What are those damn Muggles up to now?
J.K. Rowling caricatures conservatives
The Casual Vacancy, the HBO/ BBC adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s novel of parish council politics, treats its town’s conservatives like bilious hypocrites at best, overstuffed outright villains more typically: Howard Mollison (Michael Gambon), well-to-do business owner, head of the council, and the closest thing to a mastermind in this backroom fight about closing a community centre to put up a spa, is literally so fat he’s developed a sore — and he might be the most sympathetic voice speaking out in favour of keeping Pagford, the not-quite-idyllic village, firmly quaint.
Still, if there’s one place where it agrees with more conventional conservative wisdom, it’s in the necessity of a good, solid family unit. Framed around the political dust-up, The Casual Vacancy is more about what happens when no one around is willing to act like a decent, reasonable grown-up.
Pagford is lousy with lousy parents. There’s such a dearth of admirable parenting that the death of one of the few good ones, Barry Fairbrother (Rory Kinnear), reverberates through the town: a champion of the downtrodden who rely on the community centre, he gives a rousing speech about the responsibility all of us have to each other before dropping dead of an aneurysm, leaving the town in barely controlled chaos as various factions try to fill his spot to their liking.
Casual Vacancy actually takes pains to make sure the issue comes across as more important than that: keeping with its cartoony views of capitalists, it feels like an editorial about What’s Happening in Our Society, flattening down many of its characters into talking points, playing them off each other to maximize the major-key hypocrisies of people who hide class resentments and entitled bitterness behind mores of good, upstanding behaviour.
It’d like to seem fair, but it’s not really, and anyway it’s actually far more enjoyable when it forgets its speechify- ing and zeros in on the characters’ more quotidian cares. In particular, Shirley Mollison (Julia McKenzie) is a walking ball of aggression hidden with a touch of foundation, and continues the recent tradition of hilariously dry, withering older British ladies.
The series most belongs to Krystal, though, a wrongside-of-town girl played with wounded resilience by Abigail Lawrie, the miniseries’ breakout star. The victim of the worst parent, a lapsing heroin addict, she has responded by taking on that role for her little brother while casting about to try to find some pillar she can at least rest on.
If the series could find more people like her, as opposed to moving around its caricatures like chess pieces, it would not only be a better watch, it would make its point much more effectively. As is, though, it has more in common with its conservative villains — who like their people as simple as possible, so as not to disturb their convenient world view — than it would care to admit.