Julianne Nicholson – Podcasting Them Softly

HBO has another unbelievable strong drama on their hands in Craig Zobel’s Mare Of Easttown, a season of television so good, so emotionally winding and narratively compelling on all fronts that I’m still processing it weeks later and just haven’t felt qualified or equipped to write a review on. It’s one of those shows that I’ll gladly take another season of but if not that’s cool too because the story here is so wonderfully encapsulated into one single season that it feels appropriately bookended and self contained in one sensational eight episode run. Kate Winslet has to be one of the greatest of her generation as an artist and she simply outdoes herself here in a stunning turn as Mare, a long suffering police detective in a troubled working class borough of Pennsylvania who has just about enough distressing things in both her personal and professional life as one human being can take. She’s trying to solve the murder of a local girl who turns up dead in a river one morning and also can’t let go of the cold case where another girl went missing a year ago.. are they connected? Meanwhile she’s trying to cope with trauma she hasn’t even properly processed yet in her family, manage a stormy relationship with her mother (Jean Smart, superb as ever), raise her wonderful teenage daughter (Angourie Rice, brilliant) right as the three of them struggle to look after her grandson. I won’t go too much into the interpersonal relationships because they’re so intricate, unorthodox and painfully realistic you just have to explore them for yourselves and despite being intimidatingly complicated as a narrative web, the show somehow manages to juggle them all concisely so that you have a clear, mosaic like sprawl of who relates to who and very well developed characters who are acted flawlessly all across the board by a beautiful cast in a sort of ‘rust belt gothic true Detective deep drama’ recipe. The story is damn near perfect, juggling the procedural and personal aspects intuitively and seamlessly for an experience that feels raw, down to earth and relatable. I will warn you that this one one bleak, depressing and emotionally pulverizing experience, one that isn’t afraid to fully show, in complicated and upsetting minutia, how human beings suffer, hurt each other, make horrible mistakes, are dealt unfair and rough hands in life and how they attempt, bit by bit, to work through their pain, struggle forward and move on through the difficult times towards something hopefully better. It’s dark, it’s relentless, it’s an emotional gauntlet to walk through but it’s not without it’s catharsis, lessons learned and just enough light at the end of the tunnel. Pretty much perfect as far as I’m concerned.

-Nate Hill

I love stories that question the parameters of humanity’s collective ancestral belief, faith and reason, tales that dredge up ancient horrors and turn them loose on a modernized, very ill prepared and unsuspecting world. We’ve all turned the lights out to go to sleep at night and shuddered at the thought of something supernatural in the bedroom with us, pondered the presence of beings beyond trees and wildlife watching us when in the woods at night and entertained the ideas of the irrational, esoteric and unexplainable. HBO’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Outsider has concluded its first season and my god what a stunner, a darkly gorgeous, oppressively uneasy and wholly human treatise on everything I opened this paragraph with and more.

This story starts routinely enough: in a small US community a young boy is found savagely murdered and sodomized in a rural area. All signs seemingly point towards local math teacher, little league coach and family man Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman displaying a startling level of gravitas I didn’t think him capable of), with multiple witnesses and various security cameras all over town implicating him pretty cut and dry. Lead detective on the case Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelssohn, fantastic as ever) makes his arrest, the DA viciously prosecutes and everything seems to be wrapping up pretty neatly… until it doesn’t. Bit by bit evidence starts to not add up, unease creeps into the procedural and something increasingly otherworldly hovers on the fringes of everyone’s awareness, some quick to believe and others skeptics until the last second. That’s about all I’ll say in regards to plot because every viewer deserves to have this tantalizing, shocking mystery furl out unspoiled for them.

This show is so effective because of how counterintuitive it feels compared to many other King adaptations. Because he’s predominantly a horror writer there’s a lot of gory effects, heavily dramatic performances and special effects employed when bringing his work to life in film and television, but not so much here. Yes, there is a supernatural element and yes there are gruesome aspects to it but there’s a lack of obvious FX and subtlety infused into each one of the human performances, all of which I genuinely cared about and felt each arc hit hard. Mendelssohn and Bateman are brilliant, the latter not getting as much screen time but using it for maximum impact in a soulful performance that goes against the grain of his largely comedic career. Others are wonderful including Paddy Considine, Bill Camp, Max Beesley, Julianne Nicholson, Mare Winningham, Marc Menchaca, Yul Vasquez, Derek Cecil, Jeremy Bob, Hetienne Park, Michael Esper and more. My favourite performance and character is Cynthia Erivo as Holly Gibney, a slightly clairvoyant private investigator who sees the world just a bit differently and is the perfect person to have as head needle on the compass of this hunt for a heinous killer. Erivo got an Oscar nom this year, has been steadily producing brilliant work and I look forward to whatever she’s going to do next with great interest, her Holly is a sharply intuitive, subtly emotional, determined woman who is always just ahead of the curve and blends fierce pragmatism with empathy buried just below. Overall this season is a spellbinder, a dark story with touches of folk horror, well drawn characters, eerie music, haunting visuals and a real sense of place as is the case with King’s work. They have hinted at a second season and I’d be pumped if such is indeed the case but as it is this first instalment speaks for itself as a well crafted piece. Terrific stuff.

-Nate Hill