The main character of Winter’s Bone (2010), the seventeen-year old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is as tough as old boot leather. She lives up in the Missouri Ozarks with her mama, who is physically present but mentally absent, her twelve-year old brother Sonny (Isaiah Stone) and her six-year old sister Ashlee (Ashlee Thompson). Her father, Jessup, has been missing for some time and the story begins when Ree gets told that her father has to show up for court or they’re going to lose their house because he put it up to get the bond for the bail money.
It’s well known that Ree’s father cooks methamphetamine and that he’s been in trouble with the law before. Now that he is missing and the immediate safety of her family is threatened, Ree goes looking for him, asking a lot of uncomfortable questions of some very dangerous people.
Ree is shown right from the start as self-sufficient and strong in the sense that she does what has to be done. In her case that means taking care of her mother and her siblings, chopping wood and hunting squirrel and trying to make ends meet. There are poignant instances where Ree is taking her siblings to school and then looking in through the doors of the classrooms with something like longing in her eyes, showing plainly that she knows what she has to give up for her family.
Ree goes in search of her father, talking to relatives and people her father has had dealings with all over the community. She forms an uneasy alliance with her volatile uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) in trying to get to the truth, though it’s pretty clear right from the get-go that her father is gone for good, if not dead.
One of the more interesting things about this story is that even if the culture is portrayed as predominantly and pretty aggressively patriarchal, the women are given a lot of weight and substance. Most everywhere Ree goes she is greeted at the door by the wives and girlfriends of the men she has to ask questions of, and they are all cast in the same tough-as-nails Cerberus dye. The region’s patriarch Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall) is guarded by his spouse Merab (Dale Dickey), who also delivers an almighty beating to Ree when she won’t stop her investigation.
This is a tale of family, perseverance and doing what has to be done and Ree is undoubtedly a heroine in the most basic and best sense of the word. Jennifer Lawrence gives her portrayal of Ree all the gravitas and subtlety you could hope for, showing both her strength and her weakness, her fear and her deep and abiding sense of loyalty without it ever becoming overly sentimental. This could so easily have tripped into a stereotypical portrayal of degenerate hillbillies and gratuitous poverty porn, but instead each character is shown as doing what they have to do in order to live under extremely harsh conditions. Some manage to rise above their circumstance and some succumb to them. Drugs are in abundance, both as a means of making money and for everyday use and this is presented as a fact of life. The harsh things are snugged up right against the gentle in this tale. The landscape and the color palette shows just how bleak and difficult life is, and it also shows the undeniable haunting beauty of the scarcity of the mountains.
This is a thriller in the best sense of the word. The object is to find out what has happened to Ree’s father, and the viewer is taken along for the ride right up to the inevitable conclusion. What makes this rise above the run of the mill thrillers is that the devil is in the details all the way. The dialogue is sparse, the characters kept true and given context and depth even though they are not explained to death. In amidst of all the violence and danger we are also shown how Ree’s little brother and sister run and play and seem genuinely happy to be together, with no sense that they are deprived of anything essential.
There are visually lyrical moments that underscore the characters themselves without intruding on the story, sometimes in black and white and sometimes in a muted colour scheme that adds to the overall impression created in the narrative. It is gripping and harrowing and reminiscent of true Southern Gothic tales underscored with a sense of almost documentary quality frankness, which makes it well worth watching.
Winter’s Bone (2010) directed by Debra Granik stars Jennifer Lawrence (Ree), Isaiah Stone (Sonny), Ashlee Thompson (Ashlee), John Hawkes (Teardrop), Valerie Richards (Connie), Shelley Waggener (Sonya), Garret Dillahunt (Sheriff Baskin), William White (Blond Milton), Lauren Sweetser (Gail), Dale Dickey (Merab), Sheryl Lee (April), Marideth Sisco (Singer at Party) and Ronnie Hall (Thump Milton). Based on the novel of the same name written by Daniel Woodrell.
