HBO's eight episode crime series, The Night of, is another guided tour to the City of Dreadful Night. At its outset, the show resembles Martin Scorsese's underestimated After Hours: a nebbish young man ventures into downtown Manhattan looking for romance and adventure -- he meets an enticing sado-masochistic femme fatale who yanks him forcibly in a netherworld of crime and violence. Scorsese's film was a comedy but it was genuinely frightening and suspenseful -- The Night of takes itself more seriously and generates the same kind of suspense: will the innocent hero ever extricate himself from the extravagant horrors of the deadly City?
Initially, I was concerned that social commentary and outraged indignation would make watching The Night of a chore. And, indeed, the first couple episodes have a dire and preachy tone that doesn't bode well for the entertainment value of the enterprise. But quickly enough, The Night of evolves (devolves?) into a punchy, clever, and witty genre piece -- a courtroom drama and mystery involving accusations lodged against the wrong man. Once the show hits it's stride as a murder mystery complete with crusading lawyers, innumerable homicide suspects, and a heavy load of garish red herrings, The Night of becomes addictive, a pleasure notwithstanding its obvious defects (or, indeed, because of those very defects.) A young man, the son of a immigrant Pakistani cabdriver, is invited to a Manhattan party. The boy can't get a ride downtown from the outer borough where he lives so he appropriates the use of his father's taxi-cab -- in effect, he steals the cab, an asset owned in common by his father with two other immigrants. On the way to the party, the kid gets lost and, while parked trying to find his way, a young woman gets into the car. The girl is pretty and wild, every twenty-year old boy's dream. They use drugs together and she engages him in some play involving a knife. The two of them end up in bed and, when the hero, wakes up, he finds himself alone in a different room in the apartment. Looking for the girl, he finds her stabbed to death in bed. The boy panics, flees the scene, and, then, gets stopped by the cops for drunk driving. When he is being searched at the station, the cops find the bloody knife in his coat pocket. And, so, of course, he is accused of murdering the girl. Incarcerated on Riker's Island, the young man becomes the protégée of a sinister and violent inmate -- he has to find protection to survive being imprisoned. As the weeks pass, the young man begins to take on the characteristics of a violent convict -- he's young and strong and readily adapts to his environment in the jail. The Night of weaves together three narrative lines: a police procedural involving lawyers and cops working on the homicide case; the forensic courtroom drama; and the parallel narrative involving the young man's degeneration as a result of his imprisonment in the Hobbesian penal system. All of this culminates in a gripping trial and a cynical denouement. The Night of is produced by heavyweights in the crime genre: somehow James Gandolfini worked on the show from his grave; Richard Price and Steven Zaillan are also credited -- about half the episodes are written and directed by Steven Zaillan. The acting is all first-rate and the program is generously populated with interesting characters. The young man is represented by a bottom-feeder lawyer, ably acted by John Turturro -- the character is a cliché (Turturro's unethical and shabby lawyer is prefigured by Paul Newman's character in The Verdict and countless other shows), but Turturro plays the part with relish: he's the kind of lawyer who advertises on subway cars ("No fee unless you're free"), exchanges sex for legal services with his prostitute clients, and is so intrinsically kind that he adopts a stray cat prowling around the crime scene notwithstanding his disabling allergies and eczema -- we see him scratching at his oozing, pustulent feet with chopsticks on the subway. Through a series of plot contrivances, the kid is also represented by a beautiful young Indian girl. There is an opera-loving detective on the verge of retirement, a weary lady prosecutor who channels Thelma Ritter in her exhausted and minimalist presentation of the case to the jury, and a rogue's gallery of potential suspects. The anguish of the young man's upright and hardworking parents is well-portrayed and the nasty-looking, almost entirely African-American prisoners, at Riker's Island are convincingly scary. The crime boss in the jail who takes the hero under his wing is an important figure in the show -- he demonstrates how to be a free man inside the system: we see him having sex with female guards, smoking crack cocaine with impunity, and, generally, managing an elaborate system of criminal enterprises in which the authorities are completely complicit. This man's motivation for assisting the hero remains a little vague, but that is part of the menace inherent in the relationship. As always, the flaws with this kind of mini-series relate to expanding material best presented in about three hours into a much longer format. As a result there are plot elements that go nowhere or that are simply devised to fill time -- an ambitious big-time lawyer steals the case from Turturro's cut-rate services for awhile but, then, withdraws from the case: this is the device to get the famous lawyer's associate, the beautiful Punjabi girl, into the show, but it's a meaningless and implausible distraction. Everyone in downtown Manhattan turns out to be suspect -- there are a ludicrously large number of homicidal maniacs wandering around in the middle of the night in the neighborhood where the girl is killed. (The large number of suspects lets the show meander over a lot of territory establishing plausible candidates for the murderer and, then, ruling them out.) Almost everything in the plot is begged, borrowed, or stolen from some other show. But this doesn't really matter because the series is directed with great conviction and the surfaces of things as presented in the show seems to be realistic -- everything is grimy, suffused with a gloomy greenish light; the courtroom is underlit and its chambers are as dark as an outtake from the X-Files. The sun never shines as the characters scuttle about in the subways or on the dark streets or drown their sorrows in shady-looking saloons. There is a legitimate and important theme buried in the show: the good boy hero is really not a good boy at all -- as the series progress, we learn more and more about his transgressions. At one point, the crime boss at Rikers' notes that he can use the young man "because you got some rage in you." The Night of argues that this rage arises in part from being a Muslim in this country and, therefore, the butt of suspicion and bullying and, even, hatred after 9 - 11. (Rez Ahmed plays the hero of the show; he's also on display as a suavely sinister Tech mogul in the recent Jason Bourne film -- Ahmed's a magnetic actor and equally convincing as a flawed, if dutiful son to first-generation Asian immigrants and a thuggish convict navigating the brutal tribal system in jail.) In effect, the show makes it plausible that the hero has already been ruined by the bigotry of others even before he is wrongfully accused of murder. The legal details presented are generally persuasive and the brutal indifference of the criminal justice system is ably exposed. Once, it is determined that a trial will take place, no one cares about the truth any more -- instead, everyone works to conceal aspects of the truth that are inconsistent with their theory of the case: litigation involves hiding facts, shady experts, and phony arguments, a true enough, if jaded, view of the system. What saves the show from being too gloomy and upsetting to watch are its genre elements -- these are the flotsam and spars that the viewer can grasp to keep from drowning in the series' gloomy cynicism. It's the predictability of these elements and, of course, their familiarity that keeps the viewer engaged.
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