Saturday 14 September 2024
Alexander Wilson on the Whippoorwill
Wednesday 4 September 2024
Review: "River"
Abi
Morgan (Creator), “River”, Kudos/Shine International/BBC One/Netflix, 2015.
Convincing
an audience that something fantastic is going on in your fictive work is a bit
of a high-wire act. If your target demographic isn’t convinced of what you’re
trying to sell, then the whole enterprise quickly falls apart. The easy
solution would seem of course - in the case of a visual medium effort – to
obtain the best actors, directors, cinematographers – what have you - that
money can buy; in this instance, I think the creators have knocked it out of
the park.
There
is a spooky premise to this show – a supernatural rationale – but I don’t want
to let any cats out of their bags. Going in on these six episodes, I had no
idea what to expect: I was looking for a gritty British police procedural to
while away an evening’s ennui and I suddenly had just that, along with
something completely unexpected and – dare I say? – delightful. Of course, the
presence of Stellan Skarsgård and Nicola Walker
meant that – had this been simply a stultifying home renovation program – I would still have watched the hell out of it; the supernatural aspects of this show were
merely the excellent icing atop this wonderful cake.
The
BBC is the spiritual home of the police drama. No-one else takes the sordid
realities of the Street and boils them down to soul-crushing narratives in
quite the same way. Take for example, the new show “The Responder” which
is doing the rounds at the moment. I started watching this and had to stop. The
grubby particulars of this show were almost too much to bear. I mean, there’s
dark, and then there’s this: it’s like an exercise in pushing the envelope;
there’s a gleefully iconoclastic edge to everything going on that actually
starts to break the audience’s engagement due to its intensity. All that aside
however, my main issue with it is that Martin Freeman – who I normally find
eminently watchable - is completely miscast. There’s something about his
performance and physical presence that is at odds with the material – maybe he
was trying to prove that he too, could swan about like “Cracker” in a
downbeat thug-fest, but I’m here to tell you that he can’t. No amount of
withholding the razor and a good night’s sleep can knock the optimistic shine
off Bilbo Baggins. There’s something quintessentially Home Counties about him
that a bad haircut can’t disguise.
Now,
if you had put Stellan Skarsgård in his shoes, then, you’d have something…
In
“River”, my one issue is that the world – despite everything that comes
out in the conclusion of this show – is a little too vanilla for the actors at
hand. This is a plus and a minus: most of the drama here is internal with John
River balancing his workload with his mental trauma, psychological scars which
absolutely could not have been portrayed this well by any other thespian.
Having witnessed his partner, and the person whom he had just begun to realise
was the love of his life, gunned down brutally before him in the street, River
starts tiptoeing around both his work colleagues and the enforced psychological
review that he’s made to engage with, while simultaneously trying to solve the
mystery of who his partner’s assailant was. That he hears – and responds to –
voices unheard by those around him makes the knife-edge levels of his sanity
more than apparent to everyone, including himself.
It's
a testament to the writing that we don’t spot these voices until at least
two-thirds of the way through the first episode. The writing allows the
spookiness to slide right under the radar until the story deems it necessary to
reveal the supernatural goings-on to the audience and it hits like a chill
bucket of water to the face. I had been riding along with this show, enjoying
the banter and the easy relationship of the two leads when suddenly I knew that
I had something a bit extra to be getting on with. Right, I thought, this has
taken a turn: I’d better strap in. Seriously though, with these two actors –
plus the addition of a 70s disco soundtrack – if nothing at all had changed, I
would have kept watching.
These
supernatural elements are exquisitely handled. Everything occurs against the
backdrop of John River’s mental disintegration and the plot becomes highly
equivocal depending upon where you stand. The information that River receives
from his spiritual sources is slippery and, at every stage, John, his
co-workers, the suspects of his investigation, never know whether the
information he’s working with is real or not, or whether it can be used in the
chain of evidence. It’s a bravura performance from the writers and the actors
and, because it’s all based upon a solid set of rules governing the spectral
that the creators have set out clearly from the start, it works a treat. The
scenes wherein John and his work-appointed psychologist play cat-and-mouse
around the possibility of supernatural forces at play, are crafted to
perfection and wonderful to observe.
The
only real grizzle I have with the show is everything is a little too neat. The
action takes place in a very enclosed world – every character leads to the next
significant character and the narrative has a consequent hermetic feel to it.
Essentially, the world of “River” is a very small one into which nothing
of a wider reality intrudes. A key element of the investigation involves a
shonky car-hire accompany and chauffeuring service, the name of which becomes a
common refrain as things progress, flagging to the viewer the final destination
of the mystery. In essence, all roads lead to Rome, and everyone has connexions
to everyone else. It’s a little incestuous but, given one of the big reveals at
the end, maybe that’s deliberate.
My biggest delight with this show is that, while it has everything that you’d want in a gritty police procedural, it’s also very human and incredibly sad, while at the same time being quite uplifting and inspiring, in the best tradition of such fare. As I said in the beginning, lesser thespians would not have made this work, but they run with it and elevate everything around them to build a fantastic – in all senses – piece of television drama.
Four
Tentacled Horrors.