Article first published as Movie Review Winter’s Bone on Blogcritics.
And on The Topic of the End of the World…
November 15, 2010
T.S. Eliot put it best in his poem “The Hollow Men”
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
I feel the need to amend myself for the previous post about the post-apocalyptic world of The Book of Eli. There’s a lot more to that story than I first indicated, such as the plucky young female side-kick Solara and the dirty western frontier feeling of Carnegie’s town and the fact that Eli is the book, embodies it, carries it within himself, cradled close to his heart. And the fact that people eat each other is just icing on the cake. Uhm. Well, maybe not icing. Well, strange icing then.
There are all kinds of post-apocalyptic landscapes. There’s excess and decay in Blade Runner (1984), a world where there is too much of everything but it’s all broken down and at odds with the high level of technological advancement. There’s the same general sense of too much stuff and an increasing level of urban ruins in Split Second (1992) where the futuristic London looks more like Venice, complete with rain and rising water levels. Hardware (1990) is post nuclear in the same way as The Book of Eli (2009), but here there’s an interesting mix of blasted wastelands and excess and changed climate. Technology features heavily in that movie as well, and it’s the same kind of retrofitted architecture in a dying structure where the difference between ghetto and high-end living are slim to none, merely depending on weather the technology works or not.
The future of the whole Terminator-series is blasted landscapes, ruins and dangers and technology gone rogue. It’s mostly a hostile environment, more fitted for machines than humans.
Mad Max (1979) had that same blasted desert feel to it even if it was still basically a revenge tale. And the following movies in that series had their merits and flaws. It’s still a forerunner in its genre, no matter what you might think of the leading actor today.
“If the future isn’t bright at least it’s colorful” Blixa Bargeld sings in one of Einstürzende Neubauten’s songs. That certainly applies to the movies mentioned above.
In Equilibrium (2002) the world still works, but things are not the way they should be. Just like with 1984 (1956 and again in 1984) things are bad, but the pressure is concentrated to the psychological realm in a totalitarian structure where you actually can’t argue that things aren’t what they should be, that the future isn’t a bright, clean and shiny place. These aren’t post-apocalyptic worlds in the same sense, they are dystopias, but there’s more to it than that. Reasons why aren’t always given, but the viewer can infer. And does, at least if they’re constructed like this viewer. You can argue where the line between post-apocalypse and dystopia should be drawn, but sometimes they are one and the same and sometimes they teeter-totter back and forth across that line.
There are plenty of post-apocalyptic scenarios that involve some kind of plague or bio-warfare, touching on our paranoia about diseases. Pandemic outbreaks of vampirism as in Daybreakers (2009) or I Am Legend (2007) or, tangentially, The Omega Man (1971) or any of the droves of zombie-movies, starting with the George Romero movies go at the topic slightly differently. The Last man on Earth (1964) combines vampirism, viruses and what-not. And David Cronenberg’s inimitable Rabid (1977) that creeps in under your skin for more reasons than one.
The premise is basically that everything else is the same, but the people needed to keep society going are the broken part of the machine, with the exception of small pockets of survivors. 28 Days Later… (2002) give us the modern view of the virus spreading in a world where communication and travel have developed to the point where pandemics are moving at epic speeds. Then there’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) of course, which is all of these things, decay and viruses and time travel and a hallucinatory drift in the fabric of reality with a cherry on top.
Planet of the Apes (1984) is of course another time-honoured classic that deserves a mention. Nothing’s really wrong here if you don’t take the fact that the human race managed to bomb themselves into the stone age proving themselves to be nothing more than an interesting footnote in history, reduced to myth at best. It’s that old fear of degeneration, a reversed Darwinian evolutionary curve making us irrelevant, which is something that not even Matrix (1999) took all the way. At least there humans serve some kind of utilitarian purpose, even if it’s not that great from our perspective.
