Binge-r #212: Briarpatch + The Trial of the Chicago 7
Back in Black: Rosario Dawson (Allegra Dill) and Jay R. Ferguson (Jake Spivey) in Briarpatch
BRIARPATCH S1
Streaming Service: SBS on Demand
Availability: All 10 episodes now streaming
This tangy crime thriller is set in a small Texan city and it knows just what to do with the locale: heat-addled days and confrontations at dusk, loquacious suspects, and a web of corrupting implications. The hinge for this Lone Star neo-noir is Allegra Dill (Rosario Dawson), a U.S. Senator investigator who returns to her hometown of San Bonifacio when her estranged sister, a local police detective, is murdered. With power suit precision and plenty of (perhaps too many) hardboiled tics involving cigarettes and alcohol, Allegra comes to solve the case but discovers that there’s more than one in play, with her day job involving ties to the area that are equally challenging.
In some ways the plot is the most conventional element of Briarpatch, a snaking connection of crimes and untrustworthy alliances. In his first production, creator and former TV critic Andy Greenwald has liberally applied the atmospheric and the unexpected. Allegra is a daunting spin on the returning anti-hero, whether dominating a visiting lover or moving like a sentinel through ravishing nocturnal space lit by lusty pinks and rich reds. The first episode is directed by Ana Lily Amirpour (the amazing A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) and amidst the probing exchanges and bone-dry humour there are lingering hints of being drawn into a Twin Peaks-like netherworld.
Contrasting the offbeat flourishes – there are giraffes! – is Allegra’s connection to the people and place. When she questions the charmingly evasive Jake Spivey (Mad Men’s Jay R. Ferguson), the conversation begins with the memory of how as teenagers they shared their first drink together; her childhood nickname of “Pickle” precedes her, blurring the line between answers and association. Allegra knows a version, possibly still applicable, of most everyone she encounters, and her evaluations extend to her own sister, who she coolly muses may have been corrupt given a contrasting civil servant salary and real estate investment. There’s a stacked supporting cast, including Kim Dickens, Alan Cumming, and Brian Geraghty, for Dawson to play off, and it’s her commanding performance that elevates this piquant drama above the genre’s familiar conventions.
Overruled: Sacha Baron Cohen (Abbie Hoffman) and Jeremy Strong (Jerry Rubin) in The Trial of the Chicago 7
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 (Netflix, 2020, 130 minutes): Liberally adapted, this historic drama gives you everything you’d expect from an Aaron Sorkin film: zippy rhetorical exchanges, a slew of itchy and capable performances, a faith in the sensible middle ground, and a late to the game director whose visual style is at best workmanlike. With blunt parallels to contemporary America – yes, that’s a “lock them up” placard – the film depicts the trial of the anti-Vietnam War activists whose protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention infamously ended in police-instigated violence. Whether stoned performance artists such as Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) or diligent reformers such as Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), the defendants are railroaded by the conservative Nixon Presidency and a biased judge (Frank Langella, in his element). There are quick retorts and sobering sequences, particularly involving Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), with the great Mark Rylance as their besieged lawyer, but the storytelling never allows for genuine philosophical debate among the diverse accused and the movie takes refuge too quickly in American uprightness. It’s busy, but threadbare.
New on Stan: A paranoid alien replacement thriller piercing the privileged milieu of analysis and pleasure in late 70s San Francisco, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, 116 minutes) is a science-fiction classic starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, and Leonard Nimoy; Jean-Marc Vallee’s Young Victoria (2009, 105 minutes), with Emily Blunt as the trapped English royal seeking agency, is undeniable period melodrama crack.
New on SBS on Demand: Made in Indonesia and directed with magisterial brutality by Gareth Evans, The Raid (2011, 97 minutes) is one of the best action films of this century; Starring Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson, Dressed to Kill (1980, 101 minutes) is peak Brian De Palma, a concerto of kink and Hitchcock flourishes as a psychiatrist fearfully pursues an errant patient.
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