Stand By For Two Acting Legends Playing Two Country Legends: George and Tammy Review

 

In one of the many huge oversights of last year’s Emmys, Jessica Chastain was ignored for a nomination for her stunning work as Miri in the HBO tour de force limited series Scenes from A Marriage.  It was made more glaring by the fact that her co-lead Oscar Isaac was nominated for Best Actor. Now, less than a year after winning an Oscar for another tour de force in the title role of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Chastain returns to television as another legendary Tammy, Tammy Wynette in another limited series, George & Tammy.

One could be forgiven to consider this a series of variations on Chastain’s work last year. George & Tammy is penned by Abe Sylvia, the man whose screenplay for Tammy Faye earned Chastain her Oscar this past March. Similarly, just as Scenes from a Marriage was a reunion project for her and Isaac playing a couple with a complicated marriage (they had worked together in A Most Violent Year in 2014) George and Tammy is a reunion with another undervalued character actor where they played a couple with a complicated marriage. In this case, George Jones is played by Michael Shannon, who played her husband in another underrated independent film Take Shelter. (Though complicated barely covers it in the latter case; Shannon’s character was undergoing a mental breakdown that might have had something to do with the end of the world.)

I’m not sure I would have minded even if this were the case; in my review of Scenes last year I made it publicly clear how much I loved to watch Chastain work over the past decade. I similarly admire, nay, worship almost every project Shannon has done ever since he first came to my attention when he stole every scene he was in alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road.  Like Isaac, most of the characters he plays do not seem to function in a normal sense, from the paranoid veteran he played in William Friedkin’s Bug to his work in Take Shelter (he was robbed of an Oscar nomination that year) to the complicated Prohibition agent turned criminal he played in Boardwalk Empire to the utterly lost father he played in last year’s Nine Perfect Strangers.  Like Isaac, he has spent much of his career being fundamentally ignored for awards by every association for all his roles (with the sole exception for Revolutionary Road). Just having the two of them read the phone book for six hours would be riveting. And in George and Tammy both do far more than that.

Shannon and Chastain, as you no doubt know by now, play the title roles of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, two of the most legendary country music singers of all times as well as two of the most troubled ones in a field that has produced more than its share of troubled ones.  In the opening of the first episode, we see Jones having to be lured out of a men’s room stall in the Grand Old Opry, where he is drunk, ranting and tearing up hundred-dollar bills minutes before he is supposed to go on stage.   The door is broken down before Jones emerges and two minutes later, he’s on stage performing as if nothing was wrong. In the audience that night is Wynette, her husband and her children who come to the front row, with Tammy looking at George as if he were a God.  In Nashville in the 1960s, that wasn’t quite heresy.

Tammy has had some success but she wants to make it big, so she auditions before Jones – in his hotel room, while he’s nursing a hangover, ranting to his wife over the phone while last night’s conquest stands around.  He barely seems to hear anything Wynette says but at the end of the meeting, he signs her anyway. That night, Wynette and her family are in their car trailing the Jones’ tour bus and have a front row seat for when it capsizes after a drunken Jones shoots holes in the roof ‘complaining about the lack of air-conditioning.”  You would forgive Wynette for wanting to bail out then, but she keeps after him and that night she and her band play their first song for him. The key scene comes later when Tammy, looking at George, says he needs a wash and a cut and ends up giving him that. (Wynette was a hairdresser before she became a singer.) The two have an earnest discussion about life, singing and how the disappointments they’ve had in it: George says that his first wife wanted to marry George Jones but didn’t want to live with him; Tammy tells him the story of her husband and key songwriter’s first marriage that added two kids.  There are no kisses or touches beyond that of a hairdresser, but it’s still one of the most intimate scenes you can imagine. Her husband is hiding in a men’s room stall, and he knows the danger he’s in. That night, Tammy is performing on stage when George comes up and surprises her and the crowd. Everybody knows it’s a match made in heaven, even before the next day George surprises her with a new tour bus. “You move fast,” she says. “Fast is the only speed I know,” he says back. By the end of the episode, George has divorced his wife, had a messy fight with her husband and hauled her out of the Wynette home. “Remind which kids are yours,” he says as they run off.

One could understand why George and Tammy was a vanity project: it’s based on the memoirs of Georgette Jones, Jones’ and Wynette’s child.  But neither she nor Sylvia are blind to her parents’ flaws. George’s are crystal clear from the first moment we meet him, and it becomes clear in the promos that Tammy’s are going to be just as critical.  Those who know how talented Shannon and Chastain are already know how good they are at plumbing the depths of characters who are deeply flawed; Chastain has been making a name for it well before her Oscar (her performances in Miss Sloane and Molly’s Game more than demonstrate that) and anyone who has watched Shannon over the past decade knows this is where he lives. (Just to give a sample, search out the characters he’s played in such underrated masterpieces as Freeheld, Loving and Midnight Special, and while you’re at it, watch the films on their own merits because they deserve your attention way.) The fact that they have to do this while singing such established classics as ‘The Race is On’ and ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’ – both of which they sing or lip sync perfectly – doesn’t seem to fluster them one bit.

If there is a flaw in the series so far, it’s that it has yet to give two of the biggest other names in the cast much to do. Steve Zahn got a fair amount of time in the first episode as George Richey, one of the key record producers in both their careers, but he made less of an impression. And honestly, to give Walon Goggins a chance to use his southern drawl and have in the background is a crime completely, well, unjustified is the word that fits. But it’s early in the series and I’m willing to give them time to grow.

 I have a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot about George and Tammy in the discussion for awards next year. Apparently the first episode has drawn the highest ratings for Showtime in its entire forty year history. To ignore the work of Shannon and Chastain would be the kind of injustice that, well, the real life George and Tammy could have made a great song about. I hope the Emmys don’t force that.

My score: 4.5 stars.