Actor in raw, messy top form
PERHAPS there’s room for just one more.
The past 20 years have brought more than enough rich, white, male antiheroes to TV, yet networks keep pumping them out in new series. There have been some great
successes (Breaking Bad, The Sopranos), some middling dramas
(Ray Donovan, Ozark) and plenty of failures. And now we have Patrick Melrose.
Technically, the troubled British addict with abusive parents predates many of the antiheroes you love (or love to hate). Based on the series of semiautobiographical novels by Edward St Aubyn, first published in 1992, the limited series, airing over the next five weeks, portrays significant moments in the character’s life. We see Patrick as a child, a heroinaddicted young adult, a man in recovery, an unhappy husband and a reflective son at his mother’s funeral.
With Patrick played as an adult by Benedict Cumberbatch, the series is an immaculate portrait of a very troubled man, a showcase for Cumberbatch’s prodigious range as an actor and also an incisive kneecapping of the idle rich. In three episodes made available for review, it’s both captivating and revolting, addictive and terribly hard to watch. It’s not quite what you’d expect from the suave, Tumblrfriendly British actor, known for Shakespearean stage productions and Sherlock, but it’s his best role yet.
Patrick Melrose benefits from some of the most lauded source material in recent history, but it doesn’t get trapped by its own pretentiousness. The adaptation creates a uniquely visual story from the novels, yet still feels intensely literary, and each episode spins
vivid vignette that’s simultaneously unnerving, colourful and profound.
The series swaps the order of the first two novels, starting not with Patrick’s childhood but with his young adulthood, when he goes on a drugfuelled binge during a weekend in New York to collect the ashes of his father. It’s a smart move, introducing us to Patrick the man (and Cumberbatch’s wild performance), not the boy, and implies that there was something sinister going on in his childhood.
The premiere visualises both addiction and drug use in novel and aesthetically exciting ways. It’s a downright exhausting hour that never shies away from Patrick’s pain and suffering. He takes an astounding number of drugs, switching between uppers and downers on a whim. He vomits and loses consciousness, and struggles with the shakes, withdrawal and hallucinations. Set in the 1980s, its colour palette borrows from the decade’s neon excess, with imagery nearly as surreal as what’s in Patrick’s mind.
Yet the next episode shifts gears, flashing back to Patrick’s abusive 1960s childhood in a crumbling French villa. Less glam rock and more Agatha Christie, the simple story of one day in the Melrose family’s life unfolds in the creaky mansion like a horror film, as insidious threats lurk at every turn.
In the third episode, the tone changes yet again: now we’re at a posh blacktie party at a British aristocrat’s estate in 1990. It’s a credit to writer David Nicholls (Far
From the Madding Crowd) and director Edward Berger (The Terror) that despite the wildly different look and tone of each episode, they fit together seamlessly.
It’s hard to imagine that the role could have been brought to life by any other actor. Viewers have seen his odious, pompous side and whipfast dialogue in characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Marvel’s Doctor Strange, but in Patrick
Melrose his abrasiveness is defensive, and his bad behaviour
(at points) drugfuelled. Cumberbatch is more vulnerable, and more openly emotional, than he’s been before.
He’s joined by an outstanding supporting cast, including Hugo Weaving as his horrid father, Jennifer Jason Leigh as his neglectful mother and a brief turn from Allison Williams (Girls) as the girl of his dreams.
Patrick’s life may be in shambles, but the series manages to assemble its disparate pieces into something deeply beautiful. It might just be powerful enough for Cumberbatch’s notoriously spirited fan base to forget all about Sherlock and Doctor Strange.
Maybe. — TCA
Patrick Melrose premieres tonight at 8.30pm on SoHo.