Mare of Easttown

 HBO's police procedural Mare of Easttown illustrates both what prime-time cable does best and, also, how shows of this sort fall short.  The series embodies what is good and bad about current scripted television.  From its opening shots, a montage of decaying urban landscapes, the program establishes a kind of disheveled authenticity.  Set in southeastern Pennsylvania, in the suburbs around Philadelphia, Mare shows us a hard-bitten, but cohesively clannish, lower middle class milieu.  The houses are cluttered and unkempt.  Bits of stray wilderness lie at the fringes of the neighborhoods and there are desolate half-abandoned commercial districts interspersed in these suburbs.  Everyone seems chronically underemployed and the teenage girls are all young mothers or prostituting themselves for cash.  There's a lot of drug addiction and, by default, it seems, all the characters swill down gallomns of Rolling Rock beer.  Some of the streets are nearly vertical and, it seems, that, perhaps, there was some kind of hard rock mining in these forlorn-looking boroughs.  (There's some confusion in the film as to where the action is really supposed to be set -- Easttown, in reality, isn't a mining city like Allentown or Bethlehem where some of the scenes seem to have been shot; and it's certainly not like the vertical Appalachian landscape in the poor, decaying suburbs of Pittsburgh, where other sequences seem to take place.)  In effect, the filmmakers have created an imaginary landscape that embodies the American rust-belt with its ragged forests, polluted rivers, and decaying, mostly derelict industries.  The characters, particularly the titular Mare, a middle-aged female detective, all seem exhausted and at the end of their tether.  Domestic life is shown as crowded, squalid, and contentious.  The character are all related in one way or another and everyone supposedly knows everyone else's business.  Kate Winslett is effective and compelling as the show's heroine and, like the landscape where she lives, she is bitter and angry.  People waste their lives in this world -- entropy is too powerful and everything is falling apart.  One has the sense that the community has somehow irredeemably lost its center.  We don't often see this sort of environment in police procedurals -- these picture are generally set in big city urban centers or the ghetto or sometimes in the picturesque country.  Easttown is the weird, disorderly combination of rural and urban that, in fact, correlates to much of the country, particularly in the East Coast or places like Ohio.  The acting is hyper-realistic and every scene is staged for maximum gritty reality.  The performers impeccably imitate the sort of non-glamorous and inglorious folk that, of course, they are not and do their job without condescending to the poor bastards that they are playing.  Everything in the show looks just right.  

But, by the end of the first episode, it's also eminently clear that there's nothing new here in terms of plot and narrative.  In fact, the show trots out every shopworn cliche in the police procedural genre.  Mare, although obsessed with solving the mystery of disappearing teenage girls, is falling apart herself.  (How many shows of this kind feature a protagonist who is collapsing into some sort of profound dysfunction -- either alcoholism or promiscuity or just corrosive, paralyzing cynicism?)  When Mare goes to a bar within the show's first hour, we know that she will let herself be picked-up by stranger and have joyless sex with him. (In this case, Mare ends up in bed with self-absorbed writer, also a depressed and depressing fellow who has written one novel "popular with the ladies" but otherwise been afflicted with a monumental and protracted case of writer's block.)  Mare is given an earnest, wide-eyed and naive partner whom she must school in her weary brand of disenchantment -- there is the perennial clash between the idealism of youth and the discouraged disenchantment of middle age.   Mare's son has committed suicide and she is locked in a custody battle with her son's girlfriend, a junkie who is the mother of her grandchild.  Mare has a divorced husband, who looks like a schoolteacher which is exactly what he is.  He is earnest, well-meaning, and ineffectual.  There is a tough African-American chief of police who, of course, takes Mare off the case that is consuming her life.  And, of course, Mare responds by bucking her boss' authority and continuing to investigate the mystery notwithstanding official orders.  Mare's daughter is a cheerful, pretty lipstick-lesbian who has a cheerful, pretty and life-affirming girlfriend.  The plot is as exhausted as the characters -- it's a standard yarn about someone, possibly a serial killer, who is making teenage girls in the neighborhood vanish.  When a Catholic priest appears, we're pretty sure that he's a sexual predator -- which turns out to be, more or less, true.  There are two approaches to the detective narrative:  in one, an investigator working on a case that seems narrowly defined and, even, readily solved, stumbles onto a vast, sinister conspiracy -- Raymond Chandler's novels invoke this convention as do many movies, notably Chinatown and The Big Sleep.  In this kind of plot, everything starts out as disconnected and episodic, but gradually a pattern emerges that connects the events that we see.  The other approach to this kind of material is the way old TV detective shows were structured -- a new adventure every episode with no attempt made to connect the different plots.  (This how Dragnet or the CSI franchise police procedurals work.)  In Mare, the story starts with the heroine assigned the investigation of a murder in which a teenage girl, an unwed mother with a malevolent ex-boyfriend (and his even more malevolent current girlfriend) is found naked and dead in a ravine full of big rocks.  Another teenage girl vanished in mysterious circumstances a year earlier and the plot is full of  hints suggesting that the murder and the disappearance are somehow related.  Everyone is under a pall of suspicion, including Mare's ex-husband, the dead girl's ex, and the local priest (who lives with Mare's uncle, also a priest).  Mystery novels and movies always involve a lot of cheating and misdirection on the part of the auteur and we discover at the end of the fourth episode that the murder and the vanished girl (presumed dead) are not related -- despite all the clues planted to this effect.  This feels a bit like fraud perpetrated on the audience.  In fact, the movie, after adhering closely to the suspects in its large interrelated and clannish cast, imports a mad, bad guy from out of nowhere.  Mare and her partner get into a lethal shootout with this bad guy from nowhere and it appears that the mystery of the vanishing girls is solved, albeit in an unsatisfying way.  (There are various holes in the plot -- for instance, everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing. But, if this is case, how come no one figures out that the teenage girls are hooking on-line for pocket money?)  Notwithstanding the "false end" concluding episode five, two episodes remain (and I haven't yet seen them) and, so, it appears to me that these shows will be used to ultimately solve the mystery involving the girl murdered in the rip-rapped river bed and, also, settle the soap opera aspects of the story -- that is, will Mare preserve her custody rights to her grandchild? How will things turn out with the lesbian love affair?  What about the novelist?  Will Mare's relationship with him continue?  These seem to me to be the strands in the first season of this show that need to be resolved.

There's nothing innovative or, even, particularly interesting in th show's conventional plot rife with banal and predictable staples in this genre.  However, the program is worth following for Kate Winslett's performance as Mare -- she's not afraid to make the character downright unpleasant and, even, unethical, although her dogged tenaciousness makes us admire the heroine even against our better instincts.  Mare is a variant on a uniquely American kind of failure -- she is famous in Easttown for a shot she made in a championship basketball game.  But this sort of fame is more than a little pathetic and fleeting.  (Her character is similar to the protagonist in Irwin Shaw's memorable short story "The Eighty Yard Run" published in Esquire in 1941, once a staple of college literature classes, but, now, alas most forgotten -- you should look it on-line and read it.) The minor characters are all pitch-perfect denizens of the dreary landscape in which they are confined.  And Jean Smart, who plays Mare's tough but loving (of course) mother is marvelous.  Normally, this actress is given thankless rolls as neglected middle-aged women afflicted with a strong vein of hysteria.  Here Smart gets to shine as a resolute survivor, a feisty old woman who won't back down and, yet, who counsels others to keep the peace -- she's far and away the best thing in the show and its worth watching just on account of her performance.