![]() ![]() ![]() And each of the cast’s portraits in miniature worked together to lend a sense of a town trapped in amber - the series began with squabbling among the much-remembered champion Lady Hawks team that lent the sense of a town where the same conversation never ends. This series is suffused with a deep idea of where it’s set, who its characters are, what it is they want and what they’ve accepted they’ll never get. “Mare” made its case for itself with, given the heaviness of the themes at play, a startling deftness of touch. Why had we been on this ride in the first place? “The Undoing” took place in a specific and carefully drawn world, about which, finally, the show had little more to say than that sometimes, people like Nicole Kidman’s character can be blind to the obvious. But the big reveal of “The Undoing,” that Hugh Grant’s character could be pushed to the point of madness, had effectively nothing to do with the Manhattan milieu the show had taken great pains to evoke visually. It’s instructive to compare the ending of “Mare of Easttown” to that of “The Undoing.” That latter episode was widely pilloried when it aired to this viewer, it wasn’t horribly out-of-step with what had come before, a fun, underbaked show that gave us a few thrills and some nice-looking coats. Mare seems to discover within this frighteningly raw moment a strength that surprises even herself. Or think of Winslet - her whole heavy-footed performance a study in endurance, supporting Lori (the great Julianne Nicholson) through her own pain. Think of why John and Erin first came together: John tells us that they were both going through a hard time. There were real, mutually supportive relationships all through Easttown - life there isn’t unlivable - but those relationships tended to be based on supporting one another through pain that seems endless. Accreted history has blotted out possibility. Opioids quietly thrum under so many interactions (given the baleful story of Kevin and his girlfriend, who begins using again over the course of the series, they’re a subject very much on the show’s mind). But “Mare” had a big and painful conception of Easttown: It was a place, like so many in America, that feels hard to escape. It was easy, at times, to mock elements of the show’s fixation on its setting: The chewiness of the accent, the bouquet of hoagies one foreign-born movie star presented another, the Rolling Rocks. The deaths on “Mare of Easttown” catch our attention, but the show’s longer-lasting heartbreak comes from the lives, from those who survive. Had Ryan not actually killed Erin - had he simply been an angry young man who was willing to, say, beat her - we see in Kevin’s story where things might have led. Mare has recalled his brutalizing her for money for drugs, as well as his death by suicide in her attic she misses him desperately, to the point that she cannot enter the room in her house where he died. ![]() While Ryan’s anger was extreme, it was not unique: In his story, we see a parallel to Mare’s late son Kevin, a young man lost in rage, confusion, and isolation. We had seen Ryan’s propensity to turn to rage before, when he violently defended his sister in what we were meant to understand was displaced rage over his father’s infidelity. Ryan Ross was drawn into the morass of family drama and sorrow at a tender age at a time when he might otherwise have been looking ahead, he found himself obsessively working over hurts in his family history. ![]() It also completed a statement it had been making from its first episode. “Mare of Easttown” thus gave us a genuinely surprising conclusion that satisfied the viewer desire for memorable, twisty shock. Not merely was Erin McMenamin dead, but her killer’s future was over. What this added up to, though, was a double tragedy of lost youth. Her responsibility to her perception of justice outweighed her responsibility to the Ross family. This was elegantly dealt with, a realization that dawned for Mare on a standard work call, and Winslet did some of her best acting of the series processing it all for a long moment. Then, suddenly, came the second reveal - that John had been covering for his son Ryan, the real killer. This was all so neat that viewers could be forgiven for not quite realizing the mystery portion of the series seemed completely wrapped up with some half an hour of the finale still left to air plotlines, like Guy Pearce’s gentleman caller leaving town, were being wrapped up with a lovely melancholy. To deal with the specifics of that ending before moving on to grander thematic concerns: The notion that John Ross had been the killer of his former lover Erin was an elegant reversal of suspicions that had been placed upon his brother Billy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |