Binge-r #218: Rectify + Hillbilly Elegy
I Shall Be Released: Aden Young (Daniel Holden) in Rectify
RECTIFY
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All four seasons now streaming
This quietly wrenching American drama is one of the best shows of the last decade, and certainly one of the least seen. Airing between 2013 and 2016 on American cable, via the low-key Sundance Channel, and sneaking onto SBS at times here, Rectify arriving on a streaming service is a second chance you should grasp if at all possible. Created by the screenwriter and character actor Ray McKinnon (Deadwood, The Blind Side), it’s a study of freedom that captures the state’s extremes: serenity and fearfulness. The first season spans just seven days, but it feels like a vast gulf the characters are standing on the edge of.
The show’s one moment of thriller motivation provides the set-up: after 19 years on death row following his conviction for the murder of his teenage girlfriend, Hanna, a DNA analysis leads to the release of Daniel Holden (Aden Young). He returns to his rural hometown of Paulie, Georgia, where his sister Amantha (Abigail Spencer) has campaigned for his exoneration, and finds himself at odds with the world. Locals, including the police, are convinced of his guilt because he previously confessed, while his own remarried mother, Janet Talbot (the brilliant J Smith-Cameron), is perplexed by his trajectory. The pacing contracts to a heartbeat’s rhythm, the mood is often hushed. As a study of belief – in terms of both criminal innocence and spirituality – it’s laced with literary allusions and punctuated by anger.
Aden Young has been familiar to Australian audiences since the early 1990s, but Rectify is his most sustained, inhabited performance, stretching across 30 episodes. He plays Daniel as a man unsure of the world that marked him for execution, enraptured by a sunset and bewildered by cutlery after spending his adult life alone in a cell. He’s never a saintly figure, and while he can’t explain what happened on the night Hanna was murdered he’s not divorced from the embrace of violence. The cast is exemplary, but the scenes between Daniel and his stepbrother’s young wife, the devout Tawney (Adelaide Clemens, another Australian), are particularly illuminating. I’ll be rewatching this small wonder of a show. You should definitely consider doing the same.
Family Feud: Amy Adams (Bev Vance) in Hillbilly Elegy
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
HILLBILLY ELEGY (Netflix, 2020, 115 minutes): Hollywood has long struggled to convey the trials of poverty, bestowing false nobility without detail and readily dipping into exploitation under the veneer of empathy. You can mark down Ron Howard’s adaptation of J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir about how he worked his way out of working class Ohio and the flailing mother he left behind as a prime example. Hillbilly Elegy is sentimental when it needs to be sharp and judgmental when it requires understanding, so that J.D. (Gabriel Basso) returning from Yale Law School to pick up the pieces of his addict mother, Bev (Amy Adams), while remembering his crotchety but supportive grandmother, Mamaw (Glenn Close), plays out as a bombastic, ill-judged domestic drama free of genuine social commentary. I can deal with a bad film readily enough, but it is heartbreaking to see Amy Adams deliver a performance this clammy and clichéd – she delivers broad histrionics as her first option. Watch The Fighter (Netflix), Arrival (Amazon Prime Video), or American Hustle (Stan) to recall how capable Adams is.
New on Stan: A Patricia Highsmith adaptation set in 1960s Greece, The Two Faces of January (2014, 93 minutes) is a slow burn noir of manipulation starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, and Oscar Isaac; Iron Sky (2012, 89 minutes) is your basic Nazi-invaders-from-the-Moon sci-fi B-movie, more ludicrous than threatening.
New on SBS on Demand: Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer (2018, 116 minutes) updates the consumptive L.A. crime thriller with Nicole Kidman as a compromised police detective framed by visceral images; Loving (2016, 118 minutes) is a telling period drama from Jeff Nichols, with Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as the interracial American couple who fought through the courts to uphold their marriage.
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