I love the kind of movies that don't get made anymore -- or if they do, they don't get wide releases in theaters. Forrest Gump would probably never get near a green light these days. The Fisher King? No way. I love Star Trek and Batman
as much as anyone, but dramas that are about characters with no
explosions, no superheros, no comic book characters, no young-adult
franchise behind them, and no big promise to play big overseas -- those
are some of my favorite films. The Rewrite and Demolition
are two recent examples of movies that received either no American
theatrical release at all despite a beautiful, realistic story with subtle,
nuanced, moving performances (The Rewrite) or a flop of a
relatively narrow theatrical release with little promotion and no visibility just past the Oscars where it was
sure to get buried, again despite wonderful performances in a quirky,
emotional, life-affirming story (Demolition).
So I was totally delighted to discover that the pilot for This Is Us (which I must admit I watched largely because I was a Gilmore Girls
fan in high school with a huge crush on Milo Ventimiglia's brilliant,
book-addict, intellectual bad boy character) is actually the television equivalent of one
of those character films that could no longer get made. The pilot even works as a stand-alone. And it's
beautiful, with a pace far slower than most television these days and
very little plot movement -- but characters that are alive, flawed,
confused, and very real. One character, an actor, complains about how
his character on his sitcom never gets anything real to do, and
he's surprised when he's given a scene with substance that is well
written. Realistic scenes of substance might be rare in the show within the show, but scenes
like that abound in the pilot of This Is Us. In an age where
scenes seem to get shorter and shorter and no one ever seems to have
meaningful conversations without exposition (my favorite line of the Designated Survivor
pilot: when Kiefer Sutherland's character's chief of staff inexplicably
throws into an early conversation with him the sentence "You're the
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development!" ... What, does the guy have
short-term memory loss?), the sheer length of scenes in the pilot
episode in which characters
just TALK to each other is incredibly refreshing. The wonderful Gerald McRaney, in
fact, speaks for a solid two and a half minutes uninterrupted at one point -- and
it's not a second too long. And few shows would dare let the other
character in that scene be so realistically silent throughout. If there
are
other shows like this on TV, I'm missing them.
Characters like those in This Is Us
might not often get the chance to live so fully on the big screen these days, but I
hope we get the opportunity to empathize with these characters' plights -- through
their love, doubt, fear, strength, determination, humor, and zest for life -- for years to
come on the small screen.
No comments:
Post a Comment