Binge-r #188: Normal People + Hollywood + Extraction
Love Will Tear Us Apart: Daisy Edgar-Jones (Marianne) and Paul Mescal (Connell) in Normal People
NORMAL PEOPLE
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All 12 episodes streaming
Showing great fealty to Sally Rooney’s best-selling 2018 novel, Normal People is an arresting study of two young people, Marianne Sheridan (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell Waldron (Paul Mescal), from County Sligo in Ireland’s West, whose self-belief, emotional needs, and very essence is irrevocably changed with each and every encounter they share. To call it a love story is to do a disservice to the impact – vivid, heartfelt, sometimes despairing, repeatedly cruel – that the pair have on each other as high school and then university students. In these concise half-hour episodes, which were co-written by Rooney with playwrights Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe, the coming of age story is rebuilt as an ongoing struggle to make sense of a connection that is perplexing in its satisfaction and impossible to put aside.
In the initial episodes, directed by filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson (Frank, Room) with a tender feel for bodies and the energy that envelopes them, Connell is a popular if self-contained figure while Marianne is a loner – their link is his mother, Lorraine (Sarah Greene), who cleans the Sheridan family mansion but can’t thaw the people that live in it. Different classes and opportunities are some of the factors that both intertwine and divide the budding adults, whose dynamic is one of sexual release and halting conversations where Marianne pushes at their assumptions and Connell struggles to articulate what he tries to believe is a manageable arrangement where they are lovers and possibly best friends but strangers to each other at school and in public.
“It wouldn’t be the kind of thing where feelings are involved,” Connell tells Marianne after he asks another girl to the school formal, and that everyday tone of Rooney’s text, where pivotal moments are sensed more than experienced, carries onto the screen. The different settings that accompany the eras of their relationship offer new lens, but one of the show’s strengths – along with the softly scalding lead performances – is how everything that transpires accumulates, so that it’s carried forward both as possible lessons and a permanent burden. Normal People is one of the fiercest series I’ve seen. It doesn’t make allowances for Marianne and Connell, or offer them an easy out. Their lives will never be the same, long after the story is done. That’s a rare achievement.
La La Land: Laura Harrier (Camille) and Darren Criss (Raymond) in Hollywood
HOLLYWOOD (Netflix, all seven episodes streaming): This glossy limited series has many of the elements that have helped define hit American showrunner and director Ryan Murphy’s career, from the silver screen history of Feud to the unearthed gay subculture of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. But as a summation of Murphy’s oeuvre, this post-World War II fantasia about a group of outsiders who join forces to slowly create a ground-breaking studio film plays as awkward and uncertain instead of assured and definitive. Beginning with a former soldier who makes ends meet as an escort while chasing an acting career, Jack Castello (David Corenswet), this gleaming production mixes farcical machinations with historic figures, from famous stars to a future Rock Hudson, while veering into pathos to describe the exclusion of newcomers such as budding black studio star Camille Washington (Laura Harrier). There’s theatrical sex and contemporary judgments, but in the initial episodes there’s little interest shown in the actual filmmaking art of the era and the wild tonal ride never rarely attains an agreeable rhythm. I liked Murphy’s first Netflix show, last September’s The Politician [full review here], but this is a busy miss.
>> Classic Show/New Home: Made for American network television in 1999 by Paul Feig and Judd Apatow but quickly dumped, Freaks and Geeks is a pre-streaming classic now on Stan. Bittersweet and beautifully observed, this one season series about the travails of two groups of Michigan high school students in 1980 is nuanced, truthful and a touch nostalgic, with a cast that included Seth Rogen, James Franco, Linda Cardellini, and Jason Segel.
Soldier of Misfortune: Chris Hemsworth (Tyler) and Rudhraksh Jaiswal (Ovi) in Extraction
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
EXTRACTION (Netflix, 2020, 117 minutes): The trend of stunt actors and co-ordinators directing action films accelerated with Chad Stahelski and David Leitch lovingly crafting the non-stop mayhem in 2014’s John Wick, but it hits the wall in this formulaic thriller where Chris Hemsworth plays a mercenary paid to rescue an Indian drug lord’s son from Bangladeshi kidnappers. Long, intricate fight scenes and car chases captured with momentum and carnage by Marvel movies stunt co-ordinator turned director Sam Hargrave push the story along, with the Dhaka setting essentially serving as a one-up over Mexican drug cartel atrocities. But the narrative peters out halfway through, emphasising the boilerplate dialogue: Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake (I know, I know) actually tells his 14-year-old charge, Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), “you want to survive you do exactly as I say.” The embittered former SAS trooper (he swears in Australian), who kills a ton of people for someone grieving their own loss, draws the barest of recitals from Hemsworth. Any emotional pull the film tries to gather dissipates on his muscular monotony. Minimalism is a storied performance style in action cinema, but this is merely absence.
New on SBS on Demand: One for the bad movie devotees – newlyweds Madonna and Sean Penn in Shanghai Surprise (1986, 93 minutes), a dropped gear 1930s action comedy that was probably listed as evidence in their subsequent divorce; Al Pacino gives one of his great early performances in Sidney Lumet’s bracing Serpico (1973, 125 minutes), playing a clean New York cop who refuses to drown in corruption.
New on Stan: The feature debut of Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides (1999, 97 minutes) has only grown more powerful in the decades since, revealing a portrait of female adolescence that delves into the inexplicable; Hard Eight (1996, 102 minutes) introduced writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, with a portrait of casino denizens starring John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Philip Baker Hall that is pared down and contemplative.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here for a review of SBS on Demand’s stylised revenge melodrama Reprisal and Netflix’s engrossing basketball doc The Last Dance.
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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 232 series reviewed here, 140 movies reviewed here, and 33 lists compiled here.
