I Know Who Should Bare The Brunt of the Blame for What Happened On Sunday's Oscars...And It's Not Who You Think

Sunday night’s Academy Awards were a historic one. Ariana DeBose became the first LGBTQ performer of color to win an acting Oscar when she took Supporting Actress for West Side Story. Troy Kotsur became the first deaf man to win an Oscar for acting when he won for Coda. Kenneth Brannagh and Jane Campion finally reached the pinnacle of their professions after more than three decades after Brannagh won for writing Belfast ands Campion took the Best Director prize for Power of the Dog. And there were so many little joyful moments along the way – including the climax when Lady Gaga presented with Liza Minnelli for Best Picture. All of them deserve to be celebrated and talk about for years…which is why it’s almost tragic that this year’s Oscars will be forever known for when Will Smith walked up on stage and hit Chris Rock after he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith.

As is the case with so many viral moments, America is choosing sides: People on Smith’s side will say that Rock was out of line. People on Rock’s side, especially comedians, are saying that Smith has crossed a bridge too far. There are those who want Smith to face assault charges or at least have his Oscar taken away.

What I think that all of these columnists, professional or otherwise, seem to be missing a larger point. Lost in all of the outrage about what has happened is that there is an unindicted co-conspirator in the actions of Sunday night. One that basically helped set everything into motion, but will certainly face no real consequences for it. I speak, of course, of the Motion Picture Academy themselves.

Some may think I’m a writer taken on the cache of former Oscar winner turned conspiracy nut Oliver Stone. Not so. I have four very specific reasons to blame the Academy for what happened, three of which deal with how everything came to happened and a fourth one that slightly blames one of the participants but really is a testimony to the third point.

 

1.       Chris Rock’s presence at the Oscar went against the better sense of the Academy.

To be clear Chris Rock is one of the greatest comedians of all time, full stop. Ever since he debuted on Saturday Night Live thirty years, he has always been edgy, cheerfully profane and always pushing the boundaries of good taste…all of which go against everything that Academy Awards stand for on Oscar night. In the seven or eight appearances he made on the show – including the two occasions he hosted –  he always brings his brand of humor to the event and it almost invariably goes over badly.

What’s more Sunday’s Oscars already had two boundary pushing comedians hosting: Wanda Sykes, who worked with Rock on his HBO series and is basically a master of his uncomfortable humor, and Amy Schumer, who in a sense is a child of Rock’s in her approach to comedy and performing. Given their methods of pushing the envelope (which Sykes did in her segment touring the Academy museum) the Oscars had to know they were going to have enough potential trouble from the audience and critics as it was. So why was Rock there at all? This leads to my next point:

 

2.      Why Rock was presenting Best Documentary.

Screenwriters love foreshadowing and so does the Academy. The heavy favorite for Best Documentary was Summer of Soul, produced by the musician Questlove. (I don’t know if anyone noticed but Questlove did win and this artists moment of triumph was overshadowed by what happened a moment before, another great Oscar tradition.) In their heavy handed white privilege way, the Oscars no doubt wanted to have a hip black performer give the award, and I guess they figured any black musician activist like say Common or Beyonce or hell, Sean Combs (who had to cool things down for the record) was too much of a risk. I have a feeling some stodgy executive thought: “Hey, Chris Rock made the documentary Good Hair! (which they didn’t nominate for anything) And he’s a presenter. He’s a safe choice!” How’d that work out for you guys?

 

3.      The Seating Arrangement for that night’s Oscars.

To be honest, I think this was by far the biggest factor in what happened.  All of the major nominees from every major film were in the front of the theater at their own tables, presumably so they could just walk right up and accept the award. (This, of course, makes perfect sense. You know what’s been causing the Oscars to run so long all these years; those extra twenty seconds it takes them to walk down the aisle.) Smith was maybe ten feet away from the stage when Rock told his joke. If he’d been sitting in an aisle seat, say fifty or sixty feet away, someone or something would have intervened. An usher would have gotten in Smith’s way. Jada would have told him to calm down. Rock would have seen what was coming and made a comment that would have cooled off this situation. He’s a comedian; he’s used to hostile crowds. By the time anybody had a chance to do anything at all; it was too late to do anything. Which brings me to one last comment. It may not strict be relevant, but it bothered me even when it happened:

 

4.      The Joke that Rock Told.

Yes Rock is an insult comic who says harsh things about powerful people. Which is why his actual joke seemed so out of character. His exact words referred to Jada starring in G.I. Jane 2, the sequel to a Demi Moore movie in 1997.  It was in bad taste, no question, but it was also the kind of joke that is completely out of Rock oeuvre. Jada may have been rolling her eyes not so much at being insulted, but due the fact that Rock had to go back nearly a quarter of a century to come up with a joke. This is the kind of insult that Don Rickles would consider too smart and Dennis Miller too obscure a reference. And coming from a comedian who is known for being on point to the time, it genuinely doesn’t sound like a Chris Rock joke. The one he told immediately preceding it – about Javier Bardem not being able to win if his wife Penelope Cruz lost - is exactly the kind of reference I expect from Rock, and it looks like both Bardem and Cruz appreciated it. To go from that to a joke that wouldn’t have landed if he’d told to Demi Moore… it’s not his brand.

 

As to the question whether the Academy will punish Smith, as they say they are considering. I actually have a lot more to say about this, and may actually do so in a later article. But I’ll be simple: they won’t. They say there was a meeting immediately after the incident about what to do. I guarantee you what the members were deciding were who to send the bigger gift basket to: Smith or Rock.

Because honestly, the Academy owes both of them a huge favor because they did something they really wanted: they changed the subject. Do you remember what the big controversy about the Oscars was before the night began? Several major awards – among them the short subjects - were presented in an earlier ceremony and clips were shown throughout the night. (As a side note, I’m relatively certain the only reason the documentary award wasn’t one of them was because Summer of Soul was nominated. Food for thought.) There was a huge outcry from almost every major technician who works in film – editors, cinematographers, musicians, you know, all the people the Academy says they represent. They were considering staging a protest and may have even been walking on a picket line Oscar night.

But now, thanks to Smith’s attack on Rock, no one’s talking about it. The Academy can do what it always does, and resolve the problem quietly out of the eyes of the media that is now laser focused on the Smith-Rock imbroglio. And as we all know that’s all the Oscars care about: the movie stars matter, everyone else plays second fiddle if they do at all.

And if we’re being honest, they’ll take the wrong lesson from this too. Did you know that between the incident and Smith’s winning, the viewership jumped more than half a million? It would not stun me that when they start doing ads for next year’s Oscars, they’ll being showing footage of Rock and Smith with the voiceover: “What will happen this year?” What they say about no publicity is bad publicity is especially true in Hollywood. No doubt they’ll think they can resolve this by having Rock and Smith present an award together, with Rock showing up on stage with a black eye. You think I’m joking? Remember when John Travolta utterly butchered Idina Menzel’s name in the intro to singing ‘Let It Go’? That’s exactly what they did the next year. “Nothing too original, cause hey, this is Hollywood!”

Finally, for all of you who are taking this seriously right now and consider it a flashpoint, I leave you with this thought. Right now, on some corner of the internet, theories are being floated that the entire incident was staged. For what purpose will depend on who’s doing the posting, but I guarantee you at some point in the coming weeks, it’ll be all over the place. For the record, I thought that was what happened the moment Smith hit Rock. Based on that, what chance does this logic have against social media?

 Hell, maybe they’ll even use this article as a source.

 

 

 

 

 

The Greatest Kate Winslet Performance You Never Saw: Little Children Retrospective

As I watched Kate Winslet make the awards circuit the past few months for her performance in Mare of Easttown, I came to the stunning realization that one of the greatest actresses of all time is not much older than me. This realization was brought home when Melanie Lynskey won the Best Actress Prize at the Critics Choice awards a few weeks ago for Yellowjackets – the two made their debuts in Peter Jackson’s twisted true story Heavenly Creatures way back in 1991.  Since than Winslet has created some of the most memorable female roles in history and worked with some of the greatest talents: Ang Lee and Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility, Charlie Kaufman in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stephen Daldry in The Reader, Aaron Sorkin in Steve Jobs. And that’s before you consider her bookend Emmys for her work on Mare of Easttown and Mildred Pierce, exactly ten years apart.

