Tom Salinsky

After the recent cycle of American guilt-porn movies, and given the Academy’s predilection for lumpen biopics, I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to Selma but I didn’t have much of a chance to right it off in advance as I saw it prior to its UK release courtesy of Odeon’s “Screen Unseen” series of surprise movies.

Whereas 12 Years a Slave was horrifyingly brutal but structurally flawed, and The Help was ultimately a bit too twee and winsome to really succeed as a cutting evocation of America’s troubled history of racial conflict, Selma being set barely half a century ago instantly feels far more relevant and the sickening violence in Ferguson and elsewhere gives it a grim modernity which its makers can’t have anticipated.

By sensibly focusing on a small period of time – the few weeks in 1964 between Martin Luther King accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and the march from Selma to Montgomery – the movie avoids the shapelessness which dogs so many biopics, and early on director Ava DuVernay is in total control of the material, juxtaposing King in Oslo, the shocking murder by explosive of four young black girls and producer Oprah Winfrey’s neat cameo as would-be Selma voter Annie Lee Cooper, where she pulls of the neat trick of combining stoic dignity with aching vulnerability.

As the movie settles down and we meet the rest of the cast, DuVernay’s camerawork becomes a bit more pedestrian. A magnificent crane shot towards the end is eye-catching but a most of the rest is unshowy, simple and just intended to capture the performances. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but a movie ought to full the frame a bit more than a TV show and from time-to-time Selma does feel a bit movie-of-the-week, with a little too much slo-mo and a little too much omnipresent syrupy music from Jason Moran. I’m not saying DuVernay should have gone full Michael Bay on this, but a more dynamic camera would not have undermined the story at all.

Where she does succeed is in marshalling a terrific cast, and balancing the sub-plots with the main story. Without ever taking energy away from the central thread, we get glimpses into the lives of King’s loyal followers such as James Bevel (Common), James Orange (Omar Dorsey) and Diane Nash (Tessa Thompson); we see the uneasy relationship between the two young men already working in Selma for voting rights; we see the earnest white folks who rally to the cause, not all of whom make it out of Selma alive.

It helps that we get some familiar faces in this sprawling cast like Lorraine Toussaint, from HBO’s Orange is the New Black and Wendell Pierce from The Wire, because we’re not done yet. As well as the law enforcement on the ground in Selma, we also have a brilliantly reptilian turn from Tim Roth as Governor George Wallace, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos from Cuba Gooding Jr and Martin Sheen, not to mention Carmen Ejogo who does a great deal with very little as King’s ever-patient wife.

There are a couple of loose threads. Dylan Baker appears in only about two scenes as J Edgar Hoover and irritating captions keep appearing which remind us that the FBI is spying on the Kings, while giving us further information we already know – but the FBI storyline never amounts to anything. Even more bizarrely, Nigel Thatch appears in exactly one scene as Malcolm X, is never seen to meet King and then dies off-screen.

Then main conflict then is between Tom Wilkinson’s rangy Lyndon B Johnson (fascinating to compare this performance with Bryan Cranston’s approach which I was privileged to see on Broadway last year) and David Oyelowo’s electrifying King. Pitting Johnson’s compassionate pragmatism against King’s fiery idealism is a fascinating dichotomy and the scenes between them are wonderfully handled. Being shamefully unfamiliar with the details of King’s story, I was struck by the shocking nature of his tactics – broadly to mount nonviolent protests in the hope that the other side will retaliate with violence. The movie is unafraid both to criticise this approach and also to consider the cost on King’s personal life as he knowingly puts young men and women into harm’s way in order to achieve a greater good, but ultimately it becomes clear that progress would be unlikely to be achieved in any other way.

Smartly surrounding him with a rich cast of supporting characters, DuVernay is nevertheless happy to let Oyelowo off the leash from time-to-time and my word does he tear up the part when he needs to. He is absolutely magnificent, embodying Dr King with fire and passion and integrity in a way which seems almost impossible for a British public school-boy to pull off. And a further hat-tip to DuVernay who is apparently responsible for writing new speeches for him to say, when the original Martin Luther King speeches were not available. That must have been a daunting project to say the least!

So, this is not the most ambitious film on the list, nor is it the most formally daring. But it is a compelling story, well-told, with a world-class performance at its centre and a deep pool of acting talent in support. That it was so widely overlooked by the Academy is absolutely baffling, particularly Oyelowo’s performance, and particularly the screenplay, if only for those astonishing speeches.

So, Breaking Bad has gone, everyone who wants to watch The Wire and The Sopranos has, True Detective was over almost before it began and you don’t need me to tell you that you should be watching Game of Thrones. What else should you be watching, both from the US and from home? Here are some suggestions.

The Good Wife

Over here, this has completely flown under the radar. The pilot episode, and basically the whole first season, doesn’t make it seem all that special. It’s a network drama and it’s on CBS, arguably the most conservative of the big American networks. It stars Julianna Margulies off of ER as Alica Florrick who returns to a career as a lawyer, starting from the bottom again as a junior associate, when her big-shot politician husband goes to prison following a very public sex scandal. And for the first year or two it just kind of motors along, equal parts snappy case-of-the-week “I object” “in my chambers” TV courtroom stuff, and some more soapy material about Alicia’s kids and her sexual tension with senior partner Will Gardner. Fun, but hardly great. Some time around the third season, it slowly starts to become bolder, quirkier, more subversive, more willing to upend the whole premise of the show for an episode, a few episodes, a season. Add to this an amazing roster of guest stars including Alan Cumming, Michael J Fox, Carrie Preston, Nathan Lane and Martha Plimpton to name only a handful and you have probably the best TV law show since Boston Legal and arguably the best American network drama currently on the air.

Watch it on DVD from Amazon, download it from iTunes or watch it on More4.

Orange is the New Black

Probably the best of the Netflix originals, far better than the rather unsatisfactory Arrested Development episodes and nosing ahead of the fascinating and handsome but compromised House of Cards, this had an amazingly good run of episodes in its first year and its return is eagerly awaited by me at least. Based on the book by Piper Kerman, it tells the story of a seemingly-normal middle-class blonde WASP about to get married, whose reckless past catches up with her in the form of a 14 month jail sentence. The series carefully balances social comment with behind-bars melodrama and once again we have a cast to die for, including USS Voyager’s Captain Janeway in a red fright wig and full-on Russian accent.

Watch it on Netflix or buy the DVD from Amazon, but quick – the new series lands on 6 June.

Justified

Based on a short story by the late lamented Elmore Leonard, this gunslinging melodrama is more contemporary than it feels. Masterminded by Graham Yost (Speed), this FX series stars Timothy Olyphant as US Marshall Raymond Givens who is too quick-on-the-draw for his Florida bosses and so has his ass transferred back to his home town of Harlan County, Kentucky. There he meets up with old sparring partners, including his no-good dad, and makes some new friends, enemies and frenemies. Largely an adventure series, but brilliantly plotted at its best, it benefits from some deeper more thoughtful characterisation, ending up with that delightful Breaking Bad mix of plenty of high-stakes but plenty of depth too. While it can’t quite claim to scale those heights, this is much, much more than case-of-the week procedural stuff. The first series is a bit bumpy, struggling to find a through-line, suffering from an obsession with religion which never arrives anywhere interesting, and saddled with characters called Bo Crowder, Boyd Crowder and Bowman Crowder to add to the confusion. Only Boyd is really interesting or relevant. The second series is a dramatic improvement with the arrival of the splendid Margo Martindale as the Big Bad Mags Bennett. The third season is almost as good and the fourth is the best yet. The fifth isn’t quite as satisfactory, but the last episode makes it clear that this was really the first half of the final season. Catch it now before it finishes next year.

Download from iTunes or buy the DVD from Amazon. Channel 5 was running it here but has now dropped it.

The Americans

Another FX series, struggling to find its feet a little, but quietly growing in confidence and with a crackerjack premise. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys star as Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, an apparently ordinary suburban American couple living in Washington DC in the early 1980s, looking after their two kids and running their travel agency. In fact, both were born in the Soviet Union and have been placed on US soil by the Kremlin to run covert missions for the mother country. Both leads are great, sporting an array of wigs and disguises, and the run-of-the-mill jumping, shooting and hiding in cupboards is given an extra frisson by the fact that our “heroes” are on the “wrong side”. As the series continues, it becomes clear that almost everyone on almost every team is compromised to some extent, and of course we get the irony from our twenty-first century perspective that the very thing the Jennings’ are fighting for will eventually be abandoned by those asking them to risk their lives for it. Not all the characters are quite “popping” as they should yet, but the series shows a lot of promise and has already been renewed for a third season.

ITV1 is showing the second series at the moment. Buy the first series on Amazon or download from iTunes.

Nurse Jackie

Moving over to Showtime, we find Nurse Jackie, or what Edie Falco did after The Sopranos finished. In one of the best pilots of 2009, we meet New York nurse Jackie Peyton, whose attitude towards her job is one of compassionate pragmatism as her personal life gets ever more complicated. To say a lot more would be to undo the elegant structure of the opening episode which continually reveals layer after layer of this fascinating character. Comparisons with House are obvious for various reasons, but Nurse Jackie has a much more cheerfully comic tone and among a tremendous supporting cast features a total stand-out in the form of Merrit Wever as Zoe Barkow, a true original in every respect. As the seasons go on, Nurse Jackie faces the same problem as House – the more the series forces the protagonist to confront their personal issues, the greater the risk of breaking the series for good. Following the departure of original show-runners Liz Brixius and Linda Wallem after Season Four, Season Five hit the reset button pretty hard in order to keep going but the current sixth season seems to be finding an easier groove.

Sky Atlantic has been showing the fifth season and go of course buy it on Amazon or download it from iTunes.

Rev

And finally, why not something home-grown? Tom Hollander and James Wood’s sitcom about an inner city C of E priest is far from The Vicar of Dibley with testicles. The first two series were funny, heartfelt, well acted and nicely judged. Hollander’s central performance is funny without being cartoony but the more overt acting styles of Miles Jupp and Simon McBurney (Simon McBurney!!) give him energy, while he grounds them – it’s very very clever. Add Olivia Colman as Mrs Vicar and a smattering of largely deadbeat parishoners and there’s a lot to enjoy. But this third series, arriving after a three year gap, has been nothing short of superb, almost apocalyptic in the woes and suffering it has heaped upon Adam Smallbone.

Series Three is finishing on BBC Two and is available on the BBC’s iPlayer. A boxed set of the first two series is available now and a set of all three is coming soon.

That’s enough for one post. Also worth mentioning are Louie, Orphan Black, Portlandia and Veep. Shows I’m watching but can’t really endorse include Helix, The Blacklist, Trophy Wife and Mom.