Progenies

The great iconic actors have a way of being reborn in the lives of future generations - often with chilling similarities. Susan Green in Critics at Large examines the examples of James Dean and River Phoenix.

Phoenix Descending: The Young and the Restless and the Doomed

River Phoenix (1970-1993)

As a starstruck little girl, I experienced a broken heart when 24-year-old James Dean died in an automobile accident on September 30, 1955. From that day on, I began each entry in my diary with “Dear Jimmy.” A somewhat similar sadness took hold when drugs claimed the life of 23-year-old River Phoenix on Halloween 1993. But in starstruck adulthood, I no longer kept a diary with which to deny the untimely deaths of sensitive young actors.

Like Dean, Phoenix projected vulnerability, intensity and an edgy sense of potential self-destruction in his films. These qualities, which graced them both with a charisma lacking in most of their otherwise talented Hollywood peers, almost made tragedy seem inevitable. From a troubled adolescent in Stand by Me(1986) to the anguished son of fugitive parents in Running on Empty (1988), Phoenix brought that special something to the screen. In director Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), he portrays a character with narcolepsy. Never very lively while awake, he abruptly falls asleep anywhere, anytime – much like a junkie nodding out. It’s an uncanny performance in a strange movie based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

What Goes Around...

When the Coen Brothers conceived Inside Llewyn Davis, they used as their inspiration Dave Van Ronk, one of American folk music's most revered figures (even though he didn't come to define, or change, the culture the way Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan did). Susan Green shed some light on his fascinating career last year in Critics at Large.

A Walking Museum of the Blues: Dave Van Ronk Remembered

As music luminaries prepare to strut their glitzy stuff at tonight’s Grammy Awards, I am thinking back to a 20th-century hopeful who was the antithesis of glitz and who died on this date in 2002....

Why now, in particular?” a bewildered Dave Van Ronk asked rhetorically, a few days after learning about his Grammy nomination for a 1995 album titled From...Another Time & Place. “I made something like 26, actually closer to 30 records but nobody noticed before.” Well, hardly nobody. The blues performer had been in the game for four decades at the time of our January 1996 pre-Grammy interview. He was a legend whose career had returned to the kind of cutting edge made possible by that curious what-goes-around-comes-around law of the universe.

The Twee Side of Torment

Last spring saw the return of film director Whit Stillman (Barcelona) with his first film in 13 years. Susan Green caught up with it for Critics at Large and found it to be a mixed blessing.

A University’s Odd Universe: Where Damsels Go To Dance

Carrie MacLemore, Annaleigh Tipton, Megalyn Echikunwoke and Greta Gerwi star in Damsels in Distress

Mix 1930s screwball comedy with 1950s kitsch, while providing a wink and a nod to a smattering of contemporary concerns. What do you get? Damsels in Distress, the first film from writer-director Whit Stillman in 13 years. Back then, he was a young indie darling thanks to his award-winning Metropolitan(1990) and The Last Days of Disco (1998), with a less acclaimed Barcelona (1994) tossed in for good measure. Now middle-aged, his interests remain rooted in the discreet charm of the “urban haute bourgeoisie,” as a Disco denizen refers to her fading social milieu. This fascination may be the perfect fit for a filmmaker whose mother was a genuine debutante and whose godfather was the man who coined the term WASP to describe White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

In the Bathtub

One of the American independent films from last year which is seeking acknowledgement this year at the Oscars is Beasts of the Southern Wild which gathered enthusiasm from film reviewer Susan Green in Critics at Large.

Down on the Bayou: A Resilient Demimonde and a Determined Child

In John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 classic adapted from a John Steinbeck novel, Ma Joad proclaims the populist message: “They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ‘cause we’re the people.” She’s trapped in what was a genuine climate-propelled diaspora during the early 1930s. A severe drought had devastated states like Oklahoma known as “The Dust Bowl,” where growing food was soon an impossibility. Untold thousands of subsistence farmers hoped to resettle in more hospitable regions of the country while remaining nostalgic about their prairie roots.

The equally beleaguered characters in Beasts of the Southern Wild face homelessness after a hurricane floods “The Bathtub,” their hardscrabble habitat on the wrong side of a Louisiana levee. Across the divide, oil refineries pump out pollution. “Ain’t that ugly over there?” asks a little African-American girl named Hushpuppy, the movie’s amazing protagonist. “We got the prettiest place on Earth.” Although that place might look like a trash heap to outsiders, it’s beloved by those who have carved out a meager but unfettered existence there. She also intuits things beyond her day-to-day concerns, delivering a voice-over narration with a populist message that’s equally ecological: “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right.”

Hypnotized

Most people are familiar with Fleetwood Mac, but few know that they began as a blues band in the late Sixties (or that "Black Magic Woman" is originally a Fleetwood Mac song, not a Santana composition). Even fewer, however, know the middle period of the band that preceded the era of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. That era included singer/songwriter Bob Welch who died earlier this year. Susan Green wrote thoughtfully and perceptively about his time in Fleetwood Mac in Critics at Large.

Hippie in a Hypnotic Place and Time: Songs that Made Sense

Early Fleetwood Mac: Bob Welch, Mick Fleetwood, (back row), John McVie and Christine McVie

“It’s the same kind of story that seems to come down from long ago...”

With news of Bob Welch’s death last week, I was transported back to 1974. That’s when I first heard his former band, Fleetwood Mac, while living in the theoretically sleepy Vermont village of Huntington Center with my young daughter Jennie and a part-collie named Red Cloud. Our small red cabin in the woods was up a steep, twisting dirt road at the foot of a 4,083-foot-high mountain called Camel’s Hump. Local people were wary then of counterculture types, like me, who came to the area seeking a back-to-the-land existence in their midst. Undaunted, we newcomers were busy letting our freak flags fly, in the parlance of the 1960s.

Yesterday's Papers

With Fox news having recently dropped Sarah Palin from their staff of commentators, it seemed timely to look back at Susan Green's review in Critics at Large of the HBO film Game Change.

Thrilla from Wasilla: The High Stakes of Game Change

Ed Harris and Julianne Moore as John McCain and Sarah Palin in HBO's Game Change

Greetings from Cloudcuckooland! Here in the not-so-United States of America, many Republican legislatures are proposing draconian laws to insert medically unnecessary transvaginal probes into the private parts of women seeking abortions (Texas and Virginia), or force female employees to tell their bosses if they’re using birth control for controlling births rather than for health concerns (Arizona), or change the legal definition of women who have been raped from “victims” to “accusers” (Georgia), or allow the murder of doctors who provide abortions (South Dakota).

Agit-Prop

With Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States now currently on cable, we thought we'd venture back to a documentary he made about South America which was reviewed by Susan Green in Critics at Large.

Hasta La Vista, Gringos: Oliver Stone Goes South

Talk about verisimilitude! Oliver Stone’s first crack at capitalism run amok was Wall Street, in 1987. That hit film came out one year after Salvador, his feverish drama about a boozy photojournalist covering war-torn Central America. This month, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (read Kevin Courrier's review here), a sequel that’s also raking in big bucks at the box office, is hot on the heels of his 2009 examination of a region closer to the Equator than El Salvador: Latin America. South of the Border, a documentary, travels with him through six countries as he interviews democratically elected leaders whose left-leaning perspectives probably alarm the U.S. government.

Gene Ritchings' Winter in a Summer Town

The world of print journalism and dramatic television aren't worlds apart. Just ask David Simon of The Wire and Treme. Or better, yet, as Susan Green writes in Critics at Large, read Gene Ritchings' novel, Winter in a Summer Town.  

Don't Fugeddaboutit: The World of a Jersey Shore Wordsmith

Author Gene Ritchings

Full disclosure: Gene Ritchings was our saving grace. In the late 1990s my Critics at Large colleague, Kevin Courrier, and I went down to New York City for ten days to research a book about NBC’s Law & Order. We’d gotten permission and a promise of access from the show’s creator, Dick Wolf, but that blessing did not necessarily mean instant acceptance in the Big Apple. We were interlopers who needed to conduct interviews that arguably might be more in-depth (and perhaps even invasive) than those done by the usual entertainment media briefly visiting the set. 

Initially, the crew seemed to eye us with suspicion and the actors barely noticed our existence – until Ritchings, the production coordinator, took us under his wing. He also bent a few rules to help us navigate the bureaucracy and frenetic schedule that any TV series must establish to keep functioning. “We try to ward off the occasional feeling of being beleaguered and overextended and overworked because that’s the life we chose,” he said then.

