Black Rabbit

 Black Rabbit is a cathedral of heroic manly acting, it's an epic of quivering, fist-fighting masculine histrionics.  The two combatants in this eight episode agon on Netflix are Jason Bateman (Vince in the show) and Jude Law playing his younger brother, Jake.  The two principals howl abuse at one another, embrace, wrestle, butt heads, and emote to the point that the audiences is exhausted and, in fact, yearns to see one or the other rubbed out by the complex narrative involving loan sharking, gambling, sexual harassment, and every variety of greed, lust, and betrayal.  The mini-series -- it has eight episodes -- is at pains to show that the two brothers are in love with one another, have an impregnable bond, although each hates, despises, and loathes the other.  Law and Bateman chew up the scenery, foreheads furrowed and jaws set in virile defiance and rage.  In one particularly egregious scene, the two men find themselves stripped to their underpants and, nonetheless, engage in titanic name-calling and mutual denunciation -- it's turgid and ridiculous but, I suppose, if you have a hankering for this kind of thing its pretty good; the actors do a fine job but there's just too much of it.  In fact, the show is overlong by three hour-long episodes, all bloated with backstory and flashbacks and repetitive, melodramatic battles between Vince and Jake, but it's actually compelling, quite interesting, and, despite my reservations about the project (On the Waterfront with not one but two bellowing Marlon Brandos) good enough to sustain attention for eight hours.  It's a wildly ambitious mini-series and full of so much material that a lot of the stuff thrown up at the wall sticks and coheres into an exciting story.  

Apparently, the show is based on real-life scandals afflicting a trendy restaurant in NYC, the Spotted Pig, a sexual harassment venue featuring a so-called "rape room" and a celebrity chef, Mario Batali.  Jake is successfully running a popular restaurant on Water Street under the majestic arch of the Brooklyn Bridge.  This place called "The Black Rabbit" has a celebrity chef who is famous for her 50 dollar hamburgers, strange-looking victuals that seem to have a marrow bone stuck through the meat -- how do they apply the bun?  Unfortunately, a evil painter (no doubt based on some NYC celebrity artist) is raping the comely blonde waitresses in the bar, knocking them out with date-rape drugs and taking advantage of the poor girls.  (The painter has a vicious fixer who covers up all of his misdeeds.)  When one of the girls, Anna, is raped, she doesn't show up for work and Jake, who is seemingly unaware of the bad stuff happening in his establishment, fires her.  This leads to a complex series of developments that begin to unravel "the Black Rabbit".  Adding to the chaos is the sudden reappearance of the ne'er-do-well Vince, Jake's older brother, who is a degenerate gambler and petty, small-time criminal.  Vince as once a partner in the Black Rabbit and is bitter about being bought out and expelled from the lucrative venture.  There are various other partners, including a wealthy professional athlete and possibly also a rapper, named Wes.  Vince gets in trouble with a cruel loan shark, Mancuso, and, when he can't pay off the loan, Mancuso's son, Junior, with a beefy henchman, corners Vince in an elevator and cuts off his pinky finger as punishment for not timely paying his debt.  Ultimately, Vince and Jake burn down their deceased mother's house for insurance money but this cash is all lost by Vince who gambles it away.  For some reason, a famous jewelry producer decides to advertise a million dollars worth of gems, necklaces, diamond-encrusted wrist watches at the Black Rabbit.  Vince still looking for money ends up putting on a disguise and, with an accomplice, robbing his own brother's business.  Needless to say, the heist turns into a gunbattle in which several of the main characters are either killed or wounded.  Mancuso still wants his money and so he chases both Vince and Jake relentlessly for the last two episodes -- this sequence is like the breathless and lethal games of  tag that occupy almost all of One Battle After Another, and this sort of thing, if done well (and it's done well in Black Rabbit) is very exciting.  There are all sorts of baroque details:  the main gangster is a mute, who can't talk and communicates through sign language; there are parallel plots involving fathers and sons and, even, an unmistakable intimation that the loan shark is one of the boys' father himself.  There are flashy molls, car chases, dire threats, blackmail, attempted and successful murders, and a man killed by a child dropping a bowling ball on his head.  This is one of those shows that is so self-important, it can't bring itself to just end -- it has a long coda scored to a famous hit ("We'll make Manhattan an island of joy") from many years ago and lots of luminous imagery of the plot's survivors now doing well by doing good. 

The show is very strangely photographed. Every single shot uses focus to concentrate the viewer's attention on the part of the image significant to the story.  To accomplish this effect, characters often appear behind veils of blurry foreground objects.  In some shots, two-thirds or, even, three-fourths of the image is occluded by blurry obstructions in the foreground.  In other shots, both foreground and background are left unfocused so that only a sliver of space in the middle distance is clear.  The effect is subliminal -- although I noticed it after about 15 minutes. The entire picture uses this style of photography which is somewhat akin to the old iris effects in silent movies.  I don't like this way of making a picture because it fetters the viewer's eye and seems to me to be manipulative and coercive -- I want the visual freedom to roam with my eyes across the background and foreground as well.  Black Rabbit  has about four directors distributed among its episodes including Jason Bateman and Laura Linney -- but every single scene in the picture, no matter the director, is framed with big swaths of the image intentionally blurred.  The visual style of the series is dire and gloomy, handheld treks through steam baths and chaotic kitchens, labyrinths of skyscrapers filmed by drones silently whirring over the urban landscape -- it's mostly dark and the shots layered with blur around a sandwich slice of focus enforce an effect of monotonous claustrophobia on the viewer.  The series is interesting but overwrought and seriously flawed.