Cumberbatch is still fantastic

Benedict Cumberbatch’s star continues to rise with his role as Patrick Melrose, writes Jennifer Platt

Benedict Cumberbatch was excellent in his dastardly and uneasy roles in Atonement and The Other Boleyn Girl. They were only small supporting roles but it was easy to recognise his talent and see him as the addicted genius and annoying detective in the modernised and much-loved Sherlock Holmes. Yet, that role fed him into the fragile and facile world of being a superstar, and an unlikely sex object in finicky Hollywood, where you are only as good as your last review.

This led to masses of fans being slightly disappointed by his vainglorious detective’s turn in the last two lacklustre seasons of the BBC drama. It was no fault of Cumberbatch but his popularity and that of the show led to extreme expectations.

And then he became part of “big Hollywood” and the money-making superhero machine. First as Khan in Star Trek: Into the Darkness then as Dr Strange in the Marvel franchise. (Granted, so did Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy and a slew of other worthy individuals who have bowed to the pressure of entering the lucrative comic world — who wouldn’t?).

But Cumberbatch clearly does not want to be known as a sum of his total parts. He apparently had only two roles on his bucket list that he absolutely wanted to play. One was Hamlet and the other was Patrick Melrose.

His performances as Hamlet in the 2015 production at London’s Barbican theatre were sold out.

Now in Patrick Melrose he is hitting the sweet spot again. Patrick Melrose is a fivepart drama based on Edward St Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical novels, first published in 1992.

The drama became Cumberbatch’s passion project after he read the novels. And it has paid off — critics are raving about the series, saying that it could project the actor into golden statue status.

And that’s not pandering. At first the series does seem like a druggy, misery tale of first-world problems. But Cumberbatch is exceptional as Patrick Melrose and he transforms the story of a young aristocrat with addiction and family problems into a poignant and human tale.

We meet Patrick in 1982 as he gets a phone call notifying him of his father’s death. He takes in the supposed sad news by injecting himself with heroin.

He has to fly from his home in London to New York to pick up the body. And this is Cumberbatch at his finest. We see him trembling, shaking, sweating as his character comes off the heroin high, searching for any other drugs to fill the hole. Patrick goes to a dangerous underbridge in Central Park and buys ludes (Quaaludes: Mandrax), black beauties (speed balls) and a host of other narcotics.

We see him talking to a family friend when the ludes set in and he drags his body across the floor of the five-star hotel lobby to get to the bathroom. We see him trying to smash the urn that is holding his father’s ashes.

Then we meet his father in several flashbacks. Cold, sneering, evil. Played extraordinarily well by Hugo Weaver whose Agent Smith of The Matrix would fear and falter under the biting gaze of this series’s David Melrose. David was disinherited by his father (the only inheritance he received was silk pyjamas which he wears most of the time). Luckily he married Eleanor — an American whose family had come from new money which they made from a patent on a dry-cleaning liquid.

Jennifer Jason Leigh has a star turn as Eleanor, the fragile mother who ignores what is happening to her son by throwing herself into charity work.

That’s only the beginning. After that we dive into

Melrose’s life, in which he struggles to dry out, has a family, has to deal with his memories of sexual abuse at the hands of his father and with a mother he loathes. He also has to deal with becoming a version of his father when he starts drinking again.

German director Edward Berger and screenwriter David Nicholls do a seamless job of showing that the facade of these unbelievably rich people is actually sinister. They live in an impossibly beautiful family home in the south of France in the 1960s.

The series has a wonderful script, filled with sardonic and cruel wit. Says David to Eleanor: “I do like you in pink — it matches your eyes.”

HE TAKES IN THE SAD NEWS BY INJECTING HIMSELF WITH HEROIN