Then there’s a lot of … uhm, let’s call them less successful movies on the same basic topic, like Interzone (1987), the storyline of which is given in haiku-style as “Humans fight mutants in a post-holocaust world.” Hmm… I haven’t seen that one. A Boy and His Dog (1975) I have seen, but I can’t exactly claim to have any interesting memories of it, apart from thinking that the sound quality was really bad and the voice-over of the Dog just felt incredibly wrong.
We bring it on ourselves.
That is surprisingly often the moral lesson in these narratives. It doesn’t matter if we are pawns in the game or victims of chance or just caught in the maelstrom of circumstance that are outside our control.
Our fears are pretty much the usual ones. Things ending badly, for whatever reason, are often brought about by greed and stupidity and all the things connected to excess and any of a variation of combinations of the seven deadly sins. Sometimes the humans in these narratives are like cockroaches, surviving despite of it all. Sometimes they are righteous men in a bleak free-for-all where people who eat people are the luckiest people in the world.
Mule
Eastern Promises – So much more than just a gangster movie
August 20, 2010
Article first published as DVD Review: Eastern Promises: So Much More Than Just a Gangster Movie on Blogcritics.
First, a confession. I am a huge Cronenberg fan. I like his violently red vision in classics like The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981), but even more the eerily disturbing Dead Ringers (1988), Crash (1996) and Spider (2002). Naked Lunch (1991) and Videodrome (1983) have their own hallucinogenic lunacy that disturbs in a different way.
Eastern Promises begins with a birth and a death, coinciding and overlapping. Tatiana (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse), a young Russian girl, stumbles into a pharmacy begging for help. She promptly passes out in a puddle of her own blood. She is rushed to the hospital where the midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) is one of the medical team working on her. Tatiana does not survive the birth. She leaves behind a child and a diary written in Russian which Anna tries to use to track down any family the girl might have.
Anna unwittingly stumbles into the violent criminal Russian underworld of London. She enlists the help of a seemingly respectable Russian restaurant owner, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) to help her translate the diary. Little does she know that Semyon is actually responsible for Tatiana’s condition and that he is a part of the Vory v Zakonye (“thieves in law”) a criminal organization.
Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen) is working as a driver for the organization, and he is close to both Semyon and his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Anna lands herself squarely in the middle of more trouble than she can handle when she starts getting involved with Semyon, not knowing that Tatiana was working in one of his brothels and that Semyon is the one who impregnated her.
Nikolai is actually not what he seems to be at first glance, either. It turns out that he is working under cover to try and infiltrate the Vory, an operation that has been a long time in the making and which is now in part jeopardized by Anna’s involvement.
This could so easily have been another bad-accented gangster exploitation movie if handled by another director, but instead it has depth and weight. Every action is underscored by a wealth of background work and there’s a fullness to the telling that shows how much is left unsaid.
Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel both impress and come across as completely plausible Russian gangsters. The lines spoken in Russian sound true enough and their broken English rings just as true, which is a relief. The interaction between their two characters Nikolai and Kirill is underscored by a kind of romance and seduction that is really interesting to watch. Kirill’s troubled relationship with his father is of the variety you would expect to see in a Greek play, and all this comes into play in the action, but with the sliding subtlety of a master craftsman’s handling. Naomi Watts is completely believable as a midwife and her character has depth and a richness to it that isn’t common for either the genre, nor for female characters as a whole.
The action starts in medias res and it ends the same way and it actually took me a while to settle on why. This is not Anna’s story, or Kirill’s, or even Nikolai’s. This is the story of the fourteen year old Tatiana, whose diary runs as a red thread in her voice-over through the action and even rounds it off when we get the closing shot of Nikolai at Semyon’s restaurant. But even more than that, this is actually the baby’s story. Tatiana’s child is the main focus here, and that is actually so cleverly done that it underscores the violence and gives it a human resonance. Kirill’s moment of anagnorisis comes when he is gently persuaded to not kill the child and gives in to Nikolai.