After almost 15 seasons at Law & Order, Ritchings returned to a life that’s equally turbulent: journalism. It’s the career he first embraced at 18 and the New Jersey native has now also written a new novel, Winter in a Summer Town, that taps into his early experiences in print media without becoming a full-blown autobiography. The teen protagonist, Eddie Bonneville, lands a newspaper job covering the Garden State county where he has grown up with profound feelings of anger and alienation. The kid almost kills another student in a boxing match, then struggles to reinvent himself as a coming-of-age citizen committed to nonviolence. That goal is continually challenged by the systemic local political corruption he encounters as a novice reporter and by the wild zeitgeist of the era, the late 1960s.

Typecasting

Their are actors who never can escape the roles and images they create on the screen. Two of those, who Susan Green discussed in this piece from Critics at Large, couldn't be more inconically different.

Random Viewing II: Beauty and the Brute

As an adolescent, I was glued to CBS every Friday night for The Twilight Zone. After weaning myself from the addiction to attend college and then live without a television in young adulthood, it’s been possible to catch up with missed episodes whenever the US network SyFy holds a marathon – which the cable channel did during the recent holidays. Although thinking that by now I’ve seen the entire Rod Serling oeuvre, I tuned in and found one of the best stories the show ever produced: “Two,” which first aired in mid-September 1961, addresses the issue of mutually assured destruction. Such topics apparently were popular with the peacenik intellectuals who penned and directed these scripts during a Cold War era marked by nuclear weapons proliferation.

Indie & Illicit

With the New Year coming up, the timing seemed apt to reprint a review by Susan Green in Critics at Large about music that topples old orders for new ones.

Keep on Rockin' in the Free World: From Society to Screen

Politically oppressive regimes threatened by the liberating power of rock ‘n’ roll are a key factor in two 2009 films set three decades and 1,500 miles apart. Christian Carion’s Farewell (originally L’Affaire Farewell) is a feature that chronicles a true 1981 cloak-and-dagger tale in Moscow, where a Russian KGB analyst’s teenage son cares more about David Bowie than Karl Marx. Nobody Knows About Persian Cats, a docudrama by Bahman Ghobadi, focuses on the many illicit indie bands dodging authoritarian rule in contemporary Tehran. Both productions make for potent cinema that transcends cultures and continents, much like music.

The Velvet Underground helped inspire Czechoslovakia’s bloodless 1989 Velvet Revolution, apparently a designation that began to take hold among dissidents when a copy of the Andy Warhol-influenced band’s first album was smuggled into Prague 20 years earlier. In Farewell, French engineer Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet) smuggles in a cassette of Queen’s News of the World, along with a Sony Walkman, at the request of a KGB mole, Sergei Grigoriev (Emir Kusturica). In a field far from prying government eyes and ears, his alienated adolescent, Igor (Yvgenie Kharlanov), mimics Freddie Mercury’s moves to “We Will Rock You.”

Merry Frickin' Christmas

With Christmas almost upon us, here's what a few of us in Critics at Large picked as our favourite holiday picks back in 2010.

Christmas Cheer: Our Seasonal Flicks

For those who celebrate Christmas, we wish you a very Merry one. For those who don't, be cheerful anyway. For everybody who loves watching movies, here's a few of our seasonal favourites.

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As a resident of the Green Mountain State, I probably should prefer 1954’s White Christmas, a sentimental cinematic journey set at a quaint Vermont inn, where cast members (including Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney) perform the titular Irving Berlin song. Instead, give me a heathy dose of irony with A Christmas Story, the timeless 1983 comedy about an eccentric Indiana family during the early 1940s. This autobiographical slice-of-life in the fictional Parker household was written and narrated by Jean Shepherd, the late-night radio idol of my New York childhood. Dad (Darren McGavin) and Mom (Melinda Dillon) try to deflect the fervent holiday wish of nine-year-old Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) for a toy BB gun, specifically the Red Ryder Air Rifle, with this parental mantra: “You’ll shoot your eye out.” The director, Bob Clark, may be a Canadian with the execrable Porky’s on his resume, but he got the daffy decency of Middle America just right. Billingsley, by the way, is now the executive producer of A Christmas Story: The Musical! Preview performances of the play in Seattle have already begun, hopefully a very merry highlight of the season.

