Bonnie and Clyde (miniseries, 2013)

‘Bonnie & Clyde’ Review: What We Loved
Our favorite casting choice, Emile Hirsch, is the perfect Clyde Barrow for a 2013 audience. The 28-year-old fuses his trademark boyish charm with the real-life criminal’s ruthlessness, resulting in a fully-realized character, whom new viewers can be more sympathetic to than they probably anticipated.


British actress Holliday Grainger, whom we still remember fondly as The Borgias‘ Lucrezia, was also an inspired casting choice. Her Bonnie Parker is fiery, fearless, and like Emile’s Clyde, strangely compelling.

In 2009, when a different Bonnie & Clyde movie was in pre-production, Faye famously slammed the decision to cast Hilary Duff in the titular female role — she asked, “Couldn’t they at least cast a real actress?” — but we think Miz Dunaway will be much more pleased with Holliday’s performance.

And with additional stand-out performances from stars like Holly Hunter, William Hurt, Twilight‘s Elizabeth Reaser and Modern Family‘s Sarah Hyland, there’s plenty to love about Bonnie & Clyde – even when the gun-toting duo isn’t raising hell.

There 
oughta be 
a law against 
series like 
‘Bonnie & Clyde’

In this retelling, Clyde Barrow (Emile Hirsch, “Milk”) suffers bouts of “Donnie Darko”-style visions that foretell his bloody future.

One key premonition even involves a rabbit — although, thankfully, this one is pet-sized. But it is still enough to give Clyde heaving nightmares.

You expect this sort of half-hearted attention to reality from Lifetime, but History, really?

Bonnie Parker (Holliday Grainger, “The Borgias”) starts as a disillusioned bride stuck in a waitressing job.

Tonight’s opener (the miniseries is simulcast on all three of the A&E sister networks) half-heartedly argues for her as a feminist icon — the flip-side to aviator Amelia Earhart. It then spins into the cliche of the bloodthirsty femme fatale. the Eve to Clyde’s nice-guy Adam who led him astray.

If you buy this story, Clyde just wanted to settle down, 
but Bonnie, a rejected, dejected wannabe actress, longed to make a name for herself. And if she couldn’t find a way to do it while being good, she’d do it by being bad.

“See how his head bounced, Clyde. Just like a rubber ball,” she says after shooting one lawman.

One problem with that conclusion is that Clyde’s life of crime started long before he hooked up with Bonnie.

And while the miniseries depicts the sexual abuse he suffered during an early prison stint, it’s a mere footnote in his life, and not, as many surmise, a motive for his hostility toward law enforcement agents.

Hirsch and Grainger spark little as a couple, though Grainger proves she’s capable of more range than she ever did in Showtime’s costume period drama “The Borgias.”

The four-hour mini also truncates the supporting cast of gangsters, focusing mostly on Clyde’s relationship with brother Marvin “Buck” (Lane Garrison, “Prison Break”) and, tomorrow, Marvin’s wife Blanche (Sarah Hyland, “Modern Family”).

This loose adaptation also plays up a lawman, Ted Hinton (Austin Hebert), who is sweet on Bonnie, and female reporter P.J Lane (Elizabeth Reaser, “The Good Wife,” in a horrific wig) who comes to regret turning the law-breakers into heroes. Neither character is especially well-developed.

Academy Award-winners William Hurt and Holly Hunter take different approaches to their scenes as lawman Frank Hamer and Bonnie’s mother, Emma, respectively. Hurt practically spits bullets as an Old Testament-style hunter; Hunter underplays maternal concern. Both approaches work.

Spoiler alert: Even from beyond the grave Monday night, Clyde gets the last word.

“Bonnie & Clyde”?

Fallacies about Bonnie and Clyde

Reports that Bonnie was a cold-blooded killer like Clyde are just one of the fallacies about the lives and criminal careers of Bonnie and Clyde. Many of the details of their criminal lives have been lost to the sands of time, if they were ever recorded in the first place.

However, Bonnie’s role in the crimes has probably been exaggerated. Eyewitnesses of the time have stated that Bonnie didn’t fire a gun very often, and they are also in agreement that she likely never took part in shooting anyone.

In cartoons, pulp detective magazines, newsreels, and newspapers, Bonnie was often portrayed as being a machine gun toting killer. Yet, W.D. Jones, a member of their gang, couldn’t remember a time when she ever fired at any police officers.