There are many things to commend this movie, little moments like when Semyon demonstrates his ability to play the fiddle to two of his young nieces, or when Nikolai handles the post-mortem dismemberment of a rival gangster with the ease of someone who has done it all before, or the fight sequence in the Turkish bath where Nikolai takes on two fully dressed rival gangsters completely buck naked making him so blatantly vulnerable you wince for him when he gets thrown across the room. There are other things too, like the young man who is obviously of diminished capacity, but who kills and gets killed because he can’t grasp the full extent of his situation. There are many things like that and that is more than enough to make this a well above par gangster movie.
Eastern Promises is directed by David Cronenberg staring Naomi Watts (Anna), Viggo Mortensen (Nikolai), Vincent Cassel (Kirill), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Semyon), Josef Altin (Ekrem), Mina E. Mina (Azim), Aleksander Mikic (Soyka), Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse (Tatiana), Sinéad Cusack (Helen), Jerzy Skolimowski (Stephan).
The Last Ride – Car chases do not a hit movie make
August 18, 2010
Article first published as Movie Review: The Last Ride – Car Chases Do Not A Hit Movie Make on Blogcritics.
Why, oh, why? That is sometimes the question… Like with this movie, The Last Ride. There’s a definite why? in here somewhere. Now, Dennis Hopper was one of those actors that could literally blow you straight out of the room when he was on, and there was a good script to back him up and he was being used wisely. Sometimes, though, even actors have to eat. And that’s where movies like this one come in.
The young Matthew Rondell (Chris Carmack) seems to have inherited his love for cars and racing from his grandfather Ronnie Purnell (Dennis Hopper). Ronnie is just about to get out of prison after having served a thirty year sentence for robbery. The sheriff Darryl Kurtz (Fred Ward) has taken a personal interest in Ronnie’s affairs, even to the point that he took in his son Aron (Will Patton) and raised him as his own. Now everything is about to come to a head as Ronnie gets out of jail.
The movie tries to span three generations, the wild and reckless 60s outlaw with a social agenda and a heart of gold, represented by Ronnie, the staid and law-abiding Aron and the disaffected youth Matthew. Ronnie’s Robin Hood/Bonnie-and-Clyde thing, stealing money meant for soldiers’ wages, was meant as an anti-war protest. There’s a revenge theme as well since Ronnie’s wife was shot when he was arrested.
The disaffected youth represented by Matthew doesn’t agree with his father’s view on Ronnie’s life and they also share a love of cars, which explains the opening sequence that looks like something out of The Fast and the Furious. Cars matter here. Ronnie’s 1969 Pontiac GTO is a character all it’s own and there is a little too much caressingly slow camera gliding along bumpers and stick shifts for my taste.
Matthew has issues with his father, Aron and Aron has issues with his father, Ronnie. The sheriff Kurtz (Fred Ward) has issues with everything. He’s very clearly a bad guy, but that doesn’t seem to register with Aron until it’s pretty late in the game. Sound confusing? Yeah, well, this is what happens when you don’t really have a main focus to what you’re doing. Instead of being a bit of everything, trying to please everyone, this movie doesn’t really please anyone. The cast gives it its best, but having an actor like Dennis Hopper and using him like this is a waste. There are moments, little glimmering nuggets, but they don’t really get a chance to shine and that’s just too bad.
This is a made-for-TV movie and if you’re having popcorn on the couch it’s probably not going to merit you actually throwing your popcorn at the TV. Still, it’s bland and that’s too bad, all things considered.
Most movies have a derivative strain, there’s no escaping that. But, there is a difference between paying homage and cobbling together a new plot of several old familiar ones. Clichés are fine, they are a part of the attraction most of the time, but there still needs to be something more to it.
There are alternatives to this that will ensure you have a good time. I recommend you watch Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Running on Empty (1988) or even The Fast and the Furious (2001) if car porn is your thing.
The Last Ride (2004), directed by Guy Norman Bee stars Dennis Hopper (Ronnie Purnell), Will Patton (Aaron Purnell), Fred Ward (Darryl Kurtz), Chris Carmack (Matthew Rondell), Nadine Velazquez (JJ Cruz), Peter Onorati (Burt Walling).
Mule
The 2403rd Star – Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)
June 3, 2010
Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) passed away the other day. He made it to 74, who would have thought?
The thing about Hopper for me has always been his ability to hook your attention – even when the quality of the movie might not be … well, you know – stellar.
Hopper’s career was chequered, to say the least. You got the feeling that occasionally he just needed to pay the rent, and I can respect that. There’s no shame in working.
When he was good, on the other hand, he was really good. Some performances stand out by a country mile: Easy Rider (1969) and Blue Velvet (1986) being the ones that pretty much everybody remembers.
But there’s also the very young and clean-faced Goon in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the surprisingly funny Huey Walker in Flashback (1990) opposite Kiefer Sutherland. Hopper’s performance as the father in Rumble Fish (1983) is one of my personal favourites, it seems so effortless. Then again there’s the scene between Hopper and Christopher Walken where they discuss the heredity of being Sicilian in True Romance (1993) which still gives me a big happy. Apocalypse Now (1979) is one of those performances that makes perfect sense too, the crazed gleam in Hopper’s eyes probably not all the way an act.
There’s also Hoosiers (1985), The Indian Runner (1991), Paris Trout (1991), The Osterman Weekend (1983), The American Friend (1977) and Basquiat (1996).
Then, on the other hand … Waterworld (1995), Super Mario Bros. (1993) and Firestarter 2: Rekindled (2002) aren’t exactly shining moments for anyone involved. Like I say – sometimes you just got to pay the rent.
Hopper also directed. Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971) – which was a spectacular failure. Out of the Blue (1980), Colors (1988), Catchfire (1990), The Hot Spot (1990), Chasers (1994) and the short Homeless (2000).
If you look at his career as an actor, he worked with some of the very best directors, and if you look at what he did as a director he worked with some spectacular actors. Directors include Sam Peckingpah, Robert Altman, David Lynch, Sean Penn, Julian Schnabel, Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Ray, George Romero and Wim Wenders. That’s a whole hell of a lot of talent all around.
Hopper also collected modern art and exhibited his own photography and painting.
Squandered talent always kind of angers me and Hopper was lucky in a way that he didn’t fall from grace completely, succumbing to substance abuse early in his career. He did abuse his fare share of substances there for a while, though, and got a sharp awakening and cleaned up his act.
Some actors have this ability to tap into a real dark streak, mainlining something close to evil, and Hopper is one of them. He has been the good guy too, the tough cop, all that, but he is just more in command of the stage when the darkness bleeds through.
Like with most creative souls there’s a restlessness, a sense that there is never world enough, or time. A feeling that you have to rage against the dying of the light. In his best moments Hopper gave the viewer all that and a feeling that there was an active intelligence at work behind it.
I asked around amongst my less film enthusiastic acquaintances about Hopper when the news of his death became public. I asked what they remembered seeing him in, what they thought of him, and the funny thing to me was that no one seemed to like him much. I just went “huh?” because, man I didn’t get that. I guess it makes sense that you don’t like him if all you’ve seen is Blue Velvet, because Booth is not a very likeable guy. Hopper played bad guys, like Booth or Paris Trout, with so much fire and honesty, that it makes sense.
In Apocalypse Now the Photojournalist dances about like a mad monkey on speed, lost in the jungle in so many ways and he delivers the following lines about Kurtz to Marlow: “What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans, man? That he had wisdom? Bullshit, man!”
And there it is.
There was more to him, though.
Hopper’s character Father in Rumble Fish has this lovely dialogue with Rusty James;
-Every now and then, a person comes along, has a different view of the world than does the usual person. It doesn’t make them crazy. I mean… an acute perception, man… that doesn’t, that doesn’t make you crazy.
-Could you talk normal?
-However sometimes… it can drive you crazy, acute perception.
-I wish you’d talk normal ’cause I don’t understand half the garbage you’re saying. You know? You know what I mean?
-No, your mother… is not crazy. And neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother crazy. He’s merely miscast in a play. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river… with the ability to be able to do anything that he wants to do and finding nothing that he wants to do. I mean nothing.
That is one of my favourite pieces of dialogue for whatever strange and intangible reason. It has to do with the setting, the pitch of Hoppers voice and the earnestness, the slight exasperation and the honesty with which he delivers it. Hopper’s character’s rumpled suit, his greasy hair, the stubble and the signs of neglect, all of it tells the story of a man with a sharp intelligence who has fallen from grace and lost his footing due to heartache and heavy drinking.
Hopper doesn’t so much sell a performance as live it.
And that’s how I will remember him.
Mule
Kurt Sutter is the creator of this series. It stars Charlie Hunnam (Jax Teller), Katey Sagal (Gema Teller Morrow), Ron Perlman (Clay Morrow), Tommy Flanagan (Chibs), Kim Coates (Tig), Maggie Siff (Tara), Johnny Lewis (Half-Sack), Theo Rossi (Juice), Ryan Hurst (Opie), William Lucking (Piney), Dayton Callie (Chief Unser), Taylor Sheridan (Deputy Chief Hale), Theo Rossi (Juice), Mark Boone Junior (Robert Munson), Ally Walker (June Stahl) et al.
This first season consists of 13 episodes: “Pilot”, “Seeds”, “Fun Town”, “Patch Over”, “Giving Back”, “AK-51″, “Old Bones”, “The Pull”, “Hell Followed”, “Better Half”, “Capybara”, “The Sleep of Babies” and “The Revelator”. There is also some neat bonus material, a “making of…” and 29 deleted scenes, things bout the ink, the bikes and the casting.
The outlaw lifestyle is always attractive to dip into and examine from a safe distance. There has to be more than pure sensationalism to draw you back for an entire TV-season of the thing, though. Sons of Anarchy has that.
To sum it up very succinctly this is a biker world with Shakespearean overtones.
What that means is that despite the motorcycles and the bikers and the various nefarious activities they get up to, the central core and themes deal with the more personal aspects of family and extended family and the politics that involves.
Samcro, as they call themselves, is a tightly structured powerhouse reminiscent of a feudal system where you earn your position by right, by blood and by the sword. There is no doubt what-so-ever that these are bad guys with questionable morals. They live in the little town Charming and have an understanding with the police force that allows them to reside there peacefully as long as they don’t do business where they live.
Some concessions have been made to the viewers sensibilities, like the fact that Samcro primarily deals guns to earn a living and therefore are not as morally objectionable as the drug-dealers. They also steal, cheat and rob, provide dubious protection and help other criminals (including the police chief). The weapons come via the “real IRA” who have a political agenda and that, again, says something about the interesting moral line the creator of the series is treading.
In terms of structure the story centres around Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam), the son of Gemma (Katey Sagal) and John Teller who only appears as a ghost, a voice-over reading from a manuscript. His adopted father is Clay Morrow (Ron Pearlman) who is also the President of the motorcycle club Sons of Anarchy. In the beginning of the season we also meet Jax’s estranged ex-wife Wendy Case (Drea de Matteo) who is pregnant with their baby and still using drugs. This is to play a pivotal role in what sets Jax on his journey, namely the premature birth of their son Abel. No matter how jaded a TV-audience might be it’s still sufficiently shocking to see a woman seven and a half months pregnant looking for a vein to shoot up in. Abel is born prematurely and spends the first couple of episodes in prenatal care. Jax is forced to take on the responsibilities of fatherhood in the midst of all the other things that are happening around him.
Tara Knowles (Maggie Siff), Jax’s old girlfriend, also plays an important role in the direct family structure since she is working as a doctor at the local hospital and immediately gets involved in Jax’s son’s care. She also has a long and complicated history with the family, particularly Gemma, and the past is never buried completely in this narrative, since her own past, her’s and Jax’s past and the future plays heavily into the later part of the season.
The second layer of family is the members of Samcro: Chibs (Tommy Flanagan), Tig (Kim Coates) (Tig), Jucie (Theo Rossi), Piney (William Lucking), Opie (Ryan Hurst ), Bobby Elvis (Mark Boone Jr) and the prospect Half-Sack (Johnny Lewis). Each of these members have their own struggles that impact the action. Opie, for example, has just gotten out of prison after having spent five years incarcerated for a crime related to Samcro. His wife Donna (Sprague Grayden) really wants Opie to quit the life after he gets out and a lot of the action concerning where his loyalties lie comes in to play in the later part of the series when the ATF takes a special interest in Samcro.
The next level is society. The Sons of Anarchy have a complicated relationship to authority, which is pretty much a given, seeing as they put anarchy in their actual name. The peaceful little town of Charming is rife with conflicting emotions about the club, and local law enforcement is headed up by Chief Unser (Dayton Callie) who is about as bent as they come and Deputy Chief Hale (Taylor Sheridan), who longs for change and is a more straight shooter. At one point or another Samcro has been able to manipulate other officials into owing them favours, which works for them. Real outside threat comes from ATF, especially through the tough-as-nails ATF agent June Stahl (Ally Walker).
Samcro has external enemies, The Nords, The Mayans and The Niners – all representing other ethnic groups with other values. They also have all the internal strife of any group living by the sword this way. Loyalty is in question, not only between the Old King, The President – Clay – and the young prince – Jax – but also between the various members of the group. Opie, for example, has to deal with his wife wanting him to get out of the life on the one hand and Samcro trying to bring him back to the fold on the other, a plot line that moves effortlessly between the personal and private and the public when the ATF gets involved and tries to pray on this weakness to create the illusion that Opie has betrayed Samcro.
Jax is living under his stepfather’s rule and there are hints of dark secrets in the Teller family’s past. Jax finds a manuscript that his farther wrote that mostly deals with what his intentions were originally, when it comes to what Sons of Anarchy was supposed to be about. Jax’s father was a Vietnam veteran and obviously came back with some different ideas of how to live his life. Those ideas are presented in a voice-over as Jax reads the manuscript and again, this just enhances the underlying themes of family, society and politics and how far the club has drifted from what was originally intended. Katey Sagal gives a stellar performance as the tough Gemma. I can’t say enough nice things about how she is every bit as frightening as the big leather-clad henchmen of Samcro, especially when she is dealing with the other ladies attached to the club. She rules by force, but also by manipulation.
It is rare to see this much complexity in a narrative like this one, and I am reminded of a documentary I saw about an under cover agent that infiltrated a motor cycle gang and lived the life for years. His experiences of the violence and the life of an outsider are echoed here.
The overall arch of the first season focuses on how Jax is going to balance becoming a father with the demands his lifestyle makes on him in terms of how dangerous it is making a living selling illegal firearms. He connects with his fathers original intentions, and has to try and reconcile that with what Samcro has become. The need for change is obvious, and as the season draws to a close we get closer to the point where change is not only needed, but also necessary.
The writing is smart enough that you feel like you have been allowed in to the dusty backrooms where the characters show their true selves. There is a strong sense of family and loyalty, but it’s underscored by bloody violence, criminal behaviour and a deep paranoia.
There is also excellent music, smart plots, beautiful sets and really cool bikes.
And did I mention that one of the Sons of Anarchy performs as an Elvis-impersonator?
Mule
