See What Can Be Done

by Lorrie Moore

  Also exceptional is Damian Lewis as Brody—at least in the first season. As the homecoming Marine he adroitly portrays the military veteran’s vexed reentry to America, not just with trembling and vomiting but with nuanced glance and grit, even as his every move is being monitored by the CIA. In one of the show’s perverse switchbacks, early on Carrie watches the surveillance footage of Brody and his wife in their bedroom, and by the second season is herself in bed with Brody and a subject of the surveillance that her colleagues observe in mortified fashion. Entering the footage she was once just monitoring is part of a motif of pornographic fantasy that haphazardly peppers the script. One of Carrie’s CIA “assets,” a sex worker from Sandusky, Ohio, arranges lovers for a Saudi prince; in another story thread Brody is asked to kill someone he believes he has already killed. Enactments and reenactments abound.

  When Brody walks through the bright plastic aisles of an American hardware store, the viewer can share his experience of the shop’s gaudy abundance. He is looking for a doormat that might work as a prayer rug. He has converted to Islam, a fact he must keep hidden from everyone he knows. He has become a public relations pawn: the military brass would like him to play the hero card and redeploy; the White House would like him to play the hero card and run for Congress; Abu Nazir would like him to play the hero card and put on a suicide vest to take revenge for the U.S. military drone program that has killed Afghan citizens.

  Brody’s return to his home is juxtaposed with flashbacks to the physical and psychological torture and the emotional manipulations he endured at the hands of Nazir. Here Homeland’s editors and camera crew do some of their best work. We see Brody forced brutally to assault his friend and fellow Marine Tom Walker, and to dig his own grave. These heartbreaking scenes are some of the most devastating in the entire show. Even upon multiple viewings, when you have new information that allows for a reinterpretation of events, the scenes retain their awful power. The intercut flashbacks also efficiently reveal Brody’s life through the years as the tutor of Nazir’s young son, who is then killed in a drone attack. This attack is the event out of which almost everything we watch is born, and to this extent Homeland can be viewed as a criticism not just of cyclical revenge in general but of the American drone program in particular. Mandy Patinkin, who feels the show is strongly pacifist, has even been on talk shows discussing the evenhanded politics of Homeland’s scripts.

  In Homeland’s second season the editors are so overloaded with plot threads and have to make such quick cuts that there are several inadvertently funny U-turns and the narrative becomes perilously head-spinning and surreal. But in Season 1’s opening episodes all is well, and the series’s debt to its model, the Israeli television program Prisoners of War, is presumably expressed, though that program is otherwise unavailable in the United States.

  Watching Brody through the eyes of his daughter, Dana, brilliantly played by Morgan Saylor, can also be interesting. Despite his eight-year absence, this teenage girl is Brody’s true soul mate, much more so than his bombshell of a wife, who seems always to be stuck with lines like “I don’t understand. What is happening?” Dana is the person who stands next to him in the first Yellow Ribbon press photo. She is the one he puts his arm around. She is the one who first sees him praying—and understands it. Her intuitive knowledge of her dad becomes important in unraveling certain pieces of information, especially in the extremely jammed Season 2 finale, which concludes the way a giant fireworks show concludes: with everyone dazed and caught in traffic.

  In this finale two American characters played so perfectly by British actors whose accents never slip—Damian Lewis as Brody and David Harewood as David Estes, the CIA counterterrorism director—are zapped from the narrative, one to a mysterious freighter in international waters, and one to the afterlife, as if the actors’ visas had expired. The carnage is preposterous, and getting the show back on more convincing psychological territory will be the task of Season 3. This is where the daughter will have to be relied on, as she is perhaps the only person in her father’s several worlds who has surmised who he is in all of them, and so she is a repository of viewer confidence. She will certainly remain one, at the very least as a kind of psychic and interpreter. It’s satisfying to see her brought forward in the story lines—even if her younger brother is getting ominously left behind—and one feels a serious actress’s career is in the making.