Yet when I think of Winslet’s incredible range of performances, I honestly think the best single film she appeared in and did some of her best work is one that is almost certainly one of her least known. It shouldn’t have been: her work in Little Children was far more restrained and sexual than Titanic, her most famous film and a lot subtler with its eroticism than The Reader, the film in which Hollywood finally gave her an Oscar. But at the time of her nomination in 2006, there seemed more interest in the fact that she earned her fifth nomination before she had turned thirty two – the age that Meryl Streep had earned her first acting nomination – then her actual performance. I don’t blame the media for overlooking her: 2006 was one of the rare years where the Oscars had a full slate of extraordinary female performances to choose from, and they tended to focus on the more senior nominees in the category: Judi Dench, who after being ignored by the Academy for the first forty years of her career, had gotten her sixth nominations for the dark comedy Notes on a Scandal; Helen Mirren, who’d been working in the background of Hollywood and Britain for nearly as long had broken into the mainstream with her work as Elizabeth II in The Queen, and Streep herself had astounded the world with her now iconic performance as Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada. So it’s natural that Winslet, much younger and in a much smaller film, was acknowledged as a great actress and then ignored for the veterans. But that is not fair either to Winslet or to Little Children which is subtly one of the most brilliant movies I saw in 2006 and indeed still holds up well today.

Little Children is based on the best-selling by Tom Perotta; a writer whose comic looks at suburbia has been among the best adapted works for movies and television. Alexander Payne adapted his short novel in Election in 1999 and it’s become a modern classic. His end-of-the-world novel, The Leftovers was adapted by him and Damon Lindelof for HBO starting in 2014 and is one of the more overlooked masterpieces of the past decade. I have a soft spot in my heart for Mrs. Fletcher, a novel where the title character, at a loss after her son leaves for college, finds herself going down a rabbit hole of a very specific bunch of internet porn as well as the limited series featuring Kathryn Hahn that was made by HBO in 2019.

If there is a common thread in these adaptations, it is that they center around suburban women going through a major transition in life, whether it be as seemingly simple as running for school president or dealing with the fact that your entirely family was Raptured while you were in the kitchen. Sarah, Winslet’s character in Little Children is somewhere in the middle, she is a thirtyish ‘soccer mom with a young daughter named Lucy. Sarah used to be an executive and has become a stay-at-home who we see in playgrounds with other moms. The major difference is, she hates her life and barely loves her own daughter.  When the movie opens, she’s in yet another lunch time with the women and she wishes she was anywhere else. Then all of them see the ‘Prom King’, a handsome man around their age with a toddler who none dare approach. One of them offers Sara five bucks if she gets his number.

The two have a conversation as they push their children in the swing. Sarah isn’t so much attracted to him as she doesn’t want to go back to her fellow moms. She mentions the bet, but Brad doesn’t have any paper. To the shock of both of them, she kisses him and then runs away.

Brad, played by Patrick Wilson in one of his first roles as a leading man, is just as lost as Sara is. His wife Kathy is a documentary filmmaker and he’s the stay at home dad. He’s supposed to take the bar in several months and goes to the library every night, but he never makes it past the front door. He keeps watching a bunch of young kids skateboarding. He spends several days analyzing the kiss, and is really surprised that it happened especially because Kathy is, as he’ll tell Sara in perhaps the worst time you can think of ‘a knockout’ compared to Sara. (It is a stretch that anyone who could find Winslet ‘not even that pretty’ but we’ll let that go.) It’s clear they haven’t had sex in a while and in a sense Kathy is quietly pressuring him.

After a problem that has been going on in Sara’s marriage becomes blatantly clear (I won’t reveal it, save that its not what you think) Sara remembers that Brad goes by the pool almost every day, buys swimsuits for her and her daughter and she starts going there. They spend a week before anything really happens, almost entirely because Sara honestly seems to prefer just ‘being around Brad without sex being involved. Then, when rain interrupts an already ruptured day, the two go back to Sara’s house. The inevitable happens…and keeps happening in what is frankly some of the most graphic sex scenes I’ve seen in an R-Rated movie. They’re also among the most funny because of some of the conversation that’s going on while their happening. The first time they have sex; mid coitus Brad actually asks Sara if she feels bad. When she tells him no, he says I do, and then they go back to going at it.

Little Children was nominated for Best Picture as a drama, which has always struck me as another one of the Golden Globes misnomers. Much of the film has the same tone of Perotta’s work, the cruel comedy. Everyone in the major storyline seems to be being seen in a level of ridiculousness even in the middle of the sex scenes. A lot of the laughter, like it was in Election and Mrs. Fletcher is embarrassed, but it’s definitely there. Why I think the film is considering is drama is because of the second major storyline going on, which while it has occasional comic undertones, features truly dark and frankly, brilliant, filmmaking.

Throughout the film there is a discussion of a sex offender who has been released from prison and who the entire neighborhood would rather be strung up. In the early minutes of the movies, the soccer moms are joking about castrating me without meeting him. One night while watching the skateboarders, a friend of Brad’s drives by. His name is Larry (Noah Emmerich in one of his best roles). He was an ex-cop and now he’s in neighborhood watch, determined to ‘protect’ the community from this pervert.  Brad joins this watch and soon learns that the only real reason that everybody is in it is for a ‘midnight football team’ against other groups of blue-collar workers’ Brad’s days will soon be spent in bed with Sara and his nights playing football in empty stadiums, leading to a hysterical and joyful moment when his team wins their first game.

Far more serious is Larry’s obsession with the pedophile. He used to be a cop but a shooting got him suspended from the force, and now he spends his days and nights basically doing everything he can to protect the community. His protection essentially becomes harassment and in perhaps his worst moment, Brad asked him why he can’t just let this go. Larry doesn’t have an answer, which leads to a truly horrible moment.

Ray is the sexual deviant that the community fears.  He is more talked about than actually see, but the few times we do we see him with his mother (Phyllis Somerville) the only person in town who is willing to stand up for him. Jackie Earle Haley, who plays Ray, was a 1970s child star in films like The Bad News Bears before his career dried up before he became a teenager.  His nomination for Best Supporting Actor came as a shock to many people who were certain that it would go to Jack Nicholson in The Departed (what sadly became his later major Oscar worthy performance). It shouldn’t have been. Haley’s performance is one of the most restrained in the film, mainly because his character is doing everything possible not to attract the wrong kind of attention.  There are doubts in the movie as to whether he committed the crime he went to prison for (not so in the book) but the court of public opinions, led by Larry, is against him, and in a truly horrific scene midway through the film, we see why.

Two of the best scenes in the movies involve Haley and almost no dialogue. The first comes at the pool. Everyone is enjoying the bright summer day and no one notice Ray appear and then go into the pool. He is happily swimming, when people begin to. Slowly and then in a rush, the pool empties and we see the image of Ray, still frolicking. Security arrives and escorts him out. As he leaves he utters the only line of dialogue: “I was only trying to cool off!” Haley delivers with so blatant frustration that we’re not sure whether or not we believe him.

The second scene comes near the end of the movie. Ray’s mother is dead, and he is truly alone. He’s in the house alone for the first time, and he opens a letter she wrote before she died. It has just one line, and it is so simple that there is no way to read it but that even she never had faith him. Ray has spent the entire movie restrain himself. As the clock in the house chimes, he looks towards the Hummel figurines that his mother collected, and finally explodes. Even this scene, in Haley’s hands, seems sadder than it is angry.

