![]() Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. Mare of Easttown premieres on 18 April on HBO Max in the US and on 19 April on Sky Atlantic/Now TV in the UK. Whatever happens in the episodes to come, at its heart Mare of Easttown is the story of a fierce, ordinary heroine, beautifully played. In the fifth episode, the last available for review of the season's seven, one of the investigations leads to high drama and action. Otherwise, Peters' character is so generic he could have been played by almost anyone. "Anybody you're not related to?" he asks. Together he and Mare question the local priest, who happens to be her cousin. The character seems parachuted in to add romantic interest.Įvan Peters, far from his roles as Pietro in Wandavision and Quicksilver in the X-Men movies, arrives as a county detective sent to Easttown to help with the murder investigation. Guy Pearce adds a touch of sophistication as a creative writing teacher at a local college. Outsiders don't fit neatly into the series any more than they do in the town, though. The characters are beleaguered but exude the sense of thinking that's life. The houses are ordinary and middle-class, not new but not poverty porn. ![]() Jean Smart, a master at creating vivid small roles, adds a lighter touch as Mare's acerbic, well-meaning mother, who has moved in with her daughter to help care for Mare's four-year-old grandson.ĭirector Craig Zobel creates a visceral texture for Easttown, mirroring the authenticity without condescension of Winslet's performance. ![]() But the many sharp performances overcome that melodrama. Her ex-husband is newly engaged and lives in the house adjacent to her back yard. The mother of the missing woman also has cancer. There is a teenaged single mother who lives with her belligerent father. Everyone knows everyone else and each secondary character has an extra twist of a problem. Easttown seems to be a place of constant misery, and at times too hermetic to be true. Ingelsby does even better here with the small-town crime drama, even if the story is a bit overwrought. The idea of that movie is hokey, but by the end we understand why that old formula is effective. He also wrote the 2020 film The Way Back, with Ben Affleck as an alcoholic who tries to right his life by coaching high school basketball. The missing woman and a new murder keep the plot moving, but Mare trying to solve the problems of her own life and the mystery of her future are the reasons the show feels so poignant and true.īrad Ingelsby, who created and wrote the series, has a feel for how to use and tweak a formula. At work, she deals with small-level burglaries and is stymied by the case of a young woman who has been missing for a year. On the day we first see her, Mare attends the 25th anniversary celebration of the high-school basketball team she led to a championship, with women who are still her friends. There is nothing affected about Winslet's performance, not a hint of distance from or looking down on the woman she is playing. Winslet tells us who Mare is at a glance, with hair in a messy ponytail, a flannel shirt, and above all a harried look on her face. Mare (she's never called anything more formal) is inseparable from her town. This new series continues an amazing run. Over the years, Winslet has made stellar choices, including the television series Mildred Pierce, and most recently the film Ammonite (unfairly overlooked in this year's awards season). ![]() The HBO series is a dynamic portrait of a woman grappling with her troubled family and friends, and her own buried grief, all wrapped in an absorbing crime drama. She is gloriously real as a police detective trying to hold her personal life together in the small Pennsylvania town where she grew up. Kate Winslet does much more than get it right as the title character in Mare of Easttown. For every Nomadland, with Frances McDormand's graceful turn as a woman scraping by financially on the road, there is a blight like Hillbilly Elegy, with Glenn Close twanging and condescending away as a hardscrabble country granny. When movie stars play unglamorous characters, the results are usually great or horrific. ![]()
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