Summer TV Binge: TRANSPARENT

I was told this was a comedy.

No doubt, Transparent features comedic actors — Jeffrey Tambor as Maura, Jay Duplass as Josh, Judith Light as Shelly, Melora Hardin as Tammy, Rob Huebel as Len, Kathryn Hahn as Raquel and Carrie Brownstein as Syd — and traffics in comedy elements like awkwardness and obliviousness and misunderstanding. The episodes are even around a half-hour long, which our television-conditioned brains tell us equals sitcom. And it’s been classified as a comedy by awards bodies like the Golden Globes, the Emmys, et al. In watching the show, however, Transparent felt far from comedic.

That’s not to say I didn’t laugh or find amusement in areas, but I found amusement in parts of Breaking Bad, too. Not that Transparent is Breaking Bad, but even a run-of-the-mill family drama like Parenthood is funny in places. That doesn’t make it a comedy. Given, there are a number of shows currently on the books as comedies that blur the line pretty significantly, such as Nurse Jackie and genre-jumping favorites of mine Orange is the New Black and Shameless. But of all these non-comedy comedies, Transparent feels like the most non-comedy comedy of them all. (I even tweeted as much.)

What I also mention in that tweet, though, is that despite not striking me as particularly comedic, Transparent is also beautiful. Sad and awful and beautiful. Tambor’s Maura is a transgender woman who’d been hiding her true identity almost her entire life. Now divorced (from Shelly) with three grown, selfish children (Josh plus two sisters in Ali and Sarah, played by Gaby Hoffmann and Amy Landecker, respectively), Maura is selling her home and moving into a community where she can live openly and exclusively as a woman. And to be sure, Tambor’s performance is the least typically comedic of all, making it clear that this woman is not to be mocked and her life is not to be made light of. What she’s doing is brave and scary and worthwhile. It’s emphatically not a joke, and I think the awkwardness and confusion her children feel around her, while understandable, is perhaps what makes them so insufferable in my eyes. It infuriates me.

To be fair — if it can be considered fair, that is — the kids aren’t just awful toward Maura. They’re awful toward everyone. They’re just plain awful — self-centered and greedy and only ever interested in their own instant gratification, almost never considering anyone else’s feelings. And when they do, briefly, think of someone else before themselves, they just get irrationally angry at everyone else for not being as selfless as they are. It’s asinine. That’s not to say that the behavior is unearned or that there aren’t stakes and motivations built into these characters to make their behavior true to their personalities — the show itself is well-crafted — it’s just that their personalities are awful and I legit cheered when Maura finally started going off on them. (Not that Maura didn’t have a few selfish moments of her own that we see via flashback, so at least they come by it honestly.)

One thing that I did find problematic on the whole was the way female sexuality was presented as so mutable, while male sexuality wasn’t. To clarify, many of the female characters are sexually interested in women, even if they’re originally presented as being interested in men. There’s even a joke made, when Amy has left her husband Len for Tammy and Ali is dating a transgender man (who makes clear to her he still has a vagina), that with the exception of their mom Shelly, all the Pfeffermans love pussy. (Maura, it is implied though never outright stated, is still only interested in women, as she was when she was living as Mort.) In addition to the family leanings, there’s a big out-of-nowhere revelation at the end of the series that Ali’s longtime best friend Syd, who has been sleeping with Josh off and on, is actually in love with Ali. But none of the male characters share this flexibility of sexual attraction. Josh and Len think lesbians are cool, but are clearly strictly straight men themselves. And when Ali attempts to have a threesome with two men, they balk and throw her out, despite being heavily under the influence of Ecstasy, when she attempts to get them to sexually interact with each other. It’s probably not an intention of the show to portray sexuality that way, but to me it definitely feels like even in a show as open and groundbreaking as this one, gay male sex is more taboo, more shocking,  and less accepted, than lesbian sex. I’ll be interested to see if the second season continues along that line.

But more than that, I’ll be interested to see how this family drama develops in season two, because season one ended with quite a lot of drama on deck. Some of it even comedic.

Transparent is available to stream exclusively on Amazon.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Sleepless in Seattle

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 181  Days to go: 126

Movie #257:  Sleepless in Seattle

Nora Ephron could really pace a movie. Sleepless in Seattle comes in under two hours — one hour, forty-five minutes, to be exact — and yet it is as rich and as full a film as you could hope for. The lives of Sam (Tom Hanks) and his son Jonah (Ross Malinger) are just as lovingly developed as that of Annie (Meg Ryan), on the other side of the country. There aren’t thinly drawn characters, and there isn’t a haphazardly thrown together plot. No, it’s just that Ephron knew how to make a scene count, knew how to impart valuable character insights as efficiently as possible, and, basically, knew how to tell a great story.

Sleepless in Seattle is one of the great romantic comedies of the late twentieth century, it’s true, but that’s only partly because of the love story. The chemistry between Hanks and Ryan is palpable, even when they aren’t in any scenes together at all, which is why they starred in so many movies together. You feel the magical connection when Annie is listening to Sam on the radio. You feel Sam’s heart catch in his throat when he sees her in the airport and on the street. You become invested in these characters. But more than just the two of them, you care about and are invested in the people around them as well.

The friendship between Annie and Becky (Rosie O’Donnell) is as sincere and authentic a portrayal of female friendship as can be. They gossip together, they confide in each other, they poke fun but only with love, and they support each other without judgment. They are true and dear friends who share interests and feelings and desires, and it comes across that they’ve been friends for a long time and that they understand each other. That’s the kind of friendship that transcends romantic relationships, and it’s just portrayed so beautifully here.

Moreover, Sam’s sister Suzy (Rita Wilson) is a sheer and utter delight. Even though she only has one big scene, in describing the plot for An Affair to Remember, she makes such an impact. She’s silly and emotional and lovely and so very like so many friends I know who talk about their favorite love stories that way. Plus she takes the good-natured ribbing of Sam and her husband Greg (Victor Garber) with aplomb, so you just know she’s delightful to be around. How Rita Wilson didn’t star in a dozen blockbuster romantic comedies on her own is a complete mystery to me.

Another small matter that Sleepless in Seattle wins big with is the treatment of the children. Jonah, Sam’s son, is eight. He has a best friend named Jessica (Gaby Hoffman), and the two of them spend a lot of time together. In a way that is completely believable and true for their age, Jonah parrots a lot of what Jessica says, because she is far more knowledgeable about things like destiny and reincarnation and airlines, plus she has her own coded language. And Jonah is demanding and tactless and naive in all the ways young boys tend to be. Again, they aren’t featured a whole lot (Jessica far less than Jonah, of course), but the scenes they are in are hugely telling and insightful and not once do they seem forced the way a lot of child actors sometimes do.

The biggest success, however, is with Annie’s fiancé Walter (Bill Pullman), who is a lovely, if boring, man, who is never once painted as a brute or a flake or a bad match at all. On the contrary, he and Annie are very much alike, and they very much like each other. They have similar tastes and are incredibly compatible, but there just isn’t a spark between them. It’s really kind of a beautiful sentiment, in its way, that sometimes everything can look right on paper and there’s no reason in the world why it shouldn’t work, except that it just feels wrong. And Annie bears no ill-will against Walter. She has no desire to hurt him or mislead him. Indeed, she thinks he’s a great man. But she doesn’t feel magic with him. And he doesn’t want to be the guy someone settles for. It’s a sad ending for them, yes, but a completely believable and respectful one, and one that is ultimately for the best for both of them. (The movie does this to a lesser extent as well with the woman Sam briefly dates, but it’s Annie’s relationship with Walter that’s really examined in this way.) It was truly refreshing for a romantic comedy at this time to acknowledge that the person you’re with doesn’t have to be a villain to be the wrong person for you, and it’s a lesson that’s stuck with me through the years.

It’s really a great little film, with fully realized characters and a fully formed plot that is funny and charming and sweet in all the right places, with a touch of sadness to make it feel real. And it does all of that in a densely packed 105 minutes. That Nora Ephron sure could pace a movie.