Little Children was the second film written and directed by Todd Field. (His third film Tar is scheduled to come out in October of 2022.) Field had spent many years acting in TV; I actually was a fan of his subtle work in one of my favorite series Once and Again. Field’s first movie In the Bedroom in 2001 was a subtle, minor masterpiece featuring Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek as the parents of a young boy whose affair leads to death and even worse consequences. The film was nominated for five Oscars and won many prizes and won many other awards including Best First Film at the Independent Spirits. Field was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for his first two films and yet astonishingly is only now about to release his third. I realize that it takes many directors huge amounts of time between films and sometimes with auteurs like Terence Malick it can take a miracle to get them to make another. But after making two masterpieces, Field all but disappeared off the face of the earth and I have no idea why.

One of the decisions that Field made for Little Children might have been controversial. The film has a voice-over who unlike almost every other narrator isn’t part of the story. Indeed, this narrator actually spends a great deal of time revealing most of the character’s inner thoughts. This seems odd only in retrospect. At the time and now, I still think its works perfectly given the nature of the book. So much of Perotta’s prose is expressed not in dialogue but in the characters inner thoughts. I honestly can’t see a way that so many of the better sections could have been explained. And in one of the critical scenes in the movie – the football game I discussed – the narrator provides both backstory and comic relief for the situation, bringing gravitas to a scenario that without it would be nonsensical.

Now about the ending. I had mixed emotions about it. It does have certain differences then the one we got in Perotta’s novel; though considering how the book ended I don’t see any way that it would have worked on film. The ending is canon when it comes to the resolution of the story of Brad and Sarah, which no matter how I look at it is a disappointment. But the recent I still think the film works as a whole is because of the approach it takes to the other underlying story, the conflict between Ray and Larry.  I won’t give anything away, save only to say that for both characters there is redemption of a sort in it, even though it ends ambiguously and the fact that in the end, the movie considers this storyline just as important as the graphic romance that’s been going on may demonstrate Field has had his priorities about the plot right the whole time. I was left wanting more, which is what the best films do.

 

 

Criticizing Criticism Part 2: When Pauline Kael Crossed The Line in her Profession and Why Some of the Films She Loved Are Problematic Today

I think Pauline Kael was a brilliant talent. I’ve read her work in many journals and books (sadly, most of her work is out of print and hard to find even on Amazon) and the prose is well-crafted and written. I am impressed that she managed to rise to the top of her profession which is difficult now, much less in the 1950s. And the fact that a generation of critics worship decades after she stopped writing says a lot in a field that doesn’t allow for much looking back.

That said, I’ve learned a lot about Pauline Kael the person recently, particularly in a recent TCM documentary on her. And it leads me to question whether she as a critics may have done harm to industry not merely by the movies she liked, but by her own actions which I truly believed crossed a line.

In 1971 David Lean, one of the greatest directors of all time was invited to a dinner where several New York Critics including Kael were present. Lean was not in great repute at the time: his most recent film Ryan’s Daughter had been critically reviled, well over budget and a box-office disaster. Lean might have been expected some hostility, but Kael and her ilk utterly tore him a new one. They basically told him that his films were overblown and monstrous and that the world could live without them. He joked that maybe he should stay out of color, and they said: ‘No you can have color.” Lean took this criticism very much to heart: he lived until 1990 but made just one more film the rest of his life: the exceptional A Passage to India in 1984. I have no doubt Kael went to her grave thinking: ‘Job well done’.

This strikes me as not just one of the worst things a critic has ever done, it seems a violation of the boundary between art and journalism. It’s one thing to say that a director or a writer is a hack – it’s what critics do – it’s another to publicly humiliate them in a group setting and tell them they have no business being in films after forty years of making some of the most successful movies of all time. I may loathe Shonda Rhimes and the effect she’s had on television, but I withhold my criticism to my column. I would never gather a group of similar minded friends together and publicly shame her into only working in limited series.

More to the point, I never understood why so many people thought Lean was an overblown hack. You can make the argument that his works like Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia have less of the personal and humanistic touch of earlier movies like Brief Encounter and Great Expectations – that’s a legitimate discussion and indeed there are critics like Roger Ebert who did feel that way about some of his later works. But even if you want to argue that a film like Lawrence was just spectacle – it was about something. It was a film with a plot and characters and a definite story. Even if you argue that you can only get an idea of its majesty on a big screen, even on a small television you can glimpses of what Lean and his craftsmen put into it. It dwarfs so many of the overblown epics that were to come – Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, an epic only in length; Braveheart and Gladiator,; Best Pictures appreciated only for the utter excruciating natures of the violence; Kingdom of Heaven and Troy which have no business existing. These are spectacles only in the sense that they are long and ponderous, not in the way that Lean’s films were.

And what guts me even more is that Lean stopped working for the entire 1970s, the age of the auteur. What great films from him did we miss when he would have been given the artistic freedom that the Coppolas and the Spielbergs and the Altmans were getting? Given the process it took Lean to make movies, it was unlikely we would have gotten more than two or three films, but what two or three films they would have been. Would they have had the majesty of The Godfather? The beautifully cinematography we would see from Terence Malick? Something along the lines of on an American Nashville? They might have been the kind of beautiful messes that we got in that era such as a Barry Lyndon or Heaven’s Gate, but both movies are much more appreciated now than they were then. It would have been an alternate cinematic history we never got a chance because of the work of people like Kael, and that’s a tragedy for cinema.

What makes me judge Kael all the more harshly were some of the films she regarded as masterpieces right around the time she was berating Lean as an overblown hack. Because two of the films she couldn’t stop raving about in her column are among the most problematic movies ever made in the 1970s and possibly of all time. The fact that both were made by talented filmmakers doesn’t make them any less of travesties, especially since at the time they were among the most controversial of a decade filled with controversial films.

A brief bit of history for those of you who may not know much about the rating systems for films. From 1969 until roughly the early 1980s, movies that were rated X didn’t have the same stigma that they do today. Many of them were considered pornography (though during the 1970s it wasn’t uncommon for many pornographic films to get a nationwide release) but many of them were simply considered too ‘adult’ for even seventeen years old to handle. Midnight Cowboy was the first (and almost certainly only) X-rated movie to win Best Picture because of its themes of male prostitution. It was still a significant critical and box office hit and many film-makers did try to push those boundaries.

Which brings us to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.  Kael went into rhapsodies about this film that even her fellow critics questioned at the time, and almost certainly justifiably. More than half a century after the film was made, it’s still one of those films that is more talked about then actually seen. Not merely because of the violence of the subject matter, its because its dialogue – Cockney with an accent so heavy that it practically seems to be its own language – is still nearly incomprehensible even with closed captioning. 

Now at this point Clockwork Orange clearly has some of the most memorable images of all time – Malcolm McDowell in his bowler, stomping an old man to death to the tune of Singing in the Rain, images of him with eyes being held open watching a continuous stream of images until he shouts out for relief. And the messages Kubrick was trying to tell the world about clearly resonate and are significant to this. None of this, however, answers the question whether A Clockwork Orange is actually the masterpiece that people like Kael thought it was.  And the thing is, at the time it’s still never been clear that Kael’s contemporaries believed it. Roger Ebert believed Kubrick one of the great directors of all time, and in his Great Movies collections regularly featured many of his films, including films that were considered deeply flawed at the time, like The Shining and yes, Barry Lyndon. A Clockwork Orange didn’t appear in any of the four books that he had written at the time of his death. And small wonder: in his original review, he felt nothing but ‘disgust for Alex’ and considered it an ‘ideological mess’ Ebert was willing to admit his flaws with the passage of time: he would repudiate The Graduate thirty years after raving about it, and consider A.I: Artificial Intelligence which he considered flawed, a minor masterpiece nearly a decade later. He never changed his opinion on Clockwork Orange.

I’ve watched a lot of Kubrick’s movies. Some I consider masterpieces like Dr. Strangelove and Spartacus. Some I respect, even though I can’t comprehend them (2001) I’ve never been able to watch the movie or read Clockwork Orange. Burgess’ novel is incomprehensible; most of Clockwork Orange is utterly repugnant, both violently and sexually. I realize that may be the point of the movie, but I don’t approve of the messaging. But say what you will about the film; I can at least get my head around why Kael lost her head over it. Kubrick was one of the greatest directors of all time. The same can not be said for the other film that was the cause of Kael’s most famous review and lines.

