I’m Watching Love Story for Grace Gummer’s Earring Acting

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Okay, so I really wanted to like FX’s Love Story, and it looks amazing. It’s like a perfect white silk shirt on a mannequin – beautiful, but ultimately a little…hollow. After a rough start with the costumes, they really focused on getting the style of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette right, and visually, it’s fun to see. The actors are pretty, and they do a decent job mimicking the famous couple, especially Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette. But beyond that, it feels a bit empty. They’ve recreated 1990s lower Manhattan so well, it’s all dreamy and nostalgic – it reminds me of shows like Sex and the City and Felicity, even a little bit of Eyes Wide Shut. It’s just…not very memorable, you know?

The show is unfortunately bogged down by characters constantly explaining things that are already obvious. It feels like watching a history lesson, constantly reminding us about well-known facts – like JFK’s father being president, or Mark Wahlberg’s early modeling career. Naomi Watts’ portrayal of Jackie Kennedy Onassis includes a stiff accent and repetitive explanations, and other characters, like Anthony Radziwill, are burdened with heavy-handed foreshadowing through constant coughing, unnecessarily highlighting his eventual fate.

After watching eight of the nine episodes, Love Story is visually stunning but ultimately feels shallow and ethically questionable. While the show aims to celebrate Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s talent for reinventing herself, it opens with a glamorous scene of her and her husband boarding the plane that crashed, killing them. I actually appreciate the show’s honesty in acknowledging it’s capitalizing on our fascination with this tragedy. I wish I’d stopped there, but I continued watching, first because it was my job, and then because I became captivated by one specific element: the show’s portrayal of Caroline Kennedy, played by Grace Gummer, who delivers an overly dramatic performance while wearing particularly noticeable earrings.

In Love Story, Caroline serves as a grounded contrast to her more impulsive brother, constantly reminding him of their family’s prominent position and urging him to relax. While this dynamic makes sense for the story, the series is also colored by the knowledge of Caroline’s future tragedy—every mention of her recently deceased daughter feels overly pointed and intrusive. The show doesn’t shy away from difficult truths, even when pretending to be delicate. However, its distinctive costumes, styling, and performances push Love Story beyond simple sensationalism, creating something uniquely strange and almost theatrical. The show’s designers clearly worked hard to make Pidgeon’s Carolyn appear effortlessly stylish, but they put just as much effort into portraying Gummer’s Caroline as rigid and severe. As Gummer explained in an interview with Elle, her character’s hair is rigidly straightened and her clothes are always fully buttoned, creating a sense that she’s protecting herself with armor.

Gummer consistently plays Caroline with exaggerated mannerisms. Her performance is marked by a rigid posture and simmering anger, expressed through constant pouting and intense stares, almost to the point of being comical—until a specific accessory pushes it over the edge. During a dinner scene where John and Carolyn discuss their wedding plans, Caroline arrives wearing a detailed gray blouse and large, golden, spiral-shaped earrings—a design originally gifted to Jackie Kennedy by Aristotle Onassis and inspired by the moon landing. Carolyn immediately compliments the earrings, and it’s likely she’s being insincere, given her character’s preference for simplicity. Throughout the scene, as Gummer’s Caroline complains about the wedding location and feeling excluded from the planning, the earrings swing dramatically with every movement. This effect is heightened by Gummer’s acting style, which, like her mother Meryl Streep’s, relies heavily on neck and upper body movements. As Caroline expresses herself, the earrings bounce and sway, resembling the opening credits of a television show.

I’ve rewatched this scene countless times, and even made my coworkers watch it with me. It’s strangely captivating – not just because of the mesmerizing earrings. While the scene is likely intended to reveal something about the characters or a powerful, private American family, it doesn’t really go beyond what’s immediately visible. The visuals are so striking that you end up focusing on them instead of the deeper meaning. Instead of wondering about the characters’ internal struggles, you’re distracted by how amazing the earrings are. It evokes a strange mix of feelings – a detached kind of empathy, like observing a collector admiring a new doll or a scientist pinning a butterfly. There’s a hint of envy, a little bit of pleasure at another’s misfortune, and, if I’m honest, a touch of cruelty. I know I should look away, but I can’t help being fascinated by those earrings and wanting to know more.

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2026-03-11 17:54