Kate Winslet’s chaotic political satire fails to find its target
Kate Winslet starring as a powercrazed politician in an HBO mini-series created by Succession writer Will Tracy and directed by Stephen Frears. That’s quite the line-up, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, it turns out quite a lot. For while Winslet throws admirable gusto into creating Chancellor Elena Vernham, autocratic ruler of a fictional middle-european state keen to punch above its weight, she’s fighting an uphill battle to make any sense of
The Regime’s (Sky Atlantic) muddled thinking.
Laying on the satire with a hamfisted trowel, Tracy’s script calls to mind a blindfolded gunman shooting into the air and hoping against hope to hit the target. As we tailgate the erratic Vernham’s rollercoaster relationship with minder-turned-lover Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), The Regime merrily fires off storylines all over the shop, but very few hit home.
You’d think it would be easy enough to land a telling blow or two given the current chaotic state of the global body politic, but too often The Regime descends into farce as we bounce between Chancellor Elena’s paranoia, a revolutionary rebellion led by sugar beet workers, a potential face-off between the US and China, and sundry subplots involving a cabinet stuffed with subservient yes men.
The effect is dizzying rather than dazzling and, extraordinarily given the talent involved, often rather dull. By the end of episode three (of six), I was rather hoping an assassin might pop out of the woodwork and pull the plug on our hypochondriac anti-heroine and her looming sidekick (“We’re two little lunatics who fit like a glove,” coos Elena), which was not a good sign.
And it would have been a shame because episode four offers a frustrating glimpse of what The Regime could have been if it had the wit to pull its ideas into focus. Hugh Grant gives an episode-stealing turn as Elena’s toppled predecessor, Keplinger, supposedly exiled to the countryside but actually held prisoner in the palace basement, reminding us what a fully fleshed-out character looks like when thus far we’d been offered cardboard cutouts.
It all looks fabulous of course, in a sub-grand Budapest Hotel sort of way, and, if you’re a sucker for Acting with a capital A, Winslet’s collection of mannerisms, from droopy mouth to a cut-glass accent that’s more Surrey than Serbia, is undoubtedly impressive. But the nagging suspicion lingers that The Regime thinks it’s making some deep points about the tumultuous state of the world, circa 2024. Scratch below its stylish surface and it’s as shallow as a clickbait soundbite.
Can someone please invent a timetravel machine so Mary Beard can set foot in Ancient Rome before it became ancient? The look on her face if she came face to face with a living breathing emperor would be a sight to behold.
On second thoughts, the endlessly inquisitive classicist might actually be happier joining the missing historical dots in her own vivid imagination, bringing to life as she does a roulette wheel of notorious Roman rulers in her latest venture back in time.
Beard has no time for those cheesy dramatised interludes that so many history docs lean into. So in Meet the
Roman Emperor (BBC Two) we were spared self-conscious extras lolloping about naked in the bath and at the (horror) communal loos, and instead relied on Beard’s way with words to take us roaming the less-travelled recesses of Rome’s past.
Marcus Aurelius (No 16) being treated to an anal suppository, Nero (No 5) playing control freak, Hadrian (No 14) blubbing over his dead boyfriend – all featured in Beard’s pick-and-mix menu as she attempted to paint a composite picture of a Roman emperor’s lot.
She had an awful lot of ground to cover and inevitably some stories got short shrift. My new favourite emperor has to be Domitian (No 11), whose proclivity for dinner parties held in total darkness and sibling poisoning means he should be up there with Caligula in the rogues’ gallery.
What Beard does well is to render even the most horrendous detail in a matter of fact way so we can do our own shuddering. She doesn’t need to editorialise an observation such as “Tiberius having his private parts nibbled by little boys in the swimming pool”, we can supply the repulsion ourselves. The down side was that there were frequently times when a deeper dive into a theme would have proved rewarding. The Roman attitude to gender fluidity floated past too quickly and could have done with a whole programme of its own – underling the feeling that here was a series’ worth of material here squeezed into a one-off documentary.
The Regime ★★
Meet the Roman Emperor with Mary Beard ★★★