the property intentionally screaming at the top of her lungs when she’s told she has the right to remain silent.
Through Abby’s arrest, Lamia and her fellow writers allow the audience the satisfaction of seeing something we rarely get to in real life: a one-percenter receiving 100 percent of the punishment they deserve. But like the book, this iteration of The Perfect Couple allows the rest of the Winburys to remain insulated from trouble. After Abby’s arrest, it’s as if no one even notices that she’s gone. Tag literally doesn’t; he’s so focused on hitting seagulls with a golf ball that he misses the entire incident.
In both versions of this story, the Winburys proper — Tag, Greer, Tom, Benji, and, in the Netflix series, Will, who does not exist in the book — are seemingly able to go about their lives unscathed after the whole messy Merritt incident. That feels appropriate and true to what might happen in real life. In the series, Greer even gets some 11th-hour image rehab courtesy of her revelation that she had so little money earlier in her life that she worked as an escort. In the last scene, she tries to reconnect with Amelia, who doesn’t marry Benji after all, in a way that suggests Greer “gets” Amelia because she also wasn’t raised wealthy.
But Greer’s too ensconced in her high-end environs to really remember what it feels like to have very little. She’ll always be more than fine in life, and so will her kids. Hilderbrand understands that and so does the ending of her book. Lamia’s ending does, too, but it also gets that in a murder mystery, especially one involving comically wealthy, myopic people, the audience needs to see someone held accountable, and all the better if it’s an entitled snob screeching for her husband to call their lawyer while she’s being handcuffed. On the page, that might have seemed too extreme. But in the Netflix version of The Perfect Couple, it has just the right amount of juice.