There is a tale from Bonnie and Clyde’s heyday that Bonnie finished off a policeman with a bullet to his head, and that she made a joke about how the cop’s head bounced. That report has been discredited, though, and it is just one more of the fallacies that got to be a part of the lore about Bonnie and Clyde.

Another of the fallacies about Bonnie is that she smoked cigars. She actually chain-smoked Camels, though Bonnie might have posed with one for photos.

On June 10, 1933, CLyde Barrow totalled their car in a wreck. Bonnie’s leg was badly burned in the accident. She wasn’t able to get proper medical attention, and by the end of their criminal careers, she had problems even walking.

Bonnie was 23 when she died. Clyde was two months past 25. They both would probably have been surprised, but also honored, that their names and fame have survived for this long.

This four-hour miniseries, starring Emile Hirsch ("Into the Wild") and Holliday Grainger ("The Borgias"), was in the works before the History hit. It has a cinematic feel and takes a few risks, particularly with showing Clyde's sixth sense and Bonnie's hysteria and presenting the story in a leisurely fashion.

"It is a morality story and has some parallels to our modern era," Hirsch tells Zap2it. "They were almost the original reality TV stars. They were playing out their lives in the media, and that is an interesting parallel.

"I feel like something about the Bonnie and Clyde story will appeal to people for generations and generations," Hirsch continues. "It is a real love story that is flawed and tragic. As horrible as they were, the one thing that was always consistent, that never changed, was their love for each other."

The film does a great job of capturing the period, the costumes, cars and feel of the Depression. People may think they know the story well, but the miniseries aims to reveal who they were beyond the bank robberies.

Clyde is shown to have suffered a serious fever as child, and after that he was said to have a sixth sense. He had visions, including one of Bonnie, long before he met her. He first saw Bonnie at her wedding, and even the fact that she was married did not deter Clyde.

Bonnie is given to weeping fits, and only her mom (Holly Hunter) can calm her.

Until she began working on this, Grainger was among those who thought she knew the story well.

"I was very aware of Bonnie and Clyde growing up, in the way you know about Romeo and Juliet and Thelma and Louise," Grainger says. "It wasn't until I started researching the part, and I realized how quite short their lives on the road were. It was only two years. It must have been a long two years, constantly moving."

The miniseries reminds us how they held up small banks for tiny amounts. This being the Depression, people had no sympathy for the banks. But they developed a kinship with Bonnie and Clyde because of a newspaper reporter, P.J. Lane (Elizabeth Reaser, "The Twilight Saga"), who wrote sympathetic stories.

Her reporting drove Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (William Hurt) crazy. He explains that police usually nab the bad guys based on tips from the public, but because of Lane's stories, no one was turning in Bonnie and Clyde.

Clyde, long a thief, had done time in prison, where he was raped and beaten. He never intended to kill during the robberies; Bonnie was the trigger-happy one.

Bonnie married young and was abandoned by her husband. She had a flair for the dramatic, wrote poetry and desperately wanted to be in the movies.

"She is very intelligent and quite manipulative but very vain and shallow and selfish and single-minded in that she has an aim for her life to get out of certain situations," Grainger says. "She is almost a fame-hungry reality TV star. She wants to get her name known somehow. She is quite ruthless in that way, but at the same time the part of Bonnie that really came out is just this lost little girl. She was such a mommy's girl but needs to be loved as much as she is manipulating. She thrives on the love and affection and needy vanity and needs to be recognized by someone."

Bonnie and Clyde killed nine officers, or "laws" as they were called, and a few civilians in their wake before they died in a hail of bullets on May 23, 1934. Bonnie was 23, Clyde 25.

Despite the bloody robberies and their transient existence, they were in love. And it was this romance that drew Lifetime to the project, says Rob Sharenow, the network's general manager.

"Our version is the most historically accurate that has ever been told," he says. "It is an incredible love story. They fall in love at a very dangerous time. There is a lot known about them. All sorts of elements of this story are not familiar to people who think they know the story."

While most TV movies are shot in under a month, Bruce Beresford ("Tender Mercies") directed this over 50 days.

"People will see a tragic love story and a real slice of American history," Sharenow says. "These were desperate times. And for me, the big revelation of the script was really Bonnie and how much she drove the story and the escalation of violence. It was the story of her wanting to be famous, forging this bond with the journalist and wanting to be a star."

And ultimately, getting what she wanted - for 80 years later, people still know her name.