Poor little rich boy
Patrick Melrose is the Cumberbatch-iest show ever made — and that’s a good thing
Patrick Melrose Debuts Saturday, Crave TV
Patrick Melrose, a despairing yet impressive Showtime adaptation of Edward St. Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical novels, is about a lonely little rich boy who is raped by his narcissistic father and ignored by his coldly aloof mother. In adulthood, Patrick becomes a raging heroin addict, clinging to recovery on the fringes of British high society.
With apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the rich are different from you and #MeToo, which can sometimes obstruct the pity and empathy they’re entitled to as human beings. It is to Patrick Melrose’s credit that a viewer winds up feeling sorry for the title character despite his bad manners and volatile binges. The five-part series stars Benedict Cumberbatch, the hypermagnetic star of PBS’s Sherlock who rocketed to the big time with Marvel’s superhero movies and an Oscar-nominated performance in 2014’s The Imitation Game.
Suffice to say that Patrick Melrose is the Cumber batchiest thing the world has yet seen, which many will see as wonderful news, while a few non-fans might heed as a warning flare. As a star vehicle, it affords the actor — with his cyborg-blue eyes and synthetic good looks — the opportunity to summon all his capital-A acting skills into a manic mural of euphoria, misery and whatever other emotions he cares to season the scenery with before devouring it whole. Part 1 can be both captivating and off-putting, depending on how much a viewer enjoys watching a drug user hit rock bottom in a fancy hotel suite. It’s 1982 and Patrick (Cumberbatch) learns his father, David (Hugo Weaving), has died in New York. Patrick travels from London to retrieve his father’s ashes, and he unwisely chooses the trip as an opportunity to quit heroin cold turkey.
Most of the hour is therefore spent chronicling Patrick’s descent into a rarefied hell, pumping himself full of booze, downers and uppers until giving in to the needle and spoon, testing the hotel’s tolerance for a well-heeled guest.
As Patrick returns to London in the agony of withdrawal, Part 2 takes a much-needed flashback to 1967, when David sexually assaults young Patrick (Sebastian Maltz) on a tense, balmy afternoon at the family’s lavish summer place in the south of France, telling the boy that at the very least he is conferring the lifelong gift of detachment.
The events that transpire are necessarily abhorrent — carefully yet unambiguously effective in their depiction. The household dysfunction and alcohol abuse are plain to see, yet only one of the Melroses’ several house guests picks up on Patrick’s suffering. His mother, Eleanor (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is herself a study of detachment, either oblivious to her son’s pain or, more chillingly, choosing not to see it.
Now that we know why Patrick is the way he is, Part 3 flashes forward to a 1990 dinner party and gala, where the guest of honour is an atrociously snooty Princess Margaret (Harriet Walter) and Patrick barely clings to sobriety as he encounters familiar faces from his parents’ past.
It’s almost impossible to watch this show outside of the current context and conversations about sexual abuse and authority. Although the backdrop is one of vivid wealth and socially sanctioned hedonism, Patrick’s suffering is, at its core, the same as anyone else’s. Showtime did not provide the final two parts of Patrick Melrose for this review, so it’s hard to tell if it continues to be as strong as its start.
Still, Cumberbatch’s all-in performance is a worthy reason to see it through. Casual viewers might be surprised at how deeply they become invested in Patrick’s fate, hoping he can find some kind of the happiness that money cannot buy.