In her review of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Kael wrote the line: “(Marlon) Brando and Bertolucci have given birth to an art form.” In my greatest rave I don’t think I could have written just a brilliant phrase. Thirty years, in discussing another Betrolucci film, Ebert excused the line: “Well, back then we talked about movies like that.” In the documentary I saw another colleague of hers was far less kind: “Why did she choose this hill to die on?” That is a very good question when you are considering the kind of film that not even the crudest porn director would consider a story.

Now I will confess to being a mild connoisseur of pornography disguised as art. I’ve seen bits of Last Tango and it doesn’t close to meeting the qualifications of either. And I’m relatively certain if anybody other than Marlon Brando had been playing the lead, the film would have regarded with revulsion by everybody. Because no matter how you try to justify the movie, it is a glorification of a much older man raping a younger woman. That’s the first sexual encounter between Jeanne and Paul and no matter what Kael or anyone else thinks, it’s never a relationship. Paul makes it very clear he doesn’t want them to know the other’s names and Jeanne is not so much a character as object of an older man’s desires. The butter scene…well, I’ve never watched it and I never will.

I have no doubt that Kael and critics like her justified their raves of both Last Tango and Orange by saying that they were both films about the ultimate of adult artistic expression. It’s much clearer now and it should have been clearer then that both films center on the utter violence of sexuality and rape as a part of art. I don’t believe in the idea of cancel culture as a general rule. For these films, especially Last Tango in Paris, I would gladly make an exception. These films should not be considered art; they are stories that center on the subjugation of women. That in the end protagonists in each film pay the ultimate prize for their crimes is irrelevant and does nothing to justify their existence.  And that a female critic seemed to consider both films the ultimate in artistic achievement in a way she never appreciated The Godfather or MASH, well, that really doesn’t say much for Kael’s skill.

Kubrick, at least, went on to make very different films for the rest of his career and while The Shining and Full Metal Jacket were as violent, it’s hard to argue that the violence was used in the same context. Bertolucci never changed. Most of the movies he based for the rest of his careers were sexual exploitation films disguised as art: Stealing Beauty, Besieged and The Dreamers feature older man/young women porn, interracial porn, and incestuous love triangle porn, respectively. He did win an Oscar for The Last Emperor in 1987, a film that, for the record, is the kind of overblown epic film Kael and her ilk accused Lean of making fifteen years earlier, a film that is utterly dwarfed by Moonstruck and Broadcast News which were beaten by it for Best Picture. In his acceptance speech, Bertolucci referred to Hollywood as ‘The Big Nipple’. I only mention because in his hour of triumph, he was sounded less like the kind of succinct Brit Lean was (his entire acceptance speech for that ‘overblown epic’ Lawrence was basically: “This Brit is very grateful.”) and more like the dirty old man at the center of so many of his own films.

 

 

 

 

We're In Europe, But We Never Left Atlanta: Donald Glover's Landmark Series Comes Out of the Gate With A Terrifying Season Premiere

 

 

We all know it was going to take a while for the incredible Atlanta, Donald Glover’s masterpiece of African-American life in the form of a comedy, to make its return even before Covid broke the world. Indeed, it’s been nearly four years to the day since we left Paper Boi, Darius and Earn boarding their flight for a European tour and there have been millions – I among them – wondering what has happened to them in the meantime.

It is perhaps inevitable that Glover and fellow showrunner Hiro Murai would build on this anticipation and then begin season 3 with an episode where not only do we not see any of the main characters until the end, but doesn’t even seem to be connected to anything we’ve seen in the past two seasons. However, I’m relatively certain who saw the first episode of last nights two-part premiere -  definitely not me – would complain after having seen ‘Three Slaps’, an episode that is just as certain to inspire analysis among TV critics the same way the incredible ‘Teddy Perkins’ did in Season 2. In fact, I’m going to break a rule and actually spend a lot of this review doing just that.

(Note: I’m going to try my hardest to keep this analysis free of as many spoilers as I can because I real think that even people who’ve never seen Atlanta should experience this episode. That said it’s impossible not to give everything way without revealing certain things, so be warned.)

The episode begins on a river where two men, one white, one black are night-fishing. This simple excursion begins to turn dark when the white men mentions almost casually that the river they’re fishing in was damned to flow over an old black town. The discussion turns more surreal about the differences – or not – between white and black, then the white man becomes a zombie, and in…

We’re in a classroom. A middle schooler named Laquarius has just learned that he is going on a class field trip to see Black Panther 2. Everybody starts dancing and he starts dancing on the desk. The teacher calls him to get down, he keeps dancing. Then we’re in the principal’s office and Laquarius’ mother and grandfather have been called in. The teacher and guidance counselor try to explain the situation. The mother doesn’t give a damn, telling them to just give him detention. The guidance counselor goes outside to see his mother ordering him to do various dances and shouts things like: “Do you want them to kill you?” She sees his grandfather slap him. The guidance counselor leads him away saying: “Don’t worry I’m going to get you out of there.”

We actually see Laquarius home and while it looks nice, there is no evidence that his mother is taking good care of him or even seems to love him. Indeed, when family services come for a surprise inspection, she doesn’t even pause before saying: “You snitched”, packs some stuff up, and throws him out of the house.

Laquarius is taken to a ramshackle house where he meets two foster moms. They seem at first to be just very defunct flower children, but it takes less than a minute for the viewer – and Laquarius to see the warning signs.  The moms foster three other African-American children and one of them at least starts out being a hippie version of compassionate. The other can’t be bothered to even go through the motions.

And now I will start becoming vague about what happens next, save to say that ‘Three Slaps’ has the feel from beginning to end of something from the pen of David Lynch or Jordan Peele…or if we’re being honest, ‘Teddy Perkins’. I’ll just give one of the most prevalent examples of how truly terrifying this episode is. At one point, things become so bad for Laquarius that he actually runs into the arms of a white cop which everyone – especially the main characters of Atlanta – know never has a happy ending.  The interaction doesn’t end in violence, but knowing what you do about where Laquarius is, you actually think that might bring some kind of relief, especially compared to the horrors that follow.

There are some of you who are familiar with the real-life scenario that Glover and Murai are laying out, especially how it ends. At one point, the ‘nicer’ of the two moms breaks down and finds herself asking how things could have come to this point. The question is never answered, but this is a question that fundamentally everybody in the universe in Atlanta already knows the answer to.

There are some that might argue that there is a happy ending to this episode, especially compared to how this scenario played out in real life. Given the last two minutes, I don’t think there is. Which is fundamentally why I think the writers chose to start Season 3 with ‘Three Slaps’. Earn and everyone else no doubt came to Europe hoping they would be able to escape everything that awaits them in America. ‘Three Slaps’ basically tells you, there’s no way of getting away from the world.

After seeing Three Slaps you’ll want a laugh even more than you did before the season premiere, and thankfully the second part is more than willing to deliver it. Earn (Glover) wakes up in Copenhagen in bed with a white woman who doesn’t speak English, sans his underwear and having just learned that Van (Zasie Baetz) has just arrived in Amsterdam. He calls Darius (Lakeith Stansfield, who has done a lot over his summer vacation) who, big surprise is really high. Darius tells him that Alfred is in jail. I should mention that this particular ‘prison’ is just one step above the nicest three star hotels in America and Alfred actually gets his lunch order from a friendly guard before he is ‘released’.

When Earn and Alfred get out of ‘jail’ they find that there is a child in ‘blackface’. When they hear the explanation: “It’s for Sinter Klaus and it’s from coming down the chimney” Earn’s reaction, even though he has no underwear and has a bad cold, is priceless (and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it). We learn that Alfred got into trouble when two prostitutes began fighting over one’s racist term (and he didn’t even get to have sex with either!) and the level of blackface continues to increase until the night of concert when things escalate to a level that I wouldn’t dream of revealing (save to say it has a genuine ‘punch’ line as a payoff).

