The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
BEN LAWRENCE SCREENGRAB
‘Bodyguard’ may have us all gripped but Hugo Blick’s ‘Black Earth Rising’ is a superior class of thriller
BLACK EARTH RISING BBC Two, Monday
TRUST BBC Two, Wednesday
Not so long ago, the phrase “brand new thriller” was enough to have me reaching for a boxset of Mrs Brown’s Boys. Recently my expectations have been confounded. The thrills of Jed Mercurio’s Bodyguard have ensnared me (and 10 million other Britons) – and now there’s Black Earth Rising, which is in another league. This was obvious from the first few minutes, which featured a brief hand-drawn animated sequence depicting a small child being lifted from the darkness into a white void and placed above a mound of dead bodies. The theme song, Leonard Cohen’s eerie You
Want It Darker, confirmed the tone.
The story concerned a criminal lawyer Eve Ashby (an austere Harriet Walter), who was prosecuting Rwandan general Simon Nyamoya (Danny Sapani), charged with recruiting child soldiers after the 1994 genocide. Accusations of neo-colonialism were slung at Eve by those who thought African problems needed African solutions – but in this particular case the personal seeped into the professional. Eve’s adopted daughter Kate (Michaela Coel) had been rescued from Rwanda and, like Nyamoya, was a Tutsi.
Writer and director Hugo Blick (The Shadow Line, The Honourable Woman) has a gift for freighting a complex plot with emotional truth, and the scenes between Walter and Coel crackled furiously. Coel, a writer and performer best known for comedy, was terrific as the damaged Kate – capable of a captivating stillness which could then turn, on a pin, into coruscating anger. She expertly suggested Kate’s psychological trauma without giving too much away.
Having survived a suicide attempt, she was undergoing therapy with a shrink who had given her a suggested reading list which included Primo Levi. “Did it connect with you?” he asked. “You see that’s my problem, Doc,” she replied. “I don’t know who it is I am supposed to connect with.”
Nothing in Black Earth Rising was simple and Blick unpeeled layer after layer, drawing us into a complex world where resolutions seemed unlikely. He is keen on odd flourishes which more workmanlike directors would not have the imagination to conjure: the popping of tennis balls from a machine to resemble gunfire; the strange positioning of Kate and Eve in their spiffing architecturally designed home which meant they stood at odd angles to each other.
TV drama should have mass popular appeal, but it should also sometimes strive to intellectually enrich us. Black Earth Rising managed both beautifully.
Trust, directed by Danny Boyle, attempts a similar combination but I couldn’t help feeling it was actually rather trashy. Good trash, granted, but this true-life tale of the rich-as-Croesus, miserable-as-sin Getty family had a whiff of Grand Guignol which made it hard to take entirely seriously.
Donald Sutherland played John Paul Getty, the patriarch of a family of under-achievers who worried about his legacy following the suicide of his son George. Another son, Gordon, was writing a symphony to spite him, and his harem of ladies clucked around, jostling for supremacy.
Getty resisted comparisons with King Lear (suggested by his friend Bela von Block) and preferred to be read titbits of pornographic writing rather than Shakespeare. Indeed, sex loomed large in Getty’s life and he was determined not to let age wither him. When a doctor offered him an unregulated drug for erectile dysfunction he sprouted wings, which rather surprised his mistress Belinda who was only after a cuddle.
Anyway, a solution to perpetuating his legacy came in an unlikely form – John Paul Getty III, played with a fair amount of youthful exuberance by Harris Dickinson. This prodigal grandson had been whooping it up in Rome and returned for his uncle’s funeral and to replenish his dwindling funds. It wasn’t quite clear what the older man saw in this wastrel, other than perhaps he admired his fearlessness. Before long, he was explaining the inner workings of his many businesses and the boy began to realise that being a Getty, while bringing inordinate privilege, was also a poisoned chalice. He then hotfooted it back to la dolce vita where, as we know from history, he disappeared and was held to ransom.
Boyle worked hard to bring the story alive and he was aided greatly by the performances: I particularly admired Anna Chancellor, who brought a sort of gloomy resilience to Penelope Kittson, the most steadfast of Getty’s mistresses and the only one not to run away screaming when he introduced them to a lioness he had purchased for japes. Silas Carson, meanwhile, glowered magnificently as Bullimore the butler, who had learned his manners from P G Wodehouse and his morals from Machiavelli.
I have met two billionaires in my life and I suspected both were sociopaths. I thought of them when I saw Sutherland’s performance, which made much of the man’s controlling coldness. This was compelling, but it made him unsympathetic. In fact, this was the problem with Trust. Unhappiness is only interesting when those who display its symptoms are not thoroughly unpleasant.
TV drama should have mass popular appeal, but it should also intellectually enrich us