* If you asked me “What does Boardwalk Empire do well?” I’d point to this episode, I think. Nothing groundbreaking or earthshaking, just a succession of moments, images, and performances, recorded in an emotionally fraught fashion.
* The opening minutes in particular were marvelous — restrained, dreamlike, unmoored from narrative binding. We go straight from a context-free sequence of hole-drilling and goldfish-dumping to a gaunt Eli Thompson, looking like he stepped out of one of those really severe Renaissance portraits, opening a prison door on the great gray world, and cut from his pas de deux with the great Paul Sparks’ Mickey Doyle (“How are you still alive?”) to a similarly Beckettian exchange between Rosetti, who’s growing on me, and the poor dude who works at the gas station outside his hotel. I loved that non-flow flow, and the absence of background music — no context clues to go by here, you’re on your own. “It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.”
* And this established the template for most of the episode: little one-on-one scenes in which interesting performances bounce off one another. Nucky and his grinning, nubile songbird. Chalky and his buttoned-up future son-in-law, with the reptilian Dunn Purnsley looking on. Margaret and the rude, pipe-smoking doctor. Eli and the genially sociopathic Owen Sleater. Nucky and motherfucking Stephen Root absolutely killing it as a Southern grotesque, transplanted into high-gangster New York as a presence so alien and malevolent and baffling he may has well have been a Great Old One. All these conversations made you feel the futility of conversing in the first place.
* At any stop along the way you could sit back and marvel at the production values, particularly the use of color — the way they captured the gray of the day at the gas station, or the burnt siena walls of the Root character’s empty meeting room, or the joyless white of the recovery room in the hospital when Margaret visits the woman who miscarried.
* Even the violence was effective because it was, at first at least, much lower-key than we’re used to here, and from a different quarter.
* This ep was also a great example of what people talk about when they say Boardwalk Empire sort of misses where its own best stories might lie. How great would a show about Chalky and his family be? Think of how much you could mine from that: city vs. country, wealth vs. self-made men, class and color within the African-American community of the time, the rise of the Prohibition-enabled criminal class and the position of guys like Chalky in that world, the family dynamic, and on and on and on. Or hell, imagine if the season used Eli as its protagonist, and followed his return to this world and his attempt to find a new, much lower place in it. I’d probably prefer that to whatever’s going to go on with Nucky and Margaret at the center, you know? But I’m happy for the tantalizing glimpses, too.
Tags: Boardwalk Empire, reviews, TV, TV reviews
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