  * * *

  —

  The main problem with Homeland is not even the writers taking Adderall or whatever they did in the second season that eliminated suspense and brought instead an unhinged intensity of movement that barely allowed space and time enough for the cast members to occupy their roles. The main problem with the show is a kind of elephant in the room. Written into several important plot points is the “love” Brody and Carrie have for each other. For this “love,” she will hide him from the authorities. For this “love,” he will kill the vice president (although he is also doing this somewhat for his daughter’s spurned sense of justice and for the drone-killed son of Nazir; there is a convergence and confusion of motives in this terrific murder scene, which is done through distanced technology involving a pacemaker—an echo of the drone strike for which the vice president is responsible).

  The problem with the Brody-Carrie “love” is that it is unconvincing, and it is unconvincing for many reasons having to do with common sense. But that is not all. Awkward and unlikely love can be trumped by genuine sparks. But viewers will sense a lack of chemistry between Lewis and Danes, two otherwise gifted performers. Perhaps the editing is too abrupt—one minute there is shouting and despair, the next there is smiling in a cozy cottage. Good on-screen chemistry can win out, but these actors project only a cold canned heat.

  Is this because their characters are damaged goods, too jangled inside and too full of apprehension to create the trust and stillness that romance requires, qualities Brody’s friend Mike has in spades, especially around Brody’s wife? When Lewis goes to touch Danes’s face, we fear he may strangle her. When Danes smiles at him it looks effortful, mere flirtation or perhaps even nervousness. When Brody says to her in their final scene, “You gave it up to me,” and Carrie adds, “Completely,” few viewers will agree.

  Almost every character in this show has been a double agent of some sort, but especially Carrie and Brody. Yet a double agent may also have a purity of purpose that operating solo allows: you can pick and choose who is worthy of hate and who is worthy of help. A double agent can crawl out of the ideological teamwork and love the forbidden, which both Carrie and Brody have done. A double agent can determine independently who is a “bad guy”—as does Special Ops Agent Quinn, looking very IRA and defying his orders to assassinate Brody—since every belief system has some. But shared torment is not enough for love between spies. Quinn, too, seems to believe in the Carrie-Brody love, but only when viewing it through a sniper’s scope. All of Homeland’s characters are soldiers and soldierly, but they are also players in a game where the cards are thrown down ever more quickly and no one really has your back. Friendly fire can occur at any moment. This is too tense-making for what purports to be a love story.

  Moreover, is madness times two ever sexy? It is perhaps useful to compare these Homeland lovers with those in the current David O. Russell film, Silver Linings Playbook, where Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper generate quite a bit of sparkle despite both their characters being mentally ill. Of course, Silver Linings is a comedy and has dancing in it—a surefire cinematic express train to romantic love. Cooper and Lawrence may snarl and shout but they still seem like attractive screwballs in their own sexually charged tale, which just happens to be a screwball comedy.

  Give Danes and Lewis a country cabin, a roaring fire, and a bottle of wine, and we feel only anxiety. The confessing of life secrets seems therapeutic and expository rather than intimate, and Carrie’s irritated “You interrupted me” startles before th
e hearth. Creepy cello music in the background does nothing to assist. Perhaps their conversation has too much storytelling to do—it is almost always propelling the plot along—and the sideways moves of courtly dillydally and pillow talk can find little opportunity or conviction. One of the final dialogues between Carrie and Brody includes this exchange about Nazir:

  “He played us all from the beginning.”

  “How? By letting himself get killed?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s insane.”

  Insane, indeed. In the bonus feature that follows on the box set, the producer Alex Gansa refers to them as “star-crossed lovers” in the grip of a “powerful love.” But this is not true: they lack mutual trust or any palpable erotic vibe. They are not bonded and they part without any persuasive anguish—or, rather, they briefly cling then separate, their anguish only sketchily enacted. There won’t be a damp eye in the house. Carrie and Brody’s love is in a film noir, while they themselves are in a television series.

