The prolific American screenwriter David E. Kelley recently had the flair to adapt to the screen literary works which x-rayed the worst faults of bourgeois characters, with irreproachable appearances which camouflaged horrors. We just have to think about Big Little Lies and to The Undoing.
He succeeded once again in this exercise (with the help of Canadian playwright Melissa James Gibson) with the bestselling novel Anatomy of a Scandala political, legal and psychological thriller that tells the inside story of a rape trial of a popular British government minister (Rupert Friend), primarily from the perspectives of the plaintiff (Naomi Scott), the Crown prosecutor (Michelle Dockery) and the accused’s wife (Sienna Miller).
And that’s where the main interest of this miniseries resembling “courtroom drama” lies (a genre whose codes Kelley perfectly masters thanks to L.A. Law and to The Practice), which at times plunges us back into the troubled past of its four main characters, to reveal their flaws, their uncertainties, their regrets, and thus enlighten the viewer on their posture in the face of the acts of which the accused is allegedly guilty, and on other events and gestures whose nature we will not mention here.
The chronological account of the trial, combined with these seemingly disorganized returns to the sometimes distant past of the three female protagonists, gives even more security and credibility to the subtle play of their interpreters, who are without a doubt one of the major assets of this production more original than it seems.
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