Darius picks Van up and learns that she’s here because she lost her job and no luggage. They go to a thrift store for her to find a coat and she finds an address in the pocket. Because Darius is there, they go to the address which leads them to a tour bus which gets them to what appears to be a hospice where it is possible Tupac is dying? (At least that’s Darius’ theory, which leads to Van asking: “How high are you?) Van has a very pleasant conversation with the woman who she considers a caregiver. We know that we’re in the Netherlands, which was the first country to legalize physician assisted suicide and as the scenes go on we think we know what we’re in for, until in traditional Atlanta style, the writers prove us horribly- and in their way, hysterically - wrong.

What will await us as Paper Boi makes his tour of Europe? What will be the final resolution of the relationship of Van and Earn which never seems to get easier or more complicated? All of these questions make me glad Atlanta’s back, and deeply saddened to know that the fourth and final season will air later this year. (Well, Glover and his fellow writers did have a lot of time to figure out when and how they wanted to end the show, so full ‘marks’ for going out on their own terms.)

Atlanta has won more than its share of awards in its first two seasons – multiple prizes for Glover, including a Golden Globe and an Emmy and the series itself won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy way back in 2017. Yet somehow it has never taken the prize for Best Comedy from the Emmys, always falling behind more ‘traditional series’. (Veep’s victory in 2017 was totally an act of laziness. I really can’t argue over Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s victory in 2018, though I am still a little appalled that ‘Teddy Perkins wasn’t even nominated for Best Comedy Teleplay. There were two other nominees, but still…) Glover and the rest of the cast and creators of Atlanta are going to get two more bites at the apple before the series ends. Ted Lasso may be the current frontrunner, but there are plenty of other contenders already – Only Murders in the Building and the final seasons of Insecure and black-ish are behind us, and still to come the much awaited premiered of Barry which has been gone from the airwaves almost as long as Atlanta has been. But with the first two episodes, Glover and his fellow writers are sticking their flag in the sand. And having seen them, it’s really hard to view any episodes that have already aired as more imaginative or creative than these. Some might argue that Atlanta barely meets the standards of being a comedy, but can anyone argue that it’s any less creative than so many ‘high concept’ comedies these days?

My score: 5 stars.

 

 

Criticizing Criticism, A New Series on the Flaws Of My Peers: Part 1, David Thomson Can't Find The Narrative Thread of His Own Books

 

Late last year, I wrote a long piece criticizing critics who write for New York publications as well as my position on the criticism in general. I now find that I actually have significant more to say about the subject and since I’m going to be looking more at both literature and films in this column, I think that this is enough of a subject to write about semi-regularly.

So every so often I intend to critique my fellow critics, mostly in films and occasionally in TV. I want to try and assess why it is one of the most hated professions ever and that, in my opinion, much of that loathing is brought about by the critics themselves.

 

A couple of days ago, I was visiting the New York Public Library and, as I always do, perusing the Arts section. I came across David Thomson’s most recent book A Light in the Dark which focuses on directors.

For those of you who don’t know who Thomson is, he is a British Film Critic who has written for many journals including the Atlantic Monthly and who is quoted in Wikipedia as ‘the most enjoyable film critic since Pauline Kael’. (Had I known that quote, warning lights would have gone off, but that’s for another column.) 

I was trepidations about this book. A couple of years previously, I had come across a much longer work of Thomson in Barnes and Noble: Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire. I spent the better part of an hour combing through it, not because I found the writing particularly good or Thomson’s mission statement particularly intriguing, but because as someone who had read dozen of film books over the years, I’ve rarely read one that had no clear perspective on what the writer wanted to say. Thomson’s writing was all over the playing, berating Marilyn Monroe, calling Mrs. Miniver overblown, trying to come to a conclusion as to why Meg Ryan’s career had trailed off. And beneath all of this, he seemed to come back to a film that seemed to be the embodiment of desire to him – The Phantom Thread by Paul Thomas Anderson. I think he mentioned it at least a dozen times during the course of the book.

Now I admire Paul Thomas Anderson. I think he’s a great talent who a lot of critics have tried to unfairly demean over the past twenty years, and I’m grateful that at least one critic recognizes him as talent. But I can’t for the life of me see why The Phantom Thread is somehow the ultimate in genius to Thomson. It’s not Anderson’s best film (for me that is the controversial Magnolia) or even Anderson’s best film starring Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) I’m not even certain the best film in 2017 that had to do with the art of sublimated romanticism (that might very well be Call Me By Your Name) Yet to Thomson, it seemed to be a better film that Some Like it Hot, All About Eve and Marty combined.

So understandably I had qualms about even looking at another book by Thomson. But this had a more general subject: film directors. How far off the mark could he go? Well, after spending some time reading it, the answer is pretty far.

I realize that trying to consider who the greatest directors of all time are is a mammoth undertaking, one that Thomson even in the foreword admitted he was going to spend a lot of time overlooking many of the most important ones. And considering that A Light in the Dark is, by my guess, about a hundred pages shorter than Sleeping with Strangers it was understandable that there were going to be many sins of omission.  But honestly, having read it the best thing you can say about it is Thomson didn’t have as heavy a focus on Paul Thomas Anderson as he did in Sleeping with Strangers. (That said, he did give the man more pages and columns then Billy Wilder, Frank Capra and the Coen Brothers combined, but that’s the smallest flaw in the book.

He kept shifting his timeline in a way I could understand, as well as shifting subjects that would boggle the mind of so many alternative fictions. His chapter on Jean Renoir, arguably one of the great directors of our time, spent more time focus on what a good person he was than what a great director. He gave an entire chapter to Nicholas Ray as a great talent (his most famous films are Rebel Without a Cause and In a lonely Place) and didn’t give the time of day to John Ford.  Comedy, as is almost invariably the case, was pretty much ignored, except for a few pages on silents. There are so many flaws with his book that I could poke at, but I’ll settle on one chapter in particular because it illustrates just what a mess his book is.

Stephen Frears is one of the most undervalued directors in history even though he’s directed some truly remarkable films that include Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, Philomena and his most famous film, The Queen. He’s also a very remarkable director in television, directed the exceptional recent limited series for Amazon A Very English Scandal which showed Hugh Grant doing some of his best work and won an Emmy for Ben Whishaw. Frears is worthy of appreciation by critics and I’m glad that he was paid tribute to. But Thomson spends most of his chapter damning with faint praise and saying that his most famous work is actually inferior. He says The Queen which won Helen Mirren an Oscar and was the first real work of the century to give a real look inside the monarchy, is weak and yet somehow pro-monarchy which completely misreads the film. He says that Dangerous Liaisons was inferior to another adaptation that debuted the following year Valmont. (Did he think Cruel Intentions was better, too?) He says that Frears work for television is often brilliant, and then spends a page and a half condemning his most recent work State of the Union a series of short form series that won several Emmys. (He seems more focused on Rosamund Pike’s outfits than anything the show was about.)  If Thomson wanted to point out that Frears was undervalued, his entire article seems to say that he deserves to be.

But Thomson’s entire book basically seems to argue that every major artistic director that people celebrate – particularly in the past half-century – is overrated. Francis Ford Coppola? Never made a film that was about anything but itself. Martin Scorsese? Keeps making the same film over and over. Robert Altman made some good movies, but his characters all talked too much. He pays a backhanded compliment to Steven Spielberg, saying that he is a very talented filmmaker who makes too many crowd-pleasers. And of course Tarentino is all style no substance with too many unpleasant characters. Paul Thomas Anderson has been accused of the same thing in many of his films, of course, but that’s different because Thomson likes him.

You really get the picture from reading Thomson that the film industry isn’t in trouble because studios are focused too much on franchise films and marketing towards teenagers but because directors are given too much freedom. In the final chapter, he focused on Martin Scorcese’s most recent film The Irishman which Scorsese spent years trying to get made in studio’s but finally had to agree in Netflix. Does Thomson see this as a violation of the film industry, a sign that the director has no power any more? No, he makes a backhanded joke about Scorsese complaining about not being able to make another film about a gangster. Then he proceeds to pan it.

Anyone who already has the opinion that a critic is an elitist snob who thinks they know what is best for film without actually watching it would not have their opinion changed one iota by A Light in the Dark. For me, the piece de resistance came in the closest pages when Thomson tries to show himself as slightly more of a man of the people by announcing how much television is than film. He name checks The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, which is meaningless anyone who watched TV would now about their greatness. And then he focuses on Ozark.

I’ve already written multiple articles explaining why I think Ozark is one of the most overrated series in history, so I imagine my hostility when Thomson spends the last three pages of book not only elevating Ozark but calling the last four episodes of Season 3 and Jason Bateman’s direction in particularly, infinitely better than The Irishman.  The fact that both movie and series essentially center on that White Male Antihero that so many people at this blog rage against shows that clearly Thomson has no perspective when it comes to television any more than he does film. It’s nearly as incomprehensible as his fixation on The Phantom Thread in his last book.

Reading Thomson and so many other critics, you get the feeling that there is a fundamental difference between how they view films and how everybody else – the creators, the production and the audience – views them.  All art – not just film, but also plays and TV – is made for three reasons: to make an artistic statement, to make money – for everybody involved in its production, and to entertain the masses. The order of these three differs on every level of the makers, but I’m pretty sure that in performative art, the artistic statement lags closer to the bottom.

So many critics – Thomson is no different – seem to view that film should only be made to make an artistic statement.  Whether or not it makes money is irrelevant – and indeed, many critics have a habit of loathing many of the creative forces whose work is massive hits. And whether or not the masses are entertained – well, I’ve read enough critics work to know that far too many of them don’t give a shit about the people the art is intended to. To them, a movie, play or TV show is for three people: me, myself and I. Who cares what anybody else thinks? The fact that these seem critics earn a living on this work often doesn’t enter their minds. I honestly think some of don’t care if people read their work, much less like it.

This fundamental conflict between what criticism is and what it should be has been a sore subject for many critics over the years. The next column in this series will deal with this inner conflict and why I think there should never really be one in the first place. Others will deal with what critics have considered great films to be and what films and directors they have regarded with disdain as a result.

 

 

 

We Are Witnessing History: The Gilded Age Becomes The Decade's First True Masterpiece

At the climax of the seventh episode of The Gilded Age a group of New York’s elite are gathered at a picnic to witness the young Thomas Edison’s first public display of electricity. The streetlights and all the candles go out and silence fills the crowd. Then the world sees the first real example of the light bulb in action. McAllister, the aide to Nancy Astor, looks towards Bertha Russell and tells her: “We are witnessing history.” In addition to being true of the scene, it is also true for those of us who have watched the first season of HBO’s new masterpiece.

To try and sum up what has made this series so remarkable is one of those things where I, who consider myself a consummate wordsmith, seem lacking for the right language. So I’ll focus on just a handful of the performances and examples of the writing that have convinced me that The Gilded Age may very well represent a landmark for television and certainly for HBO.

 The landmark dramas that put HBO on the map were fundamentally focused on the White Male Antihero. There were, of course, key exceptions on all of them – Edie Falco on The Sopranos and Molly Parker and Robin Weigert on Deadwood – but by and large the make up HBO series for the first decade of its life focused on male protagonists. During the second decade, there have been signs that HBO has been branching out that vein – Big Little Lies and My Brilliant Friend in particular – but by and large they have remained male oriented. The Gilded Age is the first drama I’ve seen on HBO – and indeed in almost every other example of Peak TV for a very long time – where not only the women the dominant characters, in most cases the males seem almost ornamental.

Christine Baranski, who for nearly thirty years has been one of television greatest actresses, reaches a new peak as Agnes Van Ryan. It is impossible to watch her work and not being astonished that this is the same character that for almost fifteen years has portrayed Diane Lockhart on The Good Wife and The Good Fight. As pragmatic as Diane is, she is the textbook progressive and feminist, doing everything in her power to bring change about. Agnes is her polar opposite, a woman who can barely stand society as it is, but things that anything that might potentially improve it somehow makes it worse. Agnes has the same tart put downs that Diane would occasionally give out but hers are angrier because she is not content with either her lot in life but doesn’t see it changing.

Carrie Coon has been nearly as revelatory an actress as Baranski the past decade, ever since she burst onto the scene in The Leftovers eight years ago. Mrs. Russell is determined to serve as a hallmark for the new world, a woman utterly determined to shatter the hallmarks of ‘Old New York’ which wants her money but considers her an interloper at best. Her marriage to her husband is that rarity in any television form, a true partnership where the two are determined to support each through whatever travesties may come, and there have been a couple which might have ruined a lesser man. George doesn’t fully understand why his wife is so determined to break in, but he remains fully supportive to Bertha’s ambitions and is utterly faithful to her. When a maid tries to seduce by saying he needs a woman who will worship him, we know that this is absolutely not what George needs or wants.

There are many remarkable things in The Gilded Age but perhaps the most daring that took place was that creator Julian Fellowes took these two powerhouse characters and has not even had them in the same room until last night’s season finale, despite the fact that the Van Ryan’s live across the street from the Russell’s.  Even then, Bertha had to basically force Nancy Astor, whose good graces she’s desperately been trying to win since the beginning of the season to make them come. It’s been fascinating watching the struggle through proxies for the first season - the last equivalent I can think of came nearly two decades before in the first season of Deadwood when Al Swearengen tried desperately to get a hold of Alma Garret’s gold claim without the two even speaking. When they finally talked in Season 2, it was a series highlight; I can’t wait to see what happens in Season 2.

And Baranski and Coon are merely the low hanging fruit of the amazing displays of female talent. Louise Brook Jacobson has now become the third daughter of Meryl Streep to demonstrate that she is as gifted an actress as her mother is in the field of television. A lesser talent would have flinched from being the crux of the action as Marion but she has been bold, audacious and often heartbreaking. Similarly Talissa Farmiga, sister of Vera, has been just as remarkable as the Russell daughter, pushing hard to find her own way of freedom but not old enough or worldly enough to be able to understand so many of the machinations going on around her. Oscar Van Ryan, Agnes’ homosexual nephew, has set his sights on her purely to win her family fortune. Will the group of women around him be able to get to the Russell child in time to save her?

And all around them are so many of the greatest female actresses in history, some so far in mere recurring roles: Jeanne Tripplehorn plays Mrs. Chamberlain, a woman who dared flaunt society rules for the sake of love and has been ostracized from it ever since. Debra Monk as Armstrong, Agnes’ loyal maid who has a love of gossip and who does will do anything to protect her position. Audra MacDonald, Baranski’s Good Fight co-star, cast as the mother of another strong woman trying to fight for her place in the world – understandably at an even greater imposition because of her race. And the always remarkable Cynthia Nixon as Ada, Agnes’ younger sister who spent much of Season 1 seeming the weaker and more naïve sister, but in the end has more steel in her spine and is just as protective of her niece that Agnes is. I don’t think there’s been as great an assemblage of female talent on the screen since Orange is the New Black debuted.

Let all of this be said the series is also utterly magnificent to look at it in every detail, the sumptuousness of the setting, the detail of the costumes, the brilliance of the cinematography and hell, the lusciousness of the catering. Yes food is a vital part of this series in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen on any television show before. Mainly because everyone cares for style and cooking and how things are done. Appearances matter above all us, which is why a critical story in the final episode emerged when the Russell’s French chef had to reveal to his employers that he was actually – horrors! – from Wichita, Kansa. This made no difference to the staff, or indeed to George Russell, but because Bertha was so desperate for appearance she had to have him sacked. Then at the climax dinner of the episode, when a real French chef utterly disgraced himself, Russell called for ‘Gordon’ and he saved the day. He has agreed to return, though Bertha is still trying to save face: “Can’t we say he’s from the Middle West?’