  But Brody has been sent off to Canada so that the writers can figure out what to do next. All is in a state of disconclusion, and Season 3 awaits. Carrie will return to her true partner, her closest colleague, Saul, who, as he recites the kaddish before a roomful of corpses, has the look of new ambiguity to him: even though he cannot pass a single polygraph test, he has become the acting head of the CIA. As was said to many Americans after September 11, “You are all in Israel now.” Or maybe not. Presumably the show will continue to take received ideas and transform them. It may still fall short of art, but stay tuned. It is likely to continue to shatter viewers’ expectations and then glue them back together again, half-cracked.

  (2013)

  Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake

  Jane Campion’s police procedural Top of the Lake—a miniseries that aired this spring on Sundance Channel and is now available on Netflix—has the look of transcendence and the theme of sexual postapocalypse. The catastrophe that is men and the different catastrophe that is women are foregrounded against the romantic sublime—breathtaking and perhaps occasionally computer-enhanced locations in New Zealand, shot unmockingly by the Australian cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (who also shot the crime drama Animal Kingdom). The landscape gives Campion’s tragic ironies and bone-dry comedy a little something spiritual upstage, like a humming chorus. Part Deliverance, part Road Warrior, part Winter’s Bone, part Hobbit—as well as part Old Testament and part New—Top of the Lake creates, in spite of its self-aware collaging, something quite original in this harsh, lush South Pacific. For Americans unfamiliar with this fantastical backdrop, it may in its initial minutes seem to be Japan or British Columbia, with high mountains plummeting dizzyingly to water. It is hard at first to tell where this is. One is reminded of Ava Gardner’s (probably apocryphal) comment on arriving in Melbourne to film On the Beach. “I’m here to make a film about the end of the world,” she is said to have told the press as she glanced around, “and this seems to be exactly the right place for it.”

  Although much of the patchworked story occurs in a small town where the Southern Lakes police have a station and desks and look at files and interrogate witnesses in an aggressive fashion, Campion is interested primarily in two adjacent communities—one of women and one of men—both of which have gone off the grid. These communities consist of refuseniks of the libertarian and sexual variety, staked out against modernity, supporting their lifestyles with illegal activities (in the case of the men) and divorce settlements (in the case of the women). Using a dozen or so shipping containers, a string of outdoor lights, and a generator, the women have set up a desert sanctuary—on a plot of land called (thank you, Toni Morrison) Paradise. There are massages, meditation and hairstyling sessions, support discussions, and naked Gauguin-style swimming, plus a pseudoguru named GJ, played with crisp, enigmatic derision by Holly Hunter. Under GJ’s guidance, the group’s consciousness is not so much raised as smacked around. She believes in biology as the primary teacher of her flock. “Just go with the body!” she goads them, letting it be known that she despises their minds. The women who have followed GJ here are recovering addicts of various kinds. They include Bunny, who pays men to have seven minutes’ worth of sex with her, and Anita, from Syracuse, New York, who is getting over the grief of having had to euthanize her best friend, a violent and possessive chimpanzee. GJ is a figure of mysterious magnetism and caprice. She has picked the settlement’s location totally at random, closing her eyes and putting her finger on a map. Campion does not overuse her, which makes her every appearance in the series riveting.

  The men, on the other hand, are the local lugs. Sometimes seen in the dartboard-decorated pub, the younger ones occasionally communicate in animal sounds: they are largely the motherless sons of the area’s de facto patriarch, a drug dealer named Matt Mitcham, who, as a major landowner, controls the area’s law enforcement and seems to have sired half the town’s population. (The threat of incest lies everywhere in Campion’s story line.)

