Sunday Blog #9: Queenie, Hit Man, Patrick Melrose rewatch
'What if your Self is a construction?'
It’s become something of an archetype in modern TV: the woman who finds her voice via writing. Sky/HBO’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is probably the zenith example, alongside Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love – all about women trundling through their formative years and enduring the chaos of flings, friendships, and career choices. They’re also built within the realms of autofiction (though the realities are debatable with Ferrante). Candice Carty-Williams now enters this good company with Queenie, based on her bestselling novel about a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman enduring a quarter-life crisis.
I remember seeing the hardback piled on tables in bookshops everywhere, and being buzzed by the vivid opening description of Queenie’s gynaecology appointment. The eight-part Channel 4 series opens in the same place, legs akimbo, with a cracking voiceover to guide you through her thoughts. Queenie’s an absorbing narrator too: avoiding superfluous explanation and just keeping to the thoughts she feels she can’t say aloud. But thoughts and speech gradually cross over each other, especially when she has dinner with her white boyfriend’s family – the grandmother of which spouts a slurry of racist microaggressions. Gradually, as Queenie clubs and binges and sleeps around, the series reveals a chasm of buried trauma constructed over generations.
Dionne Brown is excellent in the main role: crafting such a funny, bittersweet work-in-progress of a character. It’s easy to spend time with her in eight half-hour sessions. However, much like Everything I Know About Love, I grew more interested in the side characters who are never given enough screentime. I would love to have seen more of her friendship group (known as ‘The Corgis’) as well as the crucial love interest Frank (Samuel Adewunmi) and their dynamics, but much is achieved with the time provided. Queenie doesn’t supersede the examples listed above – I even wonder if Carty-Williams’ previous drama, Champion, is superior – but it’s still a brilliant, bingeable and exploratory portrait.
It’s hard to completely pin down Richard Linklater as a director, perhaps best-known for his ageing character dramas Boyhood and the Before trilogy alongside youthful ensemble movies like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!! He also deserves more praise for his veteran road movie Last Flag Flying, starring Steve Carell and Bryan Cranston.
The common quality in all these movies is the dialogue, which wields a human, conversational power. Likewise, the dialogue in Linklater’s latest film Hit Man is its greatest strength – particularly when delving into discussions of Nietzsche and Freud. Both are somewhat idolised by New Orleans philosophy and psychology professor Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), who also works part-time for the police. When an undercover agent is unavailable, he’s enlisted to act as a hitman (an occupation that, apparently, doesn’t exist) and catch a potential murderer.
Gary takes to the role immediately, managing to improvise with precision and flair: reflecting the employer’s perceptions of hitmen. This turns into a productive talent, Gary climbing into different characters suiting the personalities that want to hire him. There’s a hint of Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs as Gary prepares for the role, and his ego starts to shift as a result. Inevitably, he begins to sympathise with one of his clients: the emotionally abused Madison (an unforgettably charged performance by Andor’s Adria Arjona), with whom he starts an unethical romance. Gary tailors the situation for Madison to free herself, become her own woman, and then date his alter-ego Ron. If Gary is the beta, Ron is very much the alpha: strong, assertive and hot. The middle of the film follows this sexually-driven situationship, with Madison clearly turned on by the danger.
Gary turns from likeable hero to manipulative liar, and it’s unclear whether Linklater wants you to cheer or despise him. Hit Man is like a journey between the poles of masculinity, accommodated by the temptation to forsake politeness and morality for a purely primal id. I enjoyed this dynamic for a while – especially with Powell and Arjona’s explosive chemistry – but then the third act screwed things up. Both Gary and Madison veer into extreme versions of themselves, leading to a finale that feels so out of place that it’s like you’re watching two different movies spliced together. This is exacerbated by the lack of detail in Madison’s character, reducing this potentially enrapturing woman to little more than an eroticised victim (transparently written by men). As such, Hit Man left me cold as a corpse.
After bingeing Eric last week, I felt obliged to rewatch my favourite Benedict Cumberbatch performance: Patrick Melrose, the witty, alcoholic, drug addict creation of Edward St Aubyn. One Day author David Nicholls adapted the five-novel quintet into a five-episode miniseries for Sky and Showtime, directed by Edward Berger who’d later make All Quiet on the Western Front.
Strangely, I’m drawn to these kinds of characters. I’ve never had issues with drugs and alcohol, despite my measured love for Scotch and Rioja, but there’s something about a mental state that cannot deal with reality, with the present moment, with the company you keep that resonates. Patrick deals with an inconceivable degree of trauma from his childhood that his aristocratic upbringing has no hope of balming. Love is limited in circles where comedic irony, stiff lips, and upper-class judgements dominate every social interaction. As someone brought up in the British middle class, I can’t relate entirely to the garishness of Patrick’s life but I understand it to a degree: that overwhelming, almost masculine need to be witty, assertive and impenetrable; refuting your own mental struggles because of a congenital lottery.
Through a twenty-year time span, Patrick Melrose spirals with this character through various phases of addiction and recovery and addiction and recovery in a constant circuit – revolving around the death of his abusive father (a poisonously horrific Hugo Weaving). This spreads into Patrick’s own paternal instincts, as seen from episode four (Mother’s Milk), which showcases the depth of Cumberbatch’s talents as an actor. It’s likely these scenes that destined him for the role in Eric.
TRAILER PARK
Bridgerton season 3 part 2, Netflix
Crossing, dir. Levan Akin
Black Barbie, dir. Lagueria Davis
Sisi & I, dir. Frauke Finsterwalder