Greetings from Desperation, N.J.

Armed with devastating performances from Uma Thurman, Juliette Lewis and Gena Rowlands, director Mira Nair trains her sociologist's eye on the Garden State in HBO's "Hysterical Blindness."

By Carina Chocano

Topics:HBO, Television

You know the obligatory “chick flick” scene in which the cute, young, unlucky in love but at least they have each other heroines succumb to the rousing rhythms of a Motown favorite and get down, get down until they whip themselves into a girlish frenzy that climaxes with a feather-strewing pillow fight?

That scene never comes in director Mira Nair’s latest film, “Hysterical Blindness.” The protagonists do dance, albeit separately, but when one of them does, she makes such a wrenching display of her insecurity, desperation and vodka-soaked longing that it makes her friend recoil in unexpected self-recognition, horror and protective love-pain.

“Hysterical Blindness,” which was the centerpiece premiere of the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and premieres Sunday night at 9:30 on HBO, is Nair’s sixth feature film. Like most of her previous ones (including this year’s art-house smash, “Monsoon Wedding,” set in her native India), it deals deftly and lightly with themes of caste, class and other social constraints.

A Harvard-educated sociologist and documentary filmmaker who worked with the legendary D.A. Pennebaker before turning to features, Nair is an astute and even-handed observer of human behavior with a gift for creating characters that are at once inescapably culture-bound and thoroughly themselves. Like the sociologist she is, Nair knows how to monitor her characters while reserving her judgment. Like the artist she is, she knows how to do this without ever coming across as detached, condescending or academic. Nair seems rarely to create a character with whom she can’t empathize, even if she has to stretch a little to do it. Her characters may be subjects, but they are never specimens.

Based on Laura Cahill’s play by the same name, “Hysterical Blindness” is set in 1980s Bayonne, N.J., and centers on the relationships between three working-class women: best friends Debby (Uma Thurman) and Beth (Juliette Lewis), and Debby’s mother, Virginia (Gena Rowlands). Debby, still a sulky, rebellious teenager at 30 or so, lives at home while telling herself she doesn’t. In classic Greg Brady, every-teen fashion, she has converted her mother’s basement into a mirror-lined bachelorette pad for “privacy.” Her friend Beth, who got pregnant at 16 and dropped out of high school, lives with her daughter, Amber (Jolie Peters), in a modest apartment nearby.

Debby and Beth have been best friends since high school. Neither their relationship nor their lives have changed since then. We never learn what Beth does for a living, but Debby works in customer service at a nameless warehouse. (It’s an unlikely job for someone so prone to social panic that she literally loses her sight under pressure, as she does at the beginning of the film.) Her real life — or what she hopes will someday become her real life — revolves around a local dive called Ollie’s.

Every night, for what seems to have been at least a decade, Debby and Beth sashay into Ollie’s with the kind of wide-eyed, anything-can-happen excitement that most people stop feeling after their first seventh-grade dance. (Ollie’s is the same bar, it turns out, where Debby used to go look for her father after he abandoned her and her mother.) Once inside, they make a mad dash for the bathroom to douse themselves in hairspray, gather their courage and devise a game plan. Debby needs Beth to tell her what to order, how to drink it and why. When Beth decides on tequila shots and asks Debby whether they should have them with salt, Debby shoots back agitatedly, “Of course, salt! I don’t want people thinking I don’t know how to do a tequila shot!” But people hardly think of Debby at all, except as the girl who “does Bayonne” and can’t get a boyfriend.

Thurman, in a serious departure from the ice maidens she usually portrays, plays a character so intensely needy and gapingly vulnerable she sucks the air out of every room she enters. Gangly, physically erratic and uncomfortable in her own skin, Debby wears her insecurity like a gash, and it hurts to watch her bleed all over nearly everyone she encounters. She confuses letting people use her with being “cool,” and consistently manages to fool nobody but herself. She requires constant, effusive reassurances from Beth (“Debby, you look soooo hot!”) before she can even bring herself to walk into Ollie’s.

Lewis, who does a mean Jersey girl, plays Beth with a charming blend of ditziness, patience and compassion. Debby is harder on Beth than she deserves, but the compassionate Beth coddles her best friend and tries to keep her from harm. This means rarely telling her the truth, even when she needs to hear it. When Rick, a cute construction worker that Debby becomes obsessed with after a single short conversation, ignores her the second time they meet, she turns an anguished face to Beth and says, “My mom thinks my problem is that I’m too aloof.” Beth looks at her with wide, disbelieving eyes. “Aloof?” is all she can say.

Thurman’s portrayal of a walking emotional wound is riveting; you can’t look away even though you want to. Lewis, on the other hand, plays a character whose quiet complexity takes some time to come through. When it does, it’s a marvel of subtle precision. Beth is the kind of girl whose over-the-top accent, huge hair and clownish makeup make her seem instantly dismissible. As the film progresses, however, her resilience and unassuming complacency begin to suggest a kind of Zen depth. She has few expectations and therefore few disappointments.

There’s also a melancholy quality to Beth that comes from the way other people’s expectations and demands are imposed on her. In one scene, she tells Debby how her daughter Amber’s father proposed to her when they were 16 and her parents made her give the ring back. “He really, really wanted us to get married … But it would have been stupid to get married at 16, right? … I don’t know … Sometimes I think it wouldn’t have been so bad.”

If Debby’s arrested adolescence is all about insecurity and anguish, Beth’s is all about the mindless fun she keeps trying to have, with little success. She leaves her kid alone at night to go to Ollie’s, where she sits around bickering with Debby and getting bored. (In a poignantly funny scene, Amber calls Virginia to see if she wants to watch TV with her, while Beth sits alone at the bar, abandoned by Debby.) Unlike Debby, Beth harbors few illusions about what she’s likely to find at Ollie’s — and when she does they are fleeting. Spotting Rick for the very first time, she yells across the room, “Hey, you want to slip on some slime?” Horrified, Debby lashes out at her, “You’ll never get a guy that way!”

But Beth may be developing a romance with the bartender, and it’s Debby, after all, who can’t distinguish sex from love and who finds it impossible to relate to men. (A few nights later, having gone home with Rick, Debby ends an awkward silence by blurting, “I give a fabulous blow job!”) Rick clearly never has any intention of getting involved with Debby. Yet despite all the cruel evidence to the contrary, Debby refuses to see her brief and sordid few encounters with him as anything but “something special.” Beth can only look on in horror and brace herself for the imminent crash.

To complicate matters, Virginia begins a relationship with a sweet, retired widower named Nick (Ben Gazzara) and Debby reacts to the news like a wounded animal. Still reeling, half a lifetime later, from her father’s sudden departure, Debby takes an instant dislike to Nick. She claims it’s because he’s bound to hurt her mother, but it’s obvious that the comparison between her “relationship” and Virginia’s is too much for her to handle.

As Debby careens even more violently between feelings of jealousy and anguish, her mother blossoms. Rowlands is amazing to watch as a woman who has long since stopped looking who falls suddenly and unexpectedly in love. She plays Virginia halfway between eminently sensible and adorably daffy; watching her dance, cautiously but tenderly, with a melancholy Gazzara, you can’t help but feel that love is squandered on the young.

: Carina Chocano writes about TV for Salon. She is the author of "Do You Love Me or Am I Just Paranoid?" (Villard). More Carina Chocano

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Ricky Gervais: My conscience never takes a day off

In a Salon exclusive, the comedian answers critics, explains his hilarious new HBO show, and talks "Office" sequels

By David Daley

Warwick Davis and Ricky Gervias in "Life's Too Short"

Topics:Interviews, Ricky Gervais, TV, Television, HBO, Editor's Picks

Ricky Gervais is not listening to those who say he should pick on someone his own size.

“Life’s Too Short,” which begins next Sunday on HBO, is a mockumentary that follows Warwick Davis, a real-life showbiz dwarf with a very real small-man syndrome. Like David Brent on “The Office” and Andy Millman on “Extras,” Davis suffers a mean case of self-delusion, even as his career tanks, his wife leaves him and a massive unpaid tax bill comes due. He compares himself to Martin Luther King Jr., while also talking about the importance of his dignity, all while falling out of his SUV or asking strangers to press doorbells he can’t reach.

It’s painfully and excruciatingly funny, yet in early episodes, at least, Davis is an extraordinarily likable Napoleon. In an interview last week, Gervais insisted that the show is not making fun of Davis or little people. And in a wide-ranging discussion that might surprise some after his controversial and sometimes mean turns hosting the Golden Globes, Gervais says that comedy and humanity can’t be separated. “Comedy is about empathy,” he says. “Comedy is about the blind spot, comedy is about rooting for them, comedy is about flawed characters.”

You have a tradition of writing and playing characters who are dangerously self-deluded, who can’t see the blind spots everyone else notices right away. “Life’s Too Short” follows a dwarf actor who not only says he wants to be the Martin Luther King Jr. of little people, but believes that if anyone takes offense at that, he points out that he’s never seen a black person shot out of a cannon before. Was part of the challenge for you making it both OK to laugh at a dwarf in these circumstances, but also somehow humanizing him so completely?

Well, the thing is, we wanted to make it clear that we weren’t laughing because he was a dwarf. There’s nothing mildly amusing about that. He doesn’t have to be a dwarf at all, really. It’s that he’s got small man complex. He’s conniving, manipulative, pretentious. When he falls out of his car, we’re laughing at him because he chose a car that’s not right for him. Way too big for him. And he was just saying, “I carry myself with dignity.” It’s about getting his comeuppance.

So, we want people to see the difference between a show that exploits little people and a show that shows exploitation of little people, and this is clearly in the latter. And Warwick is so likable, we had to make him into a little Hitler to feel that you could laugh at him and want him to get his comeuppance. Because despite everything, he’s drenched in humanity.

You’re right, we had to make sure people knew that they were allowed to laugh. And there will still be people that aren’t sure – around England there are people saying, “Oh, why is it funny that he’s caught in a cat flap” [trying to get back into a house after his wife changes the locks]. It’s funny if anyone gets caught in a cat flap. How is that not funny? [Warwick] is a fantastic physical actor. He’s like Chaplin or Harold Lloyd or something. So we’re going to exploit that. And I mean that in the sense of exploiting his skills, as opposed to exploiting his height, which we don’t. And if people think that a dwarf actor is not allowed to do slapstick, that’s their prejudice. How dare they say that Warwick Davis can’t do slapstick in case someone might think that we’re just laughing at him because he’s a dwarf falling over, as opposed to all the other reasons.

Some people might think that’s convenient: You get to make the joke about the dwarf falling over, after all, and immunize yourself from criticism. Or are people just too quick to take offense?

Some people believe it’s their job. And what you’ll notice is, it’s always someone taking offense on someone else’s behalf. You know? It’s always the person saying, I’m not a dwarf myself, but I find that offensive. It’s crazy. You see that all the time. And I’ll tell you why, it’s because whenever you do something slightly taboo, or contentious, or you’re dealing in any irony or satire, people mistake the subject of the gag with the target of the gag. You can tell a joke about race, without it being racist. You can tell a joke about disability, without it being disabilist. And I have done it all my career. David Brent (Gervais’ character in “The Office”) felt uncomfortable around people of difference.

So he goes up to a black man in “The Office” and assures him “I love Sidney Poitier.”

Right, clearly we’re laughing at him not knowing how to behave. When he grabs the girl in the wheelchair and says, “I’ll take her down the stairs,” because he wants to be seen helping out on camera. And when Gareth says, “Well, the disabled should be tested to make sure they are claiming benefits and they’re really disabled. Stick pins in their legs, or something like that.” We’re laughing at their stupidity. And, let’s not forget, people like that exist. People like that exist.

As cynical as people think I am with the subject matter I deal with and the flawed characters I show, I’m a romantic. There’s always hope in my characters and there’s always hope in my shows. And there’s nothing more exhilarating than redemption. Forgiveness is very important as well. I like to take an absolute asshole, and show him the error of his ways, and have him say sorry. Who can’t forgive when it’s a genuine apology.

What humanizes them is that gap between the way they see themselves — the aspirations they have, who they hope to be — and the person they really are.

That’s a staple of British comedy. It’s always about the blind spot. It’s always that we’re laughing at the difference between how David Brent sees himself and how the rest of the world sees him — particularly with middle-aged, midlife-crisis males. Men as boys, men who never grow up — the man wants to be cool and loved. And Warwick’s a branch of that tree really. He wants to be thought of as the Martin Luther King of little people. He’s not and he never could be. And he doesn’t really care about dwarf rights; he cares about himself. He exploits dwarfs, he takes all the best jobs for himself. [In a later episode] he goes on the board of the Small People’s Society – he’s the deputy president, but he wants to be president. That’s what annoys him more, he wants to be president. So he’s more worried about being top dog – he doesn’t care about their rights. In fact, one episode he’s there and there are a lot of little people there, and he’s trying to recruit them to be human bowling balls. And the president says, “I don’t think this is the right forum for that,” and he says, “This is the perfect forum, it’s full of dwarves, isn’t it?” He’s like David Brent: He thinks he’s going to try to fight sexism and racism, but he doesn’t really know how to. Because he’s a bit sexist and racist himself.

And yet, on some level, we’re all a little afraid that we have some David Brent in us, aren’t we?

We see ourselves in them, of course we do. We look at David Brent, and everyone, it’s fundamental — everyone is worried about their reputation. David Brent wasn’t a bad person at all. People say, “Oh, nasty boss from hell, bastard.” He wasn’t any of those things. His worst crime is he made the mistake of confusing popularity with respect … But the downfall of society will be people just wanting to be famous. And everyone is now. Everyone on Twitter is a broadcaster. TV shows are obsessed about what people say on Twitter. It’s bizarre. Just make the show!

I use Twitter as a bit of a social experiment. I’m working on a show at the moment, so I do the odd tweet to see what happens. And I think people might think I’m schizophrenic cause I’m playing a few different characters now and again because I’m trying to see the reaction. It’s fascinating what comes back.

What can you share about the characters?

It’s a new sitcom set in an old people’s home and it’s about the forgotten — everyone’s forgotten. Just like all sitcoms, when it comes down to it, it’s them against the world. It’s a family. It’s all these arbitrary people who didn’t know each other, and they’re in there now because they’re in the last years of their life. And it’s about the people who help them, who themselves are losers and have their own problems. It’s about a bunch of people with nothing, but making the most of it, and they’re together.

It’s a show about kindness. Kindness is more important than anything else. Kindness is more important than intelligence, than success, than rewards, everything. Kindness is the most important thing. And it’s about that. So, it’s a very good experiment for me, Twitter. Because you see the absolute worst and best in people.

It’s interesting that you use the word “kindness,” because that’s exactly what Tom Hanks accused you of not being when you hosted the Golden Globes last year.

Right, “He used to be a tubby, kind comedian.” “And neither of those things he is now.”

Were celebrities genuinely offended at your jokes, or was it all a game to generate attention?

No, no, they weren’t. A couple of people said that people were, so that goes into legend. But who was really offended by it, you know? And the other thing is that I’m not going out to hurt people’s feelings and embarrass them; I’m going out to make people laugh. But I also have to make a decision as a comedian – do I pander to the 200 people in the room, or the 200 million people watching at home?

There were critics this year who expected an edgier performance.

I started with a backlash. If you’re going to stand up there, and you’re going to say what’s on your mind, and you’re going to take contentious subjects head-on, as many people are going to hate you as love you. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I cherish the gasps as much as the cheers. And the groans as much as the laughs. I look at it in Darwinian framework. I’m going to do what I do – not so much proudly, but because I have to do this – and I’ll either survive, or I don’t. And so be it.

Seeing as it’s televised, there’s no doubt about it. If you just want a sycophantic back-slapping session, by all means, but don’t put it on telly, because there’s nothing in it for us watching at home. There’s nothing in it. Winning awards is the most boring thing to watch you’ll ever imagine, so I try to make it a spectator sport. So that was doing my job as a comedian, I think. Two, whatever you say, someone will claim it’s offensive. And to that I say, offense is taken, not given. It’s up to you whether you’re offended. And I’ll add one more thing: Just because you’re offended, doesn’t mean you’re right.

If people are offended, they certainly have a funny way of showing it — Sting, Liam Neeson and Johnny Depp are all among the celebrity cameos on “Life’s Too Short.”

Well, I understand why they do that now. Because I’ve had a taste of my own medicine recently when I did “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” When you play a twisted version of yourself, you realize that the more awful you are, the more armor you wear, in a way, because you’re saying, “Oh, I can’t be like this, because that’s too mad, it’s too terrible.” And so, it’s sort of like you build a credibility shield.

There’s a line in the first episode of “Life’s Too Short” when you’re doing an excruciating improv session with Liam Neeson and he makes an awkward AIDS joke. You and Steven Merchant both try to talk him out of it. Neeson asks, well, why can you do it? You both just shrug. Well, why can you do it?

Because I know what I’m doing. And I know the real target of the joke every time. I’m not one of these people that thinks comedy is your conscience taking a day off. My conscience never takes a day off. I can justify everything I’ve done. I can tell anyone why that joke is justified comedically. Comedy is an intellectual pursuit – as soon as you bring real emotions into it, it stops being comedy and starts becoming rallying. I’ve seen comedians go out there and go, “Why are there so many immigrants?” and get a round of applause. And I go, well, where’s the joke? That’s not a joke; you’re just with like-minded bigots. And the reason why a real racist joke isn’t funny, why an actual racist joke isn’t funny, it’s not because it’s offensive. It’s because it’s not true. It’s based on a falsehood. As soon as someone says, “Why is it that Mexicans always …” I’ll say, well, they don’t. That’s not true. I’ll stop you there. You can’t go on. The punch line’s irrelevant to me now, because the premise is false. So, as I said, I can justify everything I do. And that’s why I can do it. And the fact that there’s anyone in the world that gets it, makes me know that it’s gettable. If everyone in the world said, “That joke’s terrible,” I’d have to go, “Wow, I’m the only person in the world that thinks that works.” But that doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen at all. It’s the opposite. Ninety-nine percent of the people say that’s fine and 1 percent say you can’t say that. Well, watch me.

Do you have a line you won’t walk over? Or a Potter Stewart-sense of when a joke has gone too far?

I’ll tell you how I find that line myself. My own sense of morality. And that’s the problem with offense, it’s not right or wrong, it’s personal. It’s feelings, and feeling are personal. I’ll give you an example. I did a stand-up show and I played this non-reconstructed character who gets everything wrong. I say things like, “Steven Hawking. They say he’s a genius, but he’s not. He’s pretentious.” So it’s me getting stuff wrong, I’m the idiot. “I saw a documentary about this little Indian girl. She had to walk 12 miles every day just to get water. She should move.” It’s things like that. It’s getting it all wrong. I made jokes about famine, the Holocaust, cancer, AIDS, everything. Right? And I got a letter saying, we enjoyed the show, but we didn’t appreciate the jokes about the Holocaust. And I wanted to go, but you enjoyed the jokes about AIDS and famine? That’s your thing, and everyone’s got a thing. But it’s personal.

You studied philosophy for several years. How did that shape your perception of how comedy works?

I think there’s a similar train of thought with a joke: start with a real premise and take it through to its logical conclusion. There’s a flowchart of choices, and there’s a certain scientific method to comedy. Where, experimentation, the proof’s in the pudding. Particularly with stand-up. The audience picks your best jokes for you. It’s an evolution. The jokes are the genes, and it’s the survival of the fittest.

My first love’s always been sort of science and nature, and the arts, in equal proportions. It’s myth that if you’re a logician or you’re an atheist you can’t appreciate the beauty of nature. It’s a total myth. It makes it more beautiful to me that it was random events. I don’t see the problem in it. I just did this show with Richard Dawkins, it’s about the meaning of life and everything. My bit was “Well, if you’re an atheist, what’s the meaning of life for you? What do you get out of it? What’s the point of living?” And I just listed them: It’s friends, family, loved ones, a decent job of work, making a difference and creativity.

Right — things you can actually do in this life, without waiting for the next one.

I think religion was born, really, out of a certain spirituality. But the two are very different. Spirituality is a personal thing and there’s nothing wrong with that. If that helps you, thinking a superior being created the universe in six days and he loves you — if that gets you through and you do good things in his name and not bad, then good for you. I think the Dalai Lama said, ask me my religion, my answer is kindness. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think they’re right, I don’t think there is a God, and I don’t think they are going to go to heaven. But whatever gets you through, whatever makes you kinder, is fine by me.

Then there’s religion, which is a different kettle of fish. Now these are people who are arguing over whose God’s right and are killing people in the name of it. They’re stoning people to death for believing in the wrong God. That’s what I’ve got a problem with. I don’t think there is an afterlife, and what’s strange about even the kindest people among religious folk is they often say things like, “Well, if you think that this is all there is, then what’s the point?” Which is such a strange thing to me — because that’s why I cherish every moment more. Because it’s not going to last forever. And who wants to live forever, really. Fuck all. Terrible. Terrible idea.

Lastly: We live in such a nostalgic, reunion culture. And yet you’ve really never gone back and revisited these shows. They’ve had really well-defined lives and no matter how popular or influential they’ve become, you’ve probably resisted millions for another “Office” special. Why not show us where David Brent is now?

Because they’re important to me. They’re really important to me. And I’ve seen people let me down in the past by doing a series too often, one too many times. I think they should survive in their own world, and that’s it really. And also, it begs the credibility a little bit if a fake documentary team is still hanging around Slough for 10 years. I think one of the reasons for the success of “The Office” was the realism. I think that’s what resonated. Because nothing comes close to real life. It’s like how art tries to emulate the beauty of nature, and sometimes it nearly, nearly gets close. Well, sometimes comedy and drama create the excitement of real life, and the closer you can get to it, the better you’ve done. You can have the greatest movie of all time – you can be watching “The Godfather” at home – and if there’s a screech of tires and a shout of the neighbors you’re at the window, because real life wins.

: David Daley is the senior culture editor of Salon. More David Daley

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David Milch’s “Luck” hits the HBO trifecta

Dustin Hoffman stars in the next great series from the creator of "Deadwood" and "John From Cincinnati"

By Roger Catlin

Dennis Farina and Dustin Hoffman in "Luck" (Credit: HBO)

Topics:Television, HBO, David Milch, Editor's Picks, TV

HBO has always been a good place for the literary-minded David Milch, the brainy former Yale lecturer. (Of course, the networks weren’t bad either; Milch created “NYPD Blue” while still working on “Hill Street Blues.”)

Milch conceived the richly detailed retooled western “Deadwood,” with characters spouting the prosaic and profane. If “Deadwood” ultimately didn’t have an ending, Milch’s next project, “John From Cincinnati,” almost didn’t have a beginning; the spiritual metaphor set in the underbelly of the surfing world lasted just a season.

With “Luck,” which begins Sunday on HBO, he’s got a better shot at longevity, while still creating groups of scruffy underdogs in seedy motels and grandiose, malevolent businessmen all buzzing around the same goal. In “Deadwood,” it was gold; in “John,” spiritual enlightenment. In “Luck,” it’s the hard-won riches and redemption captured through the majesty of horse racing.

Creating these various worlds means creating their own language and jargon, something Milch is especially adept at doing (or perhaps he’s so subsumed in the world of the track after his own years hanging out there, it’s second nature). All of these terms and vocal shorthand can be off-putting to audiences at first – especially when they’re mostly mumbled by the characters.

That makes “Luck” more difficult to penetrate for the uninitiated than his other work. To speed things along, HBO is making the second episode available online immediately after Sunday’s first. But it may have already fumbled its initial rollout; that hard-to-follow first episode, introducing nearly all of its mumbling, jargon-spewing characters, ran as a “sneak preview” with the “Boardwalk Empire” season finale in December, possibly managing to quickly turn off those who would have otherwise given it a chance. Call it getting tangled at the gate.

“Luck” shows a fairly insular world of desperate, middle-aged men with thinning hair, willing to throw it all on a last dream. Women are far on the periphery, even more than they were in “Deadwood.” And the Peruvian trainer at the center of two different story lines, played by John Ortiz, is as close to racial diversity as it gets (other than a casino foe drawn as if he were the Yellow Peril).

Still, “Luck” plays out like a last-ditch shot at the American dream in a dire economic time. One problem gambler recites “O beautiful for spacious skies” when his horse finally comes in; a limousine driver turned horse-owning front for a just-sprung felon keeps saying things like, “I love this country!”

And what better place than the racetrack to attract these slightly intersecting groups of characters. The comic heart of the series is a quartet of hardcore gamblers played by Kevin Dunn, Ian Hart, Ritchie Coster and Jason Gedrick, who throw in together to buy a horse and live in adjoining rooms of a motel like they’re the Four Stooges.

The marquee name for the series, of course, is Dustin Hoffman — in his first television role — as a man of some means just sprung from prison and looking to find his way back to the track and to casino-owning. He’s aided by a loyal driver, played by the solid Dennis Farina. A lot of the story is banter between these two guys, usually before they turn in for the night in a swankier hotel than the Stooges. But Hoffman gets to go deep with his role, especially as the season plays on.

Nick Nolte plays a much more familiar character – the grizzled, horse-loving Kentuckian, a gruff-voiced man of few words who tries to find his own redemption in a fine new horse. Much of his acting comes in grunts and breaths as he mutters and swats himself with the racing form as the horses circle the track.

The jockeys, played by Kerry Condon, the most prominent woman in the cast, and Tom Payne, have their own stories – they’re competing for mounts when they aren’t tangling with one another. Milch tries to add some authenticity by including a real-life jockey, Hall of Famer Gary Stevens, to the proceedings.

Among the hangers-on in this world is an agent, played by Richard Kind, with a speech impediment that’s as distracting to the audience as it is to his would-be clients. (But, again: colorful.) Still to come in upcoming episodes are Joan Allen as a horsey romantic interest, Sir Michael Gambon as a malevolent foe, and Mercedes Ruehl, in the finale, as one of the gamblers’ moms.

What keeps these threads tight and advances the action is the input of Michael Mann, who directed the pilot and set the tone for the rest of the nine-episode first season – with alluring neon-tinged looks at the photogenic Santa Anita track, the clouds of frigid air exhumed by horses in the early morning, and especially the killer footage of the racetrack action itself.

Nowhere in Hollywood’s long history of horse films has action on the track looked so thundering, so close and so thoroughly involving. The action is so jarring that novices may suddenly — finally — understand the appeal of the races to generations.

: More Roger Catlin

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“Game Change”: The legend of Sarah Palin

New trailer shows off Julianne Moore's amazing impression of the former Alaskan governor

VIDEO

By Peter Finocchiaro

(Credit: HBO)

Topics:Morning Clip, HBO, Game Change, Sarah Palin

The 2008 presidential election was the stuff of modern myth-making: an epic Democratic primary contest, the legacy of two wars, a catastrophic financial collapse — and the election of our country’s first black president. True, it was the arc of Sarah Palin’s vice presidential candidacy that helped define the campaign’s homestretch, and also provided maybe the general election’s most dramatically potent subplot. That in mind, it’s possible we can still jive with the upcoming adaptation of John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s campaign yarn, “Game Change,” despite its narrow focus on only six of the book’s 23 chapters (i.e. the ones that deal with Palin). Just judging by the newly released trailer, the film should be plenty entertaining, if nothing else, and Julianne Moore does a mean Palin impression.

: More Peter Finocchiaro

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Dear HBO: Renew “Enlightened”

Laura Dern's great comedy about personal responsibility captures the frustrations and possibilities of our time

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Laura Dern

Topics:Enlightened, HBO, TV

“Everything can be transformed,” said Laura Dern’s character, Amy Jellicoe, on last night’s first-season finale of “Enlightened,” walking to work and then through the corridors of her office. “Every single thing. Goodness exists. It’s all around. It’s just sleeping. It can be wakened.”

HBO, which is reputedly on the fence about renewing this critically acclaimed but low-rated series, should recognize the goodness on its schedule Monday night and give “Enlightened” another season. It’s charming, intelligent, uncomfortable, often moving. Executive produced by Dern and writer-producer Mike White, and written by White, “Enlightened” is doing things that no series has ever done, in a tone that no show has ever attempted. And on top of that, it feels like a definitive statement on a troubled era.

If you saw the finale of “Enlightened” last night — only half-jokingly titled “Burn it Down” — you know that Amy made good on her promises to confront her employer, the giant drug company Abaddon, about the callousness and illegality that she uncovered through research. You also know that Amy, who survived a breakdown so severe that it sent her into rehab, is especially outraged about her own department, which is developing software that figures out how to work employees as hard as possible while paying them as a little as possible. “Enlightened” is not an explicitly political series — not in the way that “South Park” is, or that “The West Wing” was — and yet the corporate intrigue aspects strike to the heart of the moral crisis that’s convulsing this nation. The image of Amy fantasizing about pouring gasoline on the floors of Abaddon’s headquarters and setting it ablaze was chilling — and as metaphor, perfect. Do we continue to accept business as usual out of a weary belief that change is just too hard? Or do we say something, and do something, even if means enduring humiliation and abuse? Do we continue to live in this rotting house, or do we burn it down?

“I will not be afraid,” Amy said, walking into her office to demand a meeting with department heads and address the problems, her light blue blouse and yellow skirt standing out in a sea of corporate greys and blacks. “I will be bolder.”

It also helps to be “crazy,” one of the epithets that some of Amy’s co-workers use when they talk about her. Some people, of course, really are mentally ill, or at least so emotionally disturbed that nothing they say is of much use to anybody. But such epithets can also be used to stigmatize people who act and think in ways that call out the powers that be on their arrogance and complacency. The easiest way to neutralize a bringer of bad news is to stigmatize the messenger, either by calling her crazy (which is more or less what the board did after Amy left the room, revealing that they only let her speak to them as a joke) or by settling on some other pejorative phrase, such as “lazy bums” or “dirty smelly hippies” or any of the other retro smears trotted out in arguments about Occupy Wall Street.

One of the many wonderful things about “Enlightened” is that you can’t take anything that that pops out of its characters’ mouths at face value — especially not Amy’s remarks and requests, which are often self-serving. We’re quite aware that Amy is a terrible employee and is acting at least partly out of personal grievance. She wants to get back some of the power she lost when she went into rehab and lost her executive position, and she’s hurt by overhearing the board calling her crazy. But it’s also true — in life and in this series — that righteous action needn’t come from a disinterested place to be worth pursuing. Politics is personal.

“We can blow this place wide open!” Amy excitedly tells her co-worker, Tyler (Mike White), urging him to help her hack into the email system and retrieve correspondence proving that the company’s executives are hopelessly corrupt. “Why would we want to do that?” Tyler asks.

It’s also worth noting the difference between real-world Amy and the Amy we see and hear in the show’s contemplative, voice-over segments. Many of the lines that I quoted in this piece occur in what you might call a “protected space” — inside Amy’s roaming mind. The character that we see in these sequences is a best-case-scenario version of Amy. I think her statements express the show’s true outlook on life, its sense of what is possible, without sarcasm, irony or winking. It’s a benevolent and even inspirational view. It’s very easy to sneer and snicker at. It’s valuable. And right now it’s almost nonexistent on TV.

“Enlightened” might be a great series even without the parts about Amy’s workplace crusade. White, Dern and their collaborators have a keen ear for the way that people deceive each other and themselves. As TVLine’s Michael Slezak, another renewal booster, wrote, Amy is “the most tantalizingly/unapologetically unlikable lead character in recent memory” — and considering how many comically unlikable characters there are on television, that’s a bold statement. At the same time, though, “Enlightened” has compassion for foibles and empathy for pain. Last week’s episode — essentially a solo turn by Diane Ladd, who plays Dern’s elderly, widowed mom on the show, and is Dern’s mom in real life — might have been the most moving half-hour of TV I’ve seen this year, as good as the best of “Louie.” The scene between Ladd’s character and Amy’s druggie ex-husband Levi (Luke Wilson) in the kitchen had the sting of observed truth, each character reopening old wounds and saying and doing things that real human beings would actually say and do. As I said in an earlier piece about the show, the series is as merciless as can be without being mean. It sees through everyone’s b.s., including Amy’s.

But it’s the connection between Amy’s personal psychodrama and her workplace that puts the series over the top, and turns it into something more than a quirky half-hour show about a troubled woman living with her mother. It’s a reminder of how work defines us, and in some cases deforms us, along with everyone we know — and the soul-crushing opposition that rises up whenever we try to change anything about it.

We need a show like this right now, and not just because it’s a great comedy and a great character study. Beneath its comic brilliance and formal daring, it believes in a better future, a better country, a better human race. And if you rolled your eyes at that last line, you should work for Abaddon.

: More Matt Zoller Seitz

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“Boardwalk Empire” does not want your forgiveness

In a shocking and beautifully executed second season finale, HBO's gangster drama figured itself out

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) in a moment of contemplation on "Boardwalk Empire." (Credit: HBO)

Topics:Boardwalk Empire, HBO

The following recap of the second season finale of "Boardwalk Empire" contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.

“To the Lost,” the second season finale of “Boardwalk Empire,” may be remembered as the moment when “Boardwalk” finally, finally hit its stride. This isn’t the first time the HBO drama has impressed me — even the worst episodes have had great scenes or moments — but there was something special about this one. It was dead solid perfect in almost every department. I think a lot of it comes back to the episode’s consistency of tone, and the show’s comfort with having settled on it.

I thought about tone during that haunting close-up of the soon-to-be-late James Darmody smoking a cigarette by an open window. There was really no reason why such a simple moment should have summoned such force. Michael Pitt wasn’t selling the moment at all. He was just sitting there smoking. Yet the accumulated weight of Jimmy’s trauma — his wife’s death and his tragic inability to feel his way through it thanks to his war experience, his Oedipally perverse childhood, and a life spent among super-macho gangsters — came through loud and clear. Pitt’s posture, gestures and slightly mask-like expressions were exactly right, just as his gentleness during the beachside pony-ride scene with Jimmy’s son was exactly right, and as his ego-free coolness during that rain-soaked final sequence was exactly right. I love how Pitt delivered Jimmy’s statement to Nucky about what to expect after your first killing: 48 hours of nausea. It reclaimed a bit of dignity for Jimmy in his final moments — the implication being that this was first time that Nucky, the butcher of Atlantic City, ever personally killed anyone — but it was not particularly boastful or petty. Jimmy was just a guy who had nothing to lose, delivering information.

