The
word I would use is elegiac, as opposed to Poniewozik's
elegant, in a description of Matthew Weiner’s The Romanoffs, whose title itself suggests something which is a
knock off of an original. I would also suggest that it is fine for viewers to
be mystified by how these short movies link together to make an anthology. The strongest of them is the episode “The
Royal We,” which the NYT features in its still photo of Kerry Bishe on a cruise
for modern day survivors of the original Romanov family, of whom her husband
happens to be one. Kerry, as Shelly, is simply an all-American girl, bohemian enough
to get stoned over pizza in her off hours, trying to sort out her husband
Michael. Corey Stoll has to suffuse himself as the missing link, tying the knot
between Nicholas as the disconnected Victorian Czar about to be sacrificed for
the new world order of egalitarianism which we’ve all learned since is a
utopian fiction, and the sobering existential angst of the Slavic dark side to
brutality. To break away from Shelly’s festering befuddlement, Michael leans
into jury duty, and this has its own grotesque allure. You might reflect on how
“The Violet Hour” leads to a pregnancy. Aaron Eckhart, despite ostensible star
power, behaves like a sheep dog in it, his pleasures as furtive as Stoll’s remorse
following on its heels. I never engaged in due diligence on Eckhart following
his incisive energies which makes In The
Company of Men such a powerful nihilist statement, but Weiner allows the
actor some autobiographical footnotes which I certainly found more convincing
than his character’s overflow of sexual conquest in the guise of an American dilettante.
Ines Melab does better constructing her road map with Keller than as the
distressed Tunisian Hajar about to hurl into social alienation but for Eckhart’s
bumbling nonchalance finding a cornerstone of appearance and propriety for the
sake of what appearance and propriety entail. In its way it’s a more
sophisticated upgrade on the Florrick’s marriage of convenience revealing that
relationships are more complex than mere residual unhappiness of a mistake.
The
dowager wearies of The Good Wife as a
foretelling of a Hillary presidency ghosted into a backlash upon which Trump
capitalized, and may leave off where it is, with Peter in his effervescent
governorship, Alicia with her self-assertion, and Will Gardner on his rampage
towards Josh Charles’ exit from the series, effectively killing it. Isn’t Will
a senescent liberalism in decline as well, or Diane Lockhart? What concerns me
more than Mueller’s quest for integrity, and possible failure to bring down
Trump’s crust of an old boys network, is what this undercurrent of appeasement
toward Putin is supposed to yield. Its five day old war with Georgia reestablished
the Russian Federation as "as a
military power" in the words of Sarah Pruitt. Even before Putin
emerged after Yeltsin, how was this ever not the case, even with but a limited
tutorial available on the Crimean War with the British Empire, before revolutionary
dissents within Russian amassed under Lenin? American media figures with access
claim that Michael Flynn allowed himself to be orchestrated by Russia’s
imitative propaganda machine, which can mimic the western press so cleverly as
to not have a valid issue to raise now and again, but even if we accept, as per
Obama Administration issues with temperament, that Flynn is a cracked vessel,
he spent his career in military intelligence. If were going to think along nice
big and easy puzzle pieces, then the argument can be made that contemporary
civilization is yoked to the US Russia and China. If their interests were
aligned than the rest of Europe might be a mere pacified inconvenience. Matthew
Weiner’s fourth episode, “Expectation” entangles itself in a web of mendacity
ending in an emergency surgery for gallstones. Telling, in Weiner’s polite
request that we apply ourselves.
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