Paulson is prime in ‘Ratched’, ‘Run’
While the recent election tended to suck up most of the oxygen and attention this fall, the television season belonged to Sarah Paulson.
If you have not seen her in “Ratched,” the Netflix meditation on the character from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” you have missed one of the most striking, if violently deranged, series of the year. Paulson stars in the title role as a nurse who insinuates herself into the asylum where a notorious murderer is being treated. To comment more on her motivations or relationship with the patient would spoil things.
Suffice it to say that the Emmy winner for playing Marcia Clark in “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson” more than holds her own with Judy Davis, Sharon Stone, Cynthia Nixon and Amanda Plummer.
The limited series is visually dazzling, making the most of its Northern California location and the jaw-dropping Hollywood Regency interior decoration of the postwar period. Some of Sharon Stone’s scenes are stolen by the pet monkey on her shoulder, but that’s a minor quibble.
Paulson also stars in the 2020 thriller “Run,” streaming now on Hulu. She’s Diane, first seen just after giving birth to a very premature baby. Seventeen years later, her daughter, Chloe (Kiera Allen) is a brilliant and inventive teen awaiting letters of acceptance from college. The fact that she’s afflicted with asthma, an irregular heartbeat and diabetes, and requires a wheelchair to get around doesn’t seem to keep her down. She looks forward to getting away to college, even if that means leaving the support of her ever-present mom.
Not to give too much away, but Chloe only comes into her own when it dawns on her that Diane may not be her protector.
Shot almost entirely in a run-down modest farmhouse, “Run” does not have the visual allure of “Ratched,” but Paulson is no less assured and intense in this portrayal of a woman obsessed. Young Kiera Allen offers a remarkable performance in her film debut.
“Run,” a standalone film, has much in common with Hulu’s notable 2019 true-crime series “The Act,” starring Patricia Arquette and Joey King. Not to engage in instant pop analysis, but both films seem to be saying something about tensions between parents and 20-somethings who too often feel undercut, underpaid, paralyzed by debt and smothered.
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