Binge-r #274: Pam & Tommy + Suspicion
Picture This: Lily James (Pamela Anderson) and Sebastian Stan (Tommy Lee) in Pam & Tommy
PAM & TOMMY
Streaming Service: Disney+
Availability: All eight episodes now streaming
This Catherine Wheel of a limited series – it goes off in every direction, exploding pop culture history, the internet’s beginning, and celebrity scandal – was created by the writer Robert Siegel. His previous features include The Wrestler and The Founder, the 2016 biopic of Ray Kroc, the struggling 1950s businessman who turned MacDonald’s into a corporate behemoth. Siegel has a feel, however excessive the subject, for American creation myths. He shows how individuals can change the country, and thus the world, and no matter how engorged this 1990s sex and crime Disney+ caper gets it has an astute understanding of what people want from each other and how failing to get that leads to their downfall. Oh, and here there’s also a scene where a rock star has a discussion with his penis about falling in love.
The musician is Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan), who in 1995 meets and marries Baywatch superstar Pamela Anderson (Lily James) over the course of a long weekend in Mexico. “This is different,” he tells his doubting member (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas), which is depicted with unlikely but memorable animation (probably a good thing Walt Disney is no longer with us). Pam & Tommy is over the top but somehow plausible – the couple have absurd lives, but they are in love and relatable. She’s an insecure sex bomb and he’s a bro who lives life at maximum speed. There’s also empathy for Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), the carpenter who Lee fires from the couple’s home renovation. A polymath in need of a purpose, Rand’s quest for revenge against Tommy leads him to steal a safe whose valuables include the couple’s X-rated home movies.
As he did with I, Tonya, Australian filmmaker Craig Gillespie exults in the stupid decisions and climactic outbursts, but allows the character’s flawed humanity to reveal itself; Gillespie has a whale of a time with entrance sequences, but understands that the coda also matters. For the most part he gets to have it both ways, as the struggle to monetise the stolen tape by Rand and his pornographer partner, Miltie (Nick Offerman), leads them to a loan shark for financing and using the newly ascendant dial-up World Wide Web as their retail space. There is no shortage of lurid bit players and naked bits in this period piece, but as much as the story pinballs around it isn’t frenetic. The three leads, who all give entertaining performances, each essay character studies, with historic hindsight afforded to James’ Pam. Whatever cultural trails the sex tape blazes, the judgment is age-old: the woman pays the biggest price.
Watching the Detectives: Kunal Nayyar (Aadesh) in Suspicion
SUSPICION (Apple TV+, all eight episodes now streaming): A transatlantic remake of the Israeli mystery False Flag, this crisp thriller measures the corrosive strain placed on a group of British strangers who were all guests at a New York hotel the night the adult son of a controversial political fixer, Katherine Newman (Uma Thurman), was kidnapped. Picked up and questioned upon their return, the seemingly everyday Brits – including struggling IT expert Aadesh (Kunal Nayyar), academic Tara (Elizabeth Henstridge), and bride-to-be financial manager Natalie (Georgina Campbell) – find that their lives are fractured with mistrust, fame, and risk. Their only out, even as the one criminal associated with the kidnapping searches for them, is to solve the case to exonerate themselves. With various off-screen alumni from The Americans on board, it’s a sharply paced thriller that has a murky moral stance – even those who profess their innocence have made mistakes that come to light under the harsh glare of investigators and social media. Believability is stretched, but the plot’s momentum is quick to compensate.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: A scabrous comedy about society’s increasing ease with personal corruption, Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator (2012, 84 minutes) is a madcap Coming to American remake about a despot’s downfall and redemption; This is Where I Leave You (2014, 103 minutes), is an intermittently amusing family funeral reckoning that should do more with a cast that includes Jane Fonda, Tina Fey, Adam Driver, and Jason Bateman.
New on SBS on Demand: A modern horror classic – the evil is banal, the camera glides, and the mood airy and barely permeated by adulthood – David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014, 97 minutes) tracks a Detroit university student, Jay (Maika Munroe), who has a curse passed to her when she sleeps with her new boyfriend, starting a nightmarish pursuit by an unknown entity that is the ultimate sexually transmitted disease.
New on Stan: A crime procedural that is prescient in its depiction of the troubled communication inside relationships, Ray Lawrence’s Lantana (2001, 121 minutes) remains a masterful Australian drama; Wedding Crashers (2005, 119 minutes) got the most of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as dodgy friends whose undercover lover grift comes undone when the former falls in love in this raucous comedy.
>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to read about Binge’s Australian romantic drama Love Me and Apple TV+’s shape-shifting comedy The Afterparty.
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