Netflix show gets it right, Amazon not so much
A tale of two television shows. One of them, an Amazon adaptation of F. Scoot Fitzgerald’s last novel. “The Last Tycoon,” so much a last novel Fitzgerald dies before finishing it, excited me when I read about it. Being about Hollywood, and laden with both business machinations and romantic entanglements, it seemed the perfect vehicle for a mini-series. Having Matt Bomer and Kelsey Grammer in the leads as studio heