She reacts to Beth’s admission that she wishes Freddie were dead without judgment. She talks to Freddie calmly but directly and insists that the gas company reconnect heat to Freddie’s house because it’s illegal in Pennsylvania (and various other states) to cut off utilities for low-income families between December and March. When her longtime friend and former basketball teammate Beth Hanlon (Chinasa Ogbuagu) calls the police on her opioid addict brother Freddie (Dominique Johnson), and Mare injures herself chasing him back to his house, she doesn’t react in anger. In the present, though, we see Mare on the job, and in every altercation, she’s tough but fair. It all might be impossible to balance, and it makes you wonder if Katie’s disappearance really got Mare’s full attention last year. Carroll did on the other hand, Mare’s personal life is an unbelievable mess. On one hand, lifelong Easttown resident Mare is so ingrained in the community that people just keep calling her for help, as Mrs. We’re starting over here,” he decrees, but Mare looks at the file only once in the next few hours. She blames the victim, complaining to her boss Chief Carter (John Douglas Thompson) that Katie was a known drug user and had a history of prostitution: “She’s probably lying at the bottom of the Delaware River right now.” Still, Chief Carter isn’t backing down, since Dawn’s interview is putting so much pressure on the force. Mare, for her part, is defensive rather than sympathetic. She doesn’t exactly say “Mare Sheehan fucked this up,” but the implication is heavy. A body was never found, and the case went nowhere, and now her mother Dawn is giving interviews to the local news about how the police bungled the case. Carroll, and when she gets to the police station, we learn what that entails.Ī year before, Katie Bailey disappeared. She’s too busy investigating “all the really bad crap that goes on around here,” she admonishes Mrs. Carroll’s (Phyllis Somerville) “I trust you, and I don’t know who the station will send over,” but not Mare. When we meet Mare, there’s an immediate cause for her displeasure: She’s been woken up by a neighbor whose granddaughter saw a Peeping Tom in their backyard, and she’s peeved, as a detective, to be dealing with this low-level stuff. Is anyone who lives here happy? Hard to say. Ingelsby and director Craig Zobel, who will helm all seven episodes, immediately communicate how the small-town tidiness of Easttown - ordered brick townhomes, the rows of headstones in a cemetery, the billowing smoke coming from an industrial skyline - mask a community in crisis. Silliness aside, the Mare of Easttown premiere sets the table with tragedies past and present, and hints at even more to come. Would I pay to watch a game of HORSE between Affleck and Winslet in their respective basketball-playing Ingelsby characters? Yes, I would. She carries her body like Ben Affleck did in Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby’s film The Way Back: with a kind of bone-deep exhaustion and a claustrophobic hunching-in. Can a person limp or vape exasperatedly? You wouldn’t assume so, but Winslet does it. It’s bad! And Winslet, who returns to HBO a decade after starring in Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce adaptation and who increasingly in her career has chosen these kind of brittle, inflexible characters ( Ammonite is not a love story, people!), excels here, imbuing all of Mare’s physicality and facial expressions with some degree of annoyance. The woman who has cancer and whose daughter has disappeared into thin air is somehow the focus of Mare’s ire and defensiveness. Her family and friends, her co-workers and boss - and most gallingly, the mother of the missing girl who Mare failed to find the year before. The chip on her shoulder is a mountain range, and every person seems to irritate her. And now Easttown has two, with detective Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) in the middle. Easttown is in free fall - no economy to speak of, opioid addiction on the rise, a pervasive kind of malaise - but nothing jolts a community quite like a murder. One young woman disappeared a year ago in Easttown, Pennsylvania. Is it a prestige cable crime drama if a young woman doesn’t die in the first episode? I’m sorry to be so cynical, but Mare of Easttown begins with an upsetting amount of familiarity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |