Well, the Golden Globe nominations are in and somehow The Undoing scored four of those, including two for both leads. Or should we even be surprised? It is, after all, a serious show, a very serious, HBOserious adaptation of a serious novel, that relies almost exclusively on the acting of its luminaries, because (frankly) the pacing is such sh*te. It is somewhat surprising to me personally that a show I found so slow and tedious and unexciting fared so well with the award committee, but then again they like this sort of thing. The only really surprising thing about it is that a show about white privilege featuring a starkly white cast did this well in this day and age.
The Undoing (and the likes of it) won’t be the undoing of a network objectively too huge to fail, but it stands to mention how tepid and tedious and torpid their novel adaptations seem to be. I know This Much is True was another one of those slogfests relying exclusively on the powerhouse performance of Ruffalo who is now up against Grant for a Golden Globe. Even The Outsider, a properly exciting supernatural thriller from King himself was somehow inexplicably so stupendously slow and plodding as to be barely watchable. But, back to Undoing…a story of a wealthy privileged seemingly happy family that unravels after the man played by (still can’t do the American accent) Grant is accused of a brutal murder. The victim is a young Latina yummy mummy of the local mummy community, whose son is on a scholarship in the same prestigious school that the main couples and their friends’ kids attend through paying the exorbitant fees. The victim, playing by a gorgeous Italian actress is much too young to have a son that age, but that isn’t even a most egregious of the casting snafus in this mess, so…whatever. She’s hot and very, very comfortable with all sorts of nudity, so off the casting couch and into the show she goes. Grant and Kidman, the married couple, are cast almost impressively wrong. They are supposed to be married since grad school so roughly the same age and yet Grant appears every second his 60, while Kidman has simply plastically quit aging a while back and now simply resembles a timeless stick figure. But they are obviously not of the same or close to it ages with Grant being obviously the much older spouse, This is critical, because literally the entire plot hinges upon Grant’s smarmy charm. Essentially, the idea is that he is a man so charming that he can get away with anyfreakingthing at all. The emblem and epitome of white male privilege. Someone we simply can’t believe would be able to take a life. And, of course, because we have long associated Grant with a charming floppyhaired ineffectual Englishman bumbling his way through romcoms of yore and not a tranny soliciting creep with an assortment of babymamas, we are supposed to totally buy that. But Grant has aged, he has wrinkled, he has become more himself in a way, stating as much, saying how much nicer it is to finally not have to pretend to be the good guy, his movie roles have matured and gotten darker, I’m actually really enjoying his evolution as an actor. I’m just saying he seems miscast here, Undoing required Grant of maybe a decade ago, he is simply too old and lifebeaten to be lethal stud The Undoing needs him to be. The other major thing the plot hinges on, in fact the thing that plot should be reliant on is how clueless Kidman’s character, Grace (a professionally trained psychologist) is to her beloved spouse’s real nature. The title of the book this mess is based on is You Should Have Known. And yeah, Grace, you freaking should have. Instead of striding around Central Park looking like a Winterfell reject (many thanks to my friend J. for putting that image in my mind) in her flowing cloak like coasts and her fiery long red curly mane, how about some introspective into your own marriage. Or an explanation why your child looking nothing and I mean nothing like either of his parents, at any angle. Who cast this sh*t? Ever heard of genetics? For fuck’s sake, make some effort, won’t you. We’re supposed to buy this as a family unit. And then you have an underused Edgar Ramirez as a detective and an underused Broccoli Rabe (who is finally getting a lead in a promising Prime movie) as Grace’s bestie and an excellent Donald Sutherland ripping through scenery and dialogue as Grace’s ever devoted father. And then you have that torpid pacing which makes watching the water boil dynamic by comparison. And the ending that’s all too likely, because, of course, it would end this way. All the promise of the exciting, sexually charged episode one completely obliterated by the other five episode of this oh so serious drama. So there you go…David E. Kelley doing what he does, putting his law degree to use, creating what the power that be tend to refer to as quality television. And the critics eating it up. But really this was disappointing through and through, finished mostly due to sheer stubbornness and compulsive completism. And maybe that’s something You Should Have known going in. Or maybe you’ll learn at your own (slow, slow, slow) pace. Also, someone please feed Nicole Kidman. It’s time. A sandwich or something caloric. The skeletal look is getting to be too much.
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