Everything about The Gilded Age is a treasure – from the wonders of the performances to the greatness of the writing (and its great without profanity; I don’t think I heard a single four-letter word uttered in the entire first season) plus the fact that the series does what my favorite historical dramas do, put in real life figures without being fussy about it. In addition to Edison and Astor, a major storyline centered on Clara Barton beginning her work for The Red Cross and when we met her, she was utterly unfazed by the money around her. Like so many charity workers, she doesn’t care if the money’s new or old as long as she gets funding. Will we meet more of the ‘New money’ in subsequent seasons – the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Carnegies, all people this century still remember long after the society that disdained them has forgotten them? I hope so.

How do I praise a series like this adequately? The first great series of the year? Not nearly good enough. The first great show of the 2020s? Closer, but still not adequate. No I’d go so far as to call this the first series in broadcast or cable to potentially be ranked as among the all time greats since This is Us premiered on NBC in 2016. (I don’t include streaming because that’s an entirely different medium; if I did I would The Crown would be the nearest equivalent, a period piece that in quality and style mirrors Gilded Age.) And yes, I know the other contenders and this was outranks them fully. It is far superior to Succession even though the subject matter is similar, but its tone and wit with neither the ridiculous profanity nor utter depression that cemented the former series place among the elites among television. Other potential heirs to the title from streaming – Ozark and The Handmaid’s Tale – are both too dark and too erratic to be considered.

The Gilded Age is a better series that HBO’s biggest critical success Succession and far superior to its current popular success Euphoria. And for those young viewers who no doubt treasure the latter, I know this may not seem hip or cool but The Gilded Age is an infinitely better series than Euphoria will ever be. I urge you to watch. Your parents won’t find any reason to object to it even though its rated TV-MA, as there is no violence, nudity or profanity. You may blanch at the idea of watching privileged people flaunt their wealth, but that’s basically what everybody in Euphoria is doing already. It’s ultimately more optimistic than that series is, and there are just many secrets. And the women are just as bad ass as Zendaya seems to be. Indeed, as you watch the struggles of Peggy, the African-American woman trying to be a career woman and deal with struggles that are far worse and yet basically the same as the present, you might find far more to admire in her than you ever will in Rue. She knows the odds against her are immense, and yet she is determined to find a place in the world. I think that’s infinitely more admirable than a high school girl on a suicide run.

 This series is a far cry from what HBO called ‘Not TV’ but The Gilded Age is as much a call back to when it burst onto the scene nearly a quarter of a century ago. We are witnessing history in the making, and there will be nothing gilded about the awards that are to come.

My score: 5 stars.

 

 

NBC Didn't Reject This Transplant After All

 

 

When Covid inevitably caused disruptions to American TV shooting schedules in the summer of 2020, networks and cable television desperately searched for stop-gap series from abroad. One of NBC’s better gambles was the airing of the Canadian series Transplant - a medical drama that for much of its run basically ignored the existence of the worldwide pandemic.

Once you set aside the fact that obstacle, Transplant was a fairly good medical procedural. The series centered on Syrian trauma surgeon Bashir Hamed (Hamza Haq) who began his residency at York Memorial after saving the life of the chief of staff after a stroke. (He had to drill a hole in his head to relieve the pressure.) Dr. Bishop (John Hannah) had already rejected him in a previous interview, but reconsidered which didn’t make the board happy.

The first season was an intriguing, if not particularly remarkable, medical drama which admittedly had more than a few callbacks to ER. There was Dr. Curtis, the surgical resident who was prickly and ambitious – a Peter Benton archetype who happens to be an African-American woman.  There’s Dr. Hunter, married with children, whose wife lives in Sudbury and is trying to balance his residency in a long-distance marriage – that was Dr. Greene’s storyline throughout the first season and a half of and that didn’t end well for the family. There’s Dr. Leblanc, the doctor who cares so much about her patients that she stays too long at the hospital and can’t seem to balance her life – sort of a combination of Carter and Hathaway. The fundamental difference between is Bashir, who has been readjusting to medicine and trying to live a life without his family (save for his much younger sister). The season came to an end last year when Bishop suffered another stroke and collapsed on the steps of the hospital. Meanwhile Bash, who had been flirting with LeBlanc for most of the season finally kissed her – only to find that his former fiancé who he’d spent the last five years assuming had died in Syria is alive and in Canada.

For all its flaws, Transplant was the first medical procedural I’d seen in nearly a decade that was actually done well with the right balance between medicine and character development. After American television fundamentally began to return to normal in the spring of 2021, I honestly wondered if NBC would show Transplant again, if it had even been renewed for a second season. I was delighted to learn that it had been and that NBC was airing it on Sunday nights at 10pm.

Season 2 begins minutes after Season 1 ended with Bashir and Leblanc being called into a mass casualty after a bus crash at an arts camp. Bashir is called on the carpet after he has to perform an emergency tracheotomy on a girl by the acting chief of staff, Dr. Nolan. The newest addition to Transplant is by far the weakest element. Nolan studied at the hospital under Bishop, worked at Doctors without Borders and has only recently returned stateside. Unfortunately, this character’s only job seems to be to tell everybody he meets – particularly Bashir and Leblanc – that everything they are doing is wrong, whether they try to hard or care too much. Sadly, this is an ER construct as well – Nolan seems to be channeling a combination of Kerri Weaver and Rocket Romano, two of the most unpleasant characters in that series (and in my opinion, television) history. Bashir actually goes to Bishop who is still going through recovery and tells him that Nolan is acting ‘like the job is already his’. I hope for the sake of the series this isn’t deliberate.

Far more interesting are the conflict Bashir is going through outside the hospital. He is thrown into turmoil by the fact that the woman he loved let him think she was dead for five years even after knowing where he was, and though he can’t fault the reasoning (her family was under the threat of death from the Syrian government) it doesn’t assuage his rage. More troubling, her arrival has led him to suffer flashbacks from a time when he was kept prisoner himself. We know from past experience Bashir has suffered from PTSD, but like Bishop when it came to taking it easy after his first stroke, he ignored the symptoms until it was nearly too late.  How long until this begins to affect him at the hospital? And what will this to his relationship with Leblanc, already troubled?

I will not pretend to say that Transplant is a perfect drama or much better than the conventional. Nor do I expect to keep watching it regular passed a certain point in April when more imaginative series return. (Season 3 of Barry is little more than a month away as it the brilliant Sam Esmail’s next venture, Starz’s Gaslit, which will reunite him with Homecoming star Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell at the height of Watergate.) But this series does reminds, after more than a decade of American medical dramas that our either part of franchise (Dick Wolf’s Chicago Med) or with too glaring a hook (ABC’s The Good Doctor) what a pure medical drama can look like when it’s done well. I’m glad it’s back for a second season and I’m glad NBC decided to let viewers keep following it. I hope that both continue.

My score: 3.5 stars.

 

This is Us Has Fallen Into The Marriage Trap. Why Can't TV Let Married Couples Be Happy?

 

Ever since This is Us premiered in the fall of 2016, I have constantly been one of its biggest boosters. I think it is one of the greatest television series in history, and one that we will be lucky to see its like again. But I had a major issue with the flashforward surprise that ended Season 5 – when it was revealed that Kate (Chrissy Metz) was about to remarry. Which meant at some point in the final season she was going to leave Toby (Chris Sullivan) who she hooked up with in the Pilot and has more or less been her soulmate since.

It hasn’t been an easy road for the two of them. They suffered through a miscarriage in Season 2 and when Kate got pregnant again in Season 3, their son Jack was premature and has since become blind. (We know from a flashforward in Season 4 it’ll work out) Toby has been nothing but supportive of her pretty much from the beginning of their relationship. He was willing to adopt another child in Season 5, he has gone to elaborate efforts to make sure his physical condition would mean he was around for his children growing up and he’s gone through quite a lot, including losing his job last season and doing everything possible to find work, which led to him taking a job in Santa Monica so he can support his family.  He has done everything in his power to make this relationship work at the expense of a lot. Which is why I think particularly galling to learn not only that Kate and Toby are going to separate, but that one of the reasons she’s going to leave him is: ‘she misses the old Toby.” I’ve been one of this character's biggest boosters over the years, but this is the first time in the entire series that I really thought Kate was truly being selfish.