  The mesmerizing Scottish actor Peter Mullan plays Mitcham as a bellicose aging hippie gun-nut anarchist, one with an inexplicable brogue. Like all great villains, he controls the series as he controls the community: with charisma and bullying. That he is rough-and-tumble handsome makes the viewer’s response to him all the more uneasy. One may find oneself hoping that a good-looking man depicted washing a dish or two, as he is, won’t turn out to be completely evil. Mitcham also regularly flogs himself with a belt, stripped to the waist and on his knees, before his mother’s gravestone. He holds the series together through sheer force of personality, and the moment he appears by surprise, mid-lake, from below the deck of a large motorboat is one of the most hair-raising screen/scream moments since Jessica Walter emerged from the next room as the new apartment mate in Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me. When Mullan as Mitcham is absent, Campion’s world grows safer, less full of dread, and less interesting. Even in the final episode of the series, when his ostensible cremains are placed triumphantly on a tabletop, they possess the feeling of a genie in a bottle.

  Elisabeth Moss does serviceable work as the dewy-skinned detective Robin Griffin, who comes to town to visit her dying mother and escape a fiancé about whom she is ambivalent. Like the other women, she is there for a “bit of a think,” as she puts it to Al, a local police sergeant, on one of their several dates—but soon she is investigating the disappearance of a pregnant twelve-year-old named Tui, who happens to be (what else?) the daughter of Matt Mitcham. When asked who the father of her baby is, Tui writes on a scrap of paper “No one.” Tui’s confusion as to how she became pregnant is less diffidence or ignorance or a virgin-birth allusion than a real clue to solving the case. Alas, it is continually misinterpreted. As in most police procedurals, each step forward by the detective is at a diagonal, so each hunch is at once astute, revealing, and slightly inaccurate. Because the path to answers is zigzagging and in constant need of correction, and because Campion has seven episodes to fill, there is room for detour. Sexually violent backstories are ignited (Griffin, we discover, was gang-raped at a high school prom and subsequently had a child of her own); new characters come to town and earlier ones disappear; blind alleys are run up, with or without canine assistance. A face-concealing blue hoodie becomes the most plot-pointed hoodie since the red one used to terrifying effect in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Like Roeg’s Venice, Campion’s town is an insular maze with plenty of secrets, as well as a built-in idea that no one is really watching. Many of its residents, however, have fled. Or have tried. Or would like to. But if one has a legal conviction, like Robin’s ambiguous love interest and former prom date, Johnno (also Mitch’s son), one cannot even escape to Australia, which of course long ago was once solely for convicts. The sense of nowhere to go is accentuated by the encasement of mountains. If one cannot flee, however, there are places to hide in the surrounding bush, tents to pitch, and birdsong to learn as a summons for foo
d and allies, as in The Hunger Games—another tale of corruption and exploitation in the literal and moral wilderness.

  Not for nothing is short-haired, blue-eyed Elisabeth Moss made to look a lot like Kyle MacLachlan of David Lynch’s anti-Brigadoon, Twin Peaks. Campion alludes to Lynch not just via Moss or the many cinematic peaks but most explicitly in a scene where Moss pulls over a vanload of women and asks where they are going.

  “Book club,” they lie.

  “Oh, whatcha reading?” she asks.

  There is silence, then someone says, “Blue Velvet.”

  Moss persists. “Didn’t know it was a book. Who wrote it?”

  A woman growls, “We don’t care.”

  It is the funniest homage in the series, and because Campion herself wrote the novelization of her 1993 film, The Piano, the humor goes in several directions at once. The scene also may express some tossed-off cynicism about contemporary readers and the sororal dependence on language activities. For the series’s societal dropouts, words are seldom useful or true; the survivalist tactics of listening closely to one’s body and not talking too much are always paramount. The result is an oddly quiet production. Even GJ, the gnomic pronouncer of the body’s superiority to the mind—“Disillusionment! Get that and get it good!” she advises; “Stop your helping”—grows tired of the streaming thoughts of the “crazy bitches” she has attracted, and by the end diverts herself with curt inquiries to an assistant about the best air routes to Reykjavík and the current price of gold. One is reminded of a line Hunter delivered playing a producer in Broadcast News: told that it must be nice to feel you’re the smartest person in the room, she replies, “No, it’s awful.”