-- Susan Green is a film critic and arts journalist based in Burlington, Vermont. She is the co-author with Kevin Courrier of Law & Order: The Unofficial Companionand with Randee Dawn of  Law & Order Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion.

Clocks That Strike Thirteen

With our recent obsessions with the Mayan Calendar and the end of the world, films have been continually providing us with dystopian outcomes including this ditty reviewed by Susan Green in Critics at Large.

Identity Crisis: The Source Code Switcheroo

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

That’s the opening line in George Orwell’s classic book, 1984. Here it is once more the “cruelest month,” as poet T.S. Eliot contended in The Waste Land, and a similarly bright cold day. Not so sure about the clocks, but the foreboding in those 20th century literary works surely resonates today. The 1949 novel concerns a totalitarian dystopia where the term “memory hole” refers to enforced amnesia and “Newspeak” is language dumbed-down to foster lack of logical thought. Eliot’s twisty 1922 verses include “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” “One must be so careful these days” and other despairing observations.

Two new films, The Adjustment Bureau and Source Code(released on April 1st), suggest Big Brother-like societies. In the former production, adapted from a Philip K. Dick short story, Matt Damon plays a politician who encounters the unseen forces – all wearing fedoras! – that manipulate our lives. Source Code, cleverly written by Ben Ripley and smartly directed by Duncan Jones, is a sci-fi thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as U.S. Army Captain Colter Stevens. His last memory is of flying a helicopter mission in Afghanistan when he’s suddenly transported onto a commuter train heading for Chicago with a bomb onboard.

Michelle Monaghan and Jake Gyllenhaal

But Colter has now become a stranger named Sean sitting with Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan), a pretty young woman hoping to reconfigure her life by quitting a job and dropping an unworthy boyfriend. They have lovely old-fashioned chemistry in a story propelled by futuristic technology. Meanwhile, he feels panic upon seeing an unfamiliar face (that of actor Frederick De Granpre) staring back at him in a restroom mirror, although still looking like handsome Jake Gyllenhaal to us. When the blast takes place, the soldier is catapulted back to his true self in the present but for some reason confined to a claustrophobic pod in a hush-hush military lab.

Holiday Cheer

Tis the season to be jolly and to listen to some good tunes chosen in Critics at Large by Susan Green.

Listening: A Retrospective Soundtrack To Live By

As the troublesome decade draws to a close, people are compiling their top-ten lists for various art forms. I’d like to think back instead on a half-century of popular music that was able to, as a traditional gospel line suggests, “rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham.” Each tune has stuck with me. Not every one of the past 50 years is represented; some supplied multiple selections -- I could barely escape the 1960s, in fact. It wasn’t easy to choose from among so many worthy contenders. My apologies to the Supremes, Ray Charles, the Beach Boys, Etta James, Elvis Presley, Elvis Costello, the Grateful Dead, Jackson Browne, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Mark Knopfler, Jesse Winchester, Bonnie Raitt and countless others. Disco and hip-hop aside, these are a few of a nostalgic Baby Boomer’s highly subjective favorite things:

Doomsday

Doomsday stories were big subjects in movie theatres especially during the early Cold War years in the Fifties. They've made a comeback on television - big time - according to Susan Green in Critics at Large.  

It Can Happen Here: The Cosmology of Falling Skies

The end of the world apparently can’t come soon enough for Hollywood. While doomsday movies have been a staple for decades, the recent plethora of apocalypse fare hints at some sort of self-loathing in an industry known for boundless self-admiration. Or is it merely tapping into the collective consciousness of a populace that’s “facing a dying nation,” to borrow a poignant lyric from Hair’s “Let the Sunshine In”? Make that “facing a dying planet” and you have the current state of despair among those alarmed about the deteriorating environment and the ever-present peril of nuclear annihilation.

Now halfway through its ten-episode summer debut on TNT and already renewed for another season, Falling Skies substitutes an alien invasion for endangered polar bears and Pakistan’s arsenal. The somewhat derivative series begins six months after 90 percent of humanity has perished in the initial conflagration. Ragtag survivors in and around Boston band together to fight the “Skitters,” enormous spider-like sentient beings, and their even more gigantic metallic robots, dubbed “Mechs.” The chief writer and creator, Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan – 1998, and The Patriot – 2000) is a Harvard grad who reportedly still lives in Cambridge. Although ostensibly set in the Bay State, the series is shot in Toronto – the hometown of Graham Yost, who shares executive producer chores with Steven Spielberg. 

Survival

While there have been many films depicting the Holocaust, one of the little known pictures is last year's In Darkness. Susan Green brought it to light in her review for Critics at Large.

In Darkness: A Harrowing Tale of Enlightenment 

Milla Bankowicz and Robert Wieckiewicz in In Darkness

My mother and her closest kin came to America from Poland, a nation that was invaded a dozen years later by the Nazis. In 1942 virtually all Jewish residents in the shtetl of her little hometown, Goniadz, were killed outright or sent to the gas ovens of the Treblinka death camp. Their homes were ransacked by Catholic anti-Semites, who rejoiced with the local priest as they helped the Gestapo wipe out an entire community.

She’s not around any more but I wonder what her opinion would have been of In Darkness, about a sort of proletarian Polish version of Oskar Schindler named Leopold Socha. With his help, ten people survive for 14 months (beginning in May 1943) in the filthy, rat-infested sewers under Nazi-occupied Lvov, where fellow Jews are systematically obliterated by the Gestapo. This sort of topic was always raw for a woman who could never concede that there might conceivably be such a thing as a good Pole.

Reaganism

With the American presidential election upon us, we felt it timely to revisit the reagan era through an HBO documentary reviewed by Susan Green for Critics at Large.

Recollections of Reagan: A Confounding Centennial

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/02/recollections-of-reagan-confounding.html

President Reagan (Credit: Ronald Reagan Library)

While visiting embattled Nicaragua as a journalist in 1984, I met the grieving mother of a four-year-old killed by the Contras. These vicious mercenaries, not-so-secretly funded by the United States, had been firing mortars into the remote mountain town of Teotecacinte. After residents spent 17 consecutive days in rudimentary bomb shelters, Carmen Guttierez Suyapa was allowed to play outside when it seemed as if the attacks had finally ended. She died under a sapodilla tree, where someone later planted a tiny flowering begonia in her memory.

Ronald Reagan lost his memory to Alzheimer’s disease, at the end apparently no longer able to recall having been the 40th president. Upon his death in 2004 at age 93, he had lived 89 more years than the Nicaraguan child whose blood essentially was on his hands. The Contras – he referred to them as “freedom fighters” and “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” – got their weapons and other supplies with his blessing.

There is, of course, no mention of little Carmen in Reagan, a thought-provoking and beautifully crafted profile that's perhaps a bit too kind to its controversial subject. The documentary premiered at January’s Sundance Film Festival before a February 7 broadcast on HBO (with a repeat at 8 p.m. on February 9) during a week that marked what would have been his 100th birthday. Director Eugene Jarecki, who divides his time between New York City and Vermont, covers that 1980s period of intervention in Central America primarily to examine the Iran-Contra affair: Proceeds from illegal arms sales to the Ayatollah supported the counterrevolutionaries trying to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who spearheaded the entire operation, has since said of Reagan’s participation: "I have no doubt that he was told about the use of residuals for the Contras, and that he approved it. Enthusiastically."

Treme Returns

Now that Treme has returned for a third season on HBO, it seemed appropriate to look back on a couple of probing pieces that Susan Green wrote in Critics at Large as the program was just beginning.

Les Bon Temps: The Post-Katrina Angst of "Treme"

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/04/les-bon-temps-post-katrina-angst-of.html

Most northerners are familiar with the French Quarter and the Garden District, historically popular New Orleans tourism destinations. But we probably have had limited knowledge about Faubourg Treme, a section of the Big Easy with a heroic legacy. Under 18th-century French and Spanish colonial rule, slaves had Sundays off, allowing them to gather in Congo Square to sing and dance. Many wore makeshift costumes with an indigenous flair -- the origins of contemporary Mardi Gras, in which elaborately dressed “tribes” parade through the Crescent City.

