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: Revolutionary Road

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: 159  Days to go: 150

Movie #224:  Revolutionary Road

I’m the first to admit Revolutionary Road is not for everyone, and I completely understand why some people aren’t into it. I am not one of those people. As far as I’m concerned, Revolutionary Road is beautiful in the way it perfectly encapsulates the ugly, devastating destruction of a marriage.

Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) are pretty selfish people, to be honest. They look down their noses at their friends and neighbors, positive they are better than everyone and everything else — completely above it all. Beyond that, as individuals neither Frank nor April are getting their needs met by their marriage, and as a result they completely fail to see beyond themselves to their partner. Even when they try to be considerate and supportive of one another they say the wrong thing or their timing is all off. Their relationship disintegrates and becomes toxic, and while there was a moment when it could’ve been salvaged, the moment passes and there’s nothing more either of them can do.

I myself have had that moment — I’ve seen the moment when my first marriage could’ve been saved, could’ve been rebuilt. I tried to grasp it, but it flitted away and there was nothing more to be done but endure it. Yes, I’m much happier and better off now, but in that terrible moment when your marriage is falling apart — especially when, at one point, you truly did love your spouse — absolutely nothing is okay. I really appreciate the fact that Revolutionary Road doesn’t shy away from that pain, that pettiness, that nastiness that erupts. It doesn’t downplay Frank and April’s shortcomings or try to explain them away. It highlights them, in full despicable glory — all the fights, all the low blows, all the resentments, all the betrayals and all the fits of rage. It can be hard to watch, but it’s also hard to live through and that’s what Revolutionary Road makes clear.

Leo holds his own here — he does a particularly good job of walking the line of Frank seeing April’s unhappiness following the cancellation of their Paris plans, while being caught in the societal constraints of having to provide for his family, being considered a man and being offered a lucrative new job — but Kate really hits it out of the park. Every chain-smoked cigarette screams her frustration. Every household chore speaks to her boredom. And when April kisses Frank and welcomes him home on his birthday, excited to tell him her plan to move the family to Paris, her entire body glows with hope. Then when she discovers her pregnancy the hope drains from her in buckets. Her desperation is tangible, and she’ll do anything to get her hope back, whether it’s to beg Frank not to make them stay there or to drunkenly fuck her oafish neighbor Shep (David Harbour) because he’s openly wanted her for so long. Nothing works, and her desperation becomes despondent resignation.

In many ways, April’s last morning raises all the red flags of someone committing suicide: She gives Frank a good breakfast for his momentous day. She calls to keep her kids with Milly (Kathryn Hahn), crying as she asks her to kiss them goodbye for her. She cleans the house and arranges her things and goes solemnly into the bathroom to complete the nasty business before her. I don’t think she knew what was going to happen, though. I think she knew the risk, because her pregnancy was beyond twelve weeks along, so she was prepared for the worst, but I still don’t think she intended the result. At the same time, however, I don’t think she had enough hope and will to live to fight for her life when it was in danger. She was lost and had given up.

The performances here are strong across the board, including from Kathy Bates as the Wheelers’ realtor and Michael Shannon as her so-called mentally unstable son John who seems to see the truth of Frank and April’s life more than either of them is willing to admit, and the end result is a film that both painfully and painstakingly recreates a marriage that is imploding onto itself, with no holds barred. It reflects the lengths to which we will go — lengths that are within us all, if pushed to the brink — when things truly start to fall apart, and it illustrates how ugly and hateful we all can be when our lives are crumbling, like an injured animal attacking to protect itself. It’s the worst of us, yes, but it’s still a story well-worth telling. And Revolutionary Road tells it exceptionally well.