Binge-r #223: Your Honor + Sweet Home
Guilty Verdict: Bryan Cranston (Michael Desiato) in Your Honor
YOUR HONOR
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All 10 episodes now streaming
A thriller set in a compromised New Orleans where every favour carries an unseen price, Your Honor gives Bryan Cranston his first headlining television role since Breaking Bad. It is a show about the fine lines that serve as moral separation: deciding in the moment what is the right and wrong response, or choosing who truly matters to you and what the cost of protecting them is. By the same measure the flaws of the limited series always hang over it, feeding into your perceptions of what can be teeth-grindingly tense but equally given to flourishes that dilute instead of detailing the narrative. After five episodes I’m still watching, but there are moments that lift me out of its fearful momentum.
Cranston plays New Orleans judge Michael Desiato, a dedicated jurist first seen visiting the grave of his wife on the first anniversary of her death as the story showily clicks its parts into place. When his high school student son, Adam (Hunter Doohan) also tries to mark her passing he has to make a panicked exit, distractedly driving through a young motorcycle rider who dies – slowly, the storytelling is willing to wring you out – on a deserted corner. Michael gets as far as a police station, with calls in to a defence lawyer, when he realises that the victim is the son of Jimmy Baxter (Michael Stuhlbarg), a murderous crime syndicate boss who will never let Adam live to accept his punishment. To his son’s consternation, Michael pivots to a cover-up, reverse-engineering the mistakes he’s seen others make in his courtroom.
A supposedly ‘good’ man who loves his family but finds himself mastering illegality to look after them? That’s very redolent of Cranston’s signature role as Breaking Bad’s Walter White (apologies to the Malcolm in the Middle acolytes). Cranston hits every note he needs to, from private anguish to furious demands of loyalty, but he can’t quite transcend his exceptional past. It doesn’t always help that the creator of Your Honor, English writer Peter Moffat, is keen to swing big, trying to create a panoramic portrait of New Orleans’ racial and criminal divides so the city’s black majority isn’t sidelined. Some of the script’s affectation have a purple streak that seeps into supporting cast performances from Stuhlbarg and Hope Davis, who goes full Lady Macbeth as Baxter’s wife. Any series that’s using Leonard Cohen and Joy Division songs for showpiece scenes in the same episode is flirting with sophistry.
Bad Neighbours: Song Kang (Cha Hyon-soo) in Sweet Home
SWEET HOME (Netflix, all 10 episodes now streaming): Netflix’s South Korean commissions are increasingly tweaking audiences with a taste for horror. Last year’s Kingdom [full review here] was a telling period zombie pandemic drama, and now the digital comic adaptation Sweet Home is a gory dive into nightmarish transformation as a monster apocalypse stalks the hallways of a dilapidated Seoul apartment tower. With a suitably plug and play list of differing residents – including a disaffected teen loner (Song Kang) and a hardy former female firefighter (Lee Si-young) – the show flits between character revelations and tentacle-popping mayhem as those affected become monsters whose hunger reflects their human flaws. The pacing is calm, but the creature feature scenes are joyfully over the top as bodies contort unnaturally with effects that pay homage to The Exorcist and Ray Harryhausen’s pioneering stop-motion animation. I’m not sure this is where you’d start your journey into horror, but if you’re a fan of the genre then you will probably savour the freaky eruptions and sly black humour.
>> Further Reading: Stan has just acquired the scarifying and mordant 2018 Benedict Cumberbatch limited series Patrick Melrose, which I covered for The Monthly when it debuted [full review here]. Also for The Monthly, I wrote about British filmmaker Steve McQueen’s five film anthology Small Axe, a cumulatively titanic depiction of Black life in West London during the 1970s and 1980s [full review here].
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: The Crown star Vanessa Kirby delivers a compelling lead performance in Pieces of a Woman (2020, 126 minutes), as a grieving young parent navigating loss whose fiercest scenes are with her mother, played by Ellen Burstyn; if you want to sample Anya Taylor-Joy’s work prior to The Queen’s Gambit, start with The Witch (2015, 92 minutes), an unsettling, irresistible horror film about a pilgrim family’s fracturing.
New on SBS on Demand A crucial influence on The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973, 108 minutes) is a deceptive update of the Californian gumshoe tradition that moves Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled text into the 1970s as Elliott Gould plays Philip Marlowe, who surveys the sunny corruption with sardonic dedication as the supporting cast unleash vertiginous mood swings.
New on Stan: Hollywood invented the blockbuster with Jaws (1975, 124 minutes), Steven Spielberg’s masterful don’t get in the water thriller about a shark that terrorises a seaside American town; It’s Rocky-with-a-backbeat in Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile (2003, 111 minutes), where Eminem plays a semi-autobiographical version of his young self, a struggling Detroit rapper trying to satisfy his hunger for success and self-expression.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to read about Netflix’s canny period romance mix Bridgerton and Stan’s smartly enjoyable Australian families comedy Bump.
>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 274 series reviewed here, 156 movies reviewed here, and 39 lists compiled here.
>> BINGE-R #224 will be in your in-box next Friday morning.