Music at those slave celebrations provided the roots of modern-day jazz. After the United States acquired vast territory in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, however, authorities crushed the Sunday tradition. The place was later renamed Beauregard Square in honor of a confederate general. (It’s now Congo Square again, a jewel in the crown of Louis Armstrong Park.) The racially mixed Treme (pronounced Tra-may) evolved into a haven for “free people of color” and played a significant role in the earliest annals of the civil rights struggle. Paul Trevigne was a crusading journalist who edited a French-language publication, L’Union. Launched in September 1862, it called for the abolition of slavery five months before the Emancipation Proclamation. He went on to work for America’s first black-owned daily newspaper, the bilingual Tribune, during the 10-year period of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Remembering John Lennon

Since it would have been John Lennon's 72nd birthday today, we offer today a piece Susan Green, John Corcelli and Kevin Courrier contributed to Critics at Large in celebration of his 70th birthday.

Shining On: Celebrating John Lennon's 70th Birthday

It was the most perfectly hallucinogenic day of my life. I had been more stoned on previous occasions – it was the 1960s, after all – thanks to a variety of experiments with consciousness. In early April of 1969, however, magic mushrooms and a certain song transformed my world while tripping in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And we all shine on/ like the moon and the stars and the sun...,” John Lennon was singing in the headphones covering my ears. I had ingested two little brown, wrinkled pieces of fungus that rendered the music extraordinary. The lyrics were speaking to me; I suspected they might contain the most important message of the 20th century: “Instant karma’s gonna get you/ Gonna knock you off your feet/ Better recognize your brother/ In everyone you meet...” Although I easily could have continued listening to Lennon again and again, my three similarly wasted friends persuaded me to accompany them on a walk. Outside, everything looked even more beautiful than could reasonably be expected. I smiled at every stranger we passed and they all appeared to smile back.

Soul Mates

We often talk about the quest in life to find a soul mate, but when it's two artists who seek that spiritual bonding, it adds other dimensions that most of us don't ever consider, as Susan Green did in reviewing Patti Smith's memoir about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

The Way They Were: Patti Smith's Just Kids

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/01/way-they-were-just-kids.html

In a burst of youthful enthusiasm during the late 1970s, Rickie Lee Jones once famously  proclaimed the sensibility she shared with boyfriend and fellow musician Tom Waits: ”We’re living on the jazz side of life.” A decade earlier, another couple in their 20s had a similarly bohemian, improvisational relationship that was devoted as much to art as to romance. If not more so. Singer Patti Smith has now chronicled the years she spent with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in Just Kids (HarperCollins, 2010), a riveting memoir that recently won America’s National Book Award.

Based in Los Angeles, Jones and Waits may have been the West Coast counterparts of Smith and Mapplethorpe, who called New York home. Smith describes the dynamic metropolis and extraordinary times in stunning detail: “Nothing was more wonderful to me than Coney Island. with its gritty innocence. It was our kind of place: the fading arcades, the peeling signs of bygone days, cotton candy and Kewpie dolls on a stick...” The focus for all four of them was on the demimondes of their respective cities, along with almost everywhere they visited in between. It’s an aesthetic that’s edgy and suffused with pain.

Hero/Threat

Last night's big winner at the Emmy's was the post-9/11 cable drama Homeland. Susan Green explained  why it deserved these accolades last year in Critics at Large.

An Espionage Masterpiece: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/10/espionage-masterpiece-land-of-free-home.html

The word “homeland” makes me kind of queasy, especially when used by the Bush administration in launching the Department of Homeland Security nine years ago. It’s reminiscent of the beloved Nazi “fatherland.” The less patriarchal “motherland,” preferred by the Soviet Union, sounds just as creepy. But as the title for a new series on Showtime, Homeland makes for a tantalizingly tense television drama in which creepy is a good thing. The brilliant Claire Danes plays Carrie Mathison, a crack CIA agent taking medications to mask bipolar disorder. Mandy Patinkin is a marvel as Saul Berenson, a seasoned spook who’s her mentor. As performers, they’re both at the top of their game.

In the October 2 debut, the inciting incident takes place in Iraq, where Carrie is on an unauthorized covert mission. After a jailed militant awaiting execution tells her that an American POW has been “turned” by al Qaeda, she’s busted before learning more details, put on probation, and reassigned to the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Of course, nothing can keep this obsessive woman from the work that gives her life its sole meaning.