Now it’s not like the Pearson children haven’t done some pretty unpleasant things over the series run. Kevin, more or less, left his fiancée and the mother of his children at the altar, and even saintly Randall seemed to put his own desires about his mother’s when he tried to force her to take experimental treatment against her (and Kevin’s) wishes, which led to a major break in the family in Season 5. But the main reason I’m particular upset at the writers of This is Us is that on a show that is all about making family work despite the greatest of obstacles why in hell would they let the couple that is one of the most beloved on the series fall into the marriage trap?

You might not know the term, but the constant viewer knows what I’m talking about. Basically, it seems to be the idea that no marriage on television, no matter how many obstacles it took to get there, can ever stay happy for the good of the series. It’s the idea that a marriage without conflict is boring and must therefore face constant obstacles and in most case, separation. As someone who has been watching television for a very long time, I’m still not sure when this trope became a part of every series. We know it was verboten in the days when couples couldn’t even share a bed and pretty much stayed that way well into the 1980s. During the second Golden Age – which I classify pretty much from the premiere of Hill Street Blues until the end of Twin Peaks - marriages would often have conflict but the writers were willing to work through them. Frank Furillo and Joyce Draper constantly butted heads at work and would at one point separate because of work problems, but both were willing to work it out because they believed in each other. Similarly the relationship that lasted the longest on LA Law – Stuart Markowitz and Ann Kelsey (played by real-life married couple Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry) would have their fights over the years, over having children, health issues and problems at work, but they were determined to stay together throughout.

This would remain true throughout the 1990s as well – NYPD Blue (at least under David Milch’s tenure) was willing to keep the central couples of Bobby Simone and Diane Russell and Sipowicz and Sylvia together through constant struggles involving alcoholism, family deaths and pregnancies. It was only death that broke the couples up. ER had more than its share of bed hopping over the years, but at the end of the day most of its couples (most famous Doug Ross and Carol Hathaway) were willing to stay together despite everything.

So when did the change come? I’d like to lay this at the feet of Shonda Rhimes and Grey’s Anatomy in particular because I blame her for just about everything. And as anyone who’s watched the series for more than fifteen years (!) Rhimes believes the only happily ever after comes when you’re dead. She literally said as much when Lexie Grey and Mark Sloan both died at the beginning of Season 9: “Now they can be together forever.” Otherwise, monogamy is something you do as long as you’re happy. This is true whether you’re black or white, straight or gay, old or young. You stay with them for awhile, then you divorce and remarry someone new, then you have an affair with the partner you once loved. This was the fundamental truth about the first spinoff of Grey’s, Private Practice as well, where the only reason couples got married was so they could have reasons to have affairs and go on to someone different. Her acolytes seemed to believe in that for How to Get Away with Murder, but not subsequent series (which perhaps not coincidentally didn’t last as long)

But alas, this can not be blamed on Rhimes. I’m not entirely certainly it can be blamed on Peak TV either because that would imply there were a lot of happy marriages to begin with. Tony Soprano was always having affairs, Don Draper seemed unable to keep it in his pants, and Walter White’s marital problems had nothing to do with sex. The closest mirror we find to this is in Six Feet Under where Nate (Peter Krause, who I’ll come back to) and Brenda (Rachel Griffiths, ditto) had an affair in an airport restroom and then began a very messy relationship that involved a psychotic brother, a sex addiction, an illegitimate child and a murder before they finally got married. Then just before Nate died, he told Brenda he wanted to leave her.

All I know is that throughout the era of Peak TV, particularly on network dramas, you couldn’t have a happy marriage. Every marriage I saw on Brothers and Sisters (including two involving Rachel Griffiths) ended either in a messy divorce or a widowing. It didn’t matter if you were a police procedural (Elliot Stabler broke up and reconciled with his wife so many times I lost count) a medical drama (Gregory House wasn’t the only miserable person in love) or a comic book based drama (I still don’t know why Oliver Queen and Felicity broke up before the end of the show and I don’t want to know). A happy marriage was forbidden on any series. I think by the time The Crown debuted on Netflix; we didn’t need to royal marriages were as miserable as everybody else’s.

But the reason I’m galled that This is Us felt it had to fall for the marriage trap is because it airs on the network that had two of the most beloved great series of all time where a large part of the reason they were perfect was because they had marriages that ignored that same trap. It’s probably not a coincidence that both of these series had the same showrunner: the great Jason Katims. Many of you probably know which shows I’m talking about; for the rest of you (and given how low their ratings were that’s a lot) I’m referring to Friday Night Lights and Parenthood.

Most of the great series of Peak TV have fans because their unflinching looks at the bleakness of society. Friday Night Lights is loved because it is one of the most moving and kindest of all those shows. Most of its characters face the same bleak path that Walter White does but they find a way towards community in a way that no one in Heisenberg’s world would think of. And at the center of this community are Coach Tim Taylor and Tammi Taylor, played by two of the greatest actors in television history Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton. Throughout the chaos that surrounding the students of Dillon, through two very different high schools, Coach and ‘Mrs. Coach’ were the rocks of Friday Night Lights. And they had one of the greatest and most authentic marriages television has seen before or since.

It wasn’t because there were no bumpy spots; it’s because none of them affected the basic relationship between the two. Tim and Tammi loved each other and were willing to always talk anything out rather than have it cause a conflict. In one of the best examples of this, at one point Tammi’s colleague Glen made a pass at her. Based on how television works these days the normal path would be for Tami to hide this from Tim, Tim would learn about it by accident, there would be an epic fight, and a separation, if not a divorce. Instead Tammi told Tim immediately afterwards. There was no fight. Instead, it became a series of jokes about by association Glen had now kissed Tim. Was it realistic? Maybe not. Did we love it? Absolutely.

I only came to Friday Night Lights fandom a few years after it was cancelled. Parenthood, by contrast, I started watching early and kept following through its six year run and consider it one of the best series of the 2010s. (I didn’t put it on my list of the Best Series of the 2010s for the same reason Parks and Rec wasn’t on it: The Good Place and This is Us already were and I didn’t want so much real estate to be occupied by NBC.)

Parenthood had to fight for its life every season on a network that was already struggling for viewership and like Friday Night Lights, never got the appropriate amount of love from awards shows. But one of the reason I loved it was because every member of the Braverman clan (except Sarah, who was divorced at the beginning of the series) would be part of a marriage that would suffer from all kinds of stress but each one, relying on their siblings, their children and their parents (Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia, who went through their own marital stress in Season 1) would find a way to work through it. The Braverman clan may not have liked each other all the time, but they were family and they stuck by each other.

The best marriage of the group was Adam and Kristina (Peter Krause and the incredible Monica Potter).  In the pilot their youngest child was diagnosed as being on the spectrum and they would spend the series dealing with it. (On a side note Parenthood’s treatment of being on the spectrum, not just by the child but by his parents and every member of his family was then and still remains the most realistic portrayal of it I’ve seen on TV.) They would deal with an unexpected pregnancy Kristina being diagnosed with cancer, Adam’s being forced to seek a new job and endless pull-ins from the rest of the family’s drama. Not once did they have a single flare-up that came close to breaking up their marriage. They had problems, to be sure but they were too strong for that.

And all the marriages on Parenthood were that strong. Even the ones that went through the biggest crises – including Joel and Julia who struggled immensely with near infidelities in Season 5 – were willing to do the work and fight for their marriages. None of them – on this show or Friday Night Lights – would dare do what Kate is doing and give us when things get tough.

Why did This is Us fall into the marriage trap when it’s been willing to fight so much hard on so many other plots? I  don’t know. I have one hope in mind. We know that the final episode will deal with the family gathering around Rebecca on her deathbed. Previous flashbacks have shown that Toby is there (and still on good terms with Kevin and Randall) but that Kate isn’t. I hope that the writers are willing to do a mea culpa and on the final episodes have Kate realize the mistake she’s made and come back to the man who has done everything for her. That’s what marriage is and what is love is about, despite what you may have seen on almost every major series on TV these days.