Pitt’s acting was always good, if a bit vague and guarded early on — an understandable response to being ask to play a character who was whatever the show needed him to be at any given instant — but he was especially strong during the last five episodes, probably because the writing sharpened up, and he hit his peak last night. The performance was free of 21st-century neuroses, which is by no means the same thing as being untroubled. When Jimmy said he died in the trenches during the war, there was nothing self-dramatizing about it. The character was just reporting the facts as he saw them. Pitt’s acting, here and earlier on the show, was retro, but not ostentatiously so. It seemed to be pitched somewhere between 1940s-era Joel McCrea or Dana Andrews and the kinds of performances that Montgomery Clift gave in the 1950s, which were soulful and tormented, but never never over-indicated or begged for sympathy.

In retrospect, I think the tone of Pitt’s performance is the tone “Boardwalk” should have hit, or should have tried to hit, from the beginning. I went back and re-watched sections of season one and the first half of season two before writing this piece, and I was struck by how much less focused and confident it was. The show was bloody and sexy and profane and handsomely produced, and it had great sequences and moments, but it seemed insecure and prone to distraction, forever adding new characters, subplots and locations instead of exploring what it had already created. It had the brash but shallow confidence of a gambler or a con man. Tonally and rhythmically it was all over the place. Its philosophical and theological banter felt forced, and frankly still does. (Margaret to Nucky in “To the Lost:” “So your version of God asks nothing.” Nucky: “There is more God in the love I feel for you and those children than in all the churches in Rome.”) And some of the violence — like a lot of pay-cable violence — seemed to be there just because the show knew it could do it. “Boardwalk” struggled a lot, I suspect, with the legacy of “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos,” and probably all of those purgatorial gangster films by co-executive producer Martin Scorsese, who won an Emmy for directing the “Boardwalk” pilot. There were times when the show seemed as though it was trying and failing to capture the rough magic of its obvious inspirations, instead of finding its own voice in a somewhat lesser mode that it was actually good at: a modern cable version of default old-movie storytelling, lively but not deep and not really trying to be. In that sense, Nucky’s hateful kiss-off to Jimmy felt like a bracing recognition that “Boardwalk Empire” is what it is, and is content to be that thing: “You don’t know me, James. You never did. I .. am not … seeking .. forgiveness.”

That quality came through in this episode, which had the polish and snap of another classic Prohibition-era retro-gangster flick, “Miller’s Crossing,” but mostly minus the flamboyance. A rare exception was the crosscut montage that juxtaposed Esther Randolph rehearsing her opening statement while putting on her courtroom clothes, Jimmy and Richard extracting a Nucky-exonerating confession/suicide note from an alderman at gunpoint, and Nucky and Margaret getting married to inoculate Margaret against having to testify against her husband; the direct address of the camera and the whirling camera moves were very Coen brothers, and in contrast to most of the music on “Boardwalk,” the classical piano score was not “justified” by being, say, performed in a saloon or played on a Victrola.

There was an unabashed movie-ness to the sequence — an exuberant yet controlled showmanship — that the drama has never before attempted. There wasn’t a trace of Coppola-style solemnity; the sequence just flew by, and the camera seemed to be tap-dancing around the actors. Jimmy’s last moments were nearly as old-movie cinematic. Having a psychologically damaged vet buy it in the shadow of a war memorial was already verging on too much; and yet somehow having the shocking double-cross and execution happen on a melodramatically dark-and-stormy night put the whole sequence over the top in a good way. “To the Lost” director Tim van Patten, who helmed some of the best “Sopranos” and “Boardwalk” episodes, is the kind of filmmaker who would have anonymously directed five B-pictures a year under the old studio system, then been discovered in the 1960s by the French. Winter’s script was filled with quotable lines that had an early-talking-pictures hard-boiled cadence. (When the judge asked Esther if she wanted to pursue a case that had fallen to pieces or withdraw and “get your ducks in a row,” she replied, “I’ll take the ducks, your honor.”) The more enthusiastically “Boardwalk” embraces an old movie style and tone, and the less it grasps for “Godfather” or “Sopranos”-like depth, the better it is. The episode even had hints of sneaky Hays Code-era moralizing. Between Margaret’s giving herself a backdoor to redemption by signing the highway land deed over to the church and the revelation that the Commodore left his estate to the housekeeper who was framed for trying to poison him (Jimmy tore up the document, but still — hilarious!), you have wonder if the “Boardwalk” universe is really godless after all.

None of this, of course, erases the fact that “Boardwalk” spent roughly a season-and-a-half figuring out what to be, overloading its narrative with an excess of characterization and incident and putting most of its women into dependent little boxes. (Things got better on all fronts year the end, though, and Esther’s interrogation of Margaret was one of the season’s sharpest, truest scenes.) And they might as well keep whacking major characters, because a lot of them are, dramatically speaking, toast anyway. The writers systematically pulverized Special Agent Van Alden like Chalky’s men whaling on those abducted Klansmen, to the point where his character lay in pieces; he should probably just stay in Cicero with his nanny-wife. And minus Jimmy and the Commodore, I don’t see what the show can do with Gillian. But still! What a great hour. Winter and company seem to have figured out something essential. I hope they build on it.