Binge-r #253: The Chair + Nine Perfect Strangers
Pass Mark: Sandra Oh (Ji-yoon) in The Chair
THE CHAIR S1
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All six episodes now streaming
A model of brevity and one of Netflix’s best new shows of the year to date, The Chair is set at an august American university, where the new chair of the embattled English faculty, Dr Ji-yoon Kim (Sandra Oh), finds herself dealing with ageing colleagues, disconnected students, budget cuts, and a campus scandal when her colleague and best friend, Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), unintentionally delivers a facsimile of a Nazi salute during a lecture. The set-up sounds like a satire, but while there’s a blithe air to the academic antics the writing is so thoughtful and wide-ranging, and the performances so nuanced, that this comic-drama never reduces anyone to the status of a target or a punchline. Whether through individuals or institutions, the dynamics in these half-hour episodes bestow lived-in humour and empathy.
Ji-Yoon is an exemplary role for Sandra Oh, an actor with acute emotional antenna. What should be the character’s moment of triumph, ascending to the head of a traditional and overwhelmingly white department, becomes increasingly fraught. The Killing Eve star lets you see how Ji-yoon is pulled from side to side, reacting to situations and also trying to gather satisfaction. The narrative ranges across her life, so that there’s an adopted daughter she’s trying to be closer with, as well as the question of what to do with Bill, who is grieving for the loss of his life but also free if they both want to act on their long-standing mutual attraction. Duplass, as anyone who has watched Amazon’s Transparent knows, has a knack for making his character’s poor and indulgent decisions play as a satisfactory outcome. The push and pull between Ji-yoon and Bill has a plausible undertow.
The creators of the series, actor Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, weave together a variety of issues, from the relevancy of the humanities in the smart phone age, the acceleration of protest culture, and the bristling changing of the guard in academia. It helps immensely that Ji-yoon’s fellow professors are played by the likes of Holland Taylor and Bob Balaban, who between them impeccably capture every trait of people who’ve spent their adult lives in lecture halls and campus cocktail parties. From a babysitter who gets triggered to a dismissive background comment about the “theory boys” who want to teach Lacan, The Chair plays as a smart streaming update of American indie cinema. There’s definitely some traces of Noah Baumbach in its storytelling DNA, while at three hours the running time is barely longer than a movie. It’s a show worth signing up for.
House of Wax: Nicole Kidman (Masha) in Nine Perfect Strangers
NINE PERFECT STRANGERS (Amazon Prime, all eight episodes now streaming): Subtlety is not the defining quality of this star-studded wellness drama, but it’s worth pointing out that it is often messy but not necessarily a mess. Updating Agatha Christie for the wellness age, where the blows are at first psychological, David E Kelley and John Henry Butterworth’s adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel bring a cross-section of troubled strangers and their emotional baggage – an airport luggage carousel’s worth of it – to a secluded health retreat where an increasingly vexatious guru, Masha (Nicole Kidman and her Russian accent), pledges to restore them. Her means are unconventional, but the guests unfold in conventional ways that are at least elevated by the expert individual performances: no-one does deeply troubled better than Michael Shannon, Melissa McCarthy embodies pain beneath diffidence, Bobby Cannavale is a master of prickly machismo, and so on. Nine Perfect Strangers is glossy and the plot is constantly spiked with new revelations and age-old escalations, but my main interest is whether they can stick the landing – Kelley and Kidman absolutely totalled their last TV collaboration, The Undoing.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: To be frank, in terms of hotness levels few films can match the work of Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado (1995, 104 minutes), a steamy south of the border action-adventure; Hannibal (2001, 131 minutes) was Ridley Scott steering a capably gory if not entirely relevant return of Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter where Julianne Moore stepped in for Jodie Foster.
New on Stan: Equally inventive and satiric, Tim Burton’s supernatural black comedy Beetlejuice (1988, 93 minutes) remains the perfect distillation of Michael Keaton and the sharpest judgment of home renovation; The Prestige (2006, 131 minutes) is – comparatively – the most-underrated of Christopher Nolan’s films – a study of artistic rivalry and the artist’s death wish told through a Victorian-era thriller starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman.
New on SBS on Demand: Recommended only if your response to lockdown is to take refuge in the heavy stuff, The Killing of a Scared Deer (2017, 117 minutes), is a psychological horror film about people who are unaware of what humanity entails from filmmaker Yanthos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite), headlined by Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman as a couple whose lives are upended by a young interloper.
>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to catch up on Netflix’s unsettling Hollywood curse Brand New Cherry Flavour and Amazon’s witty period drama The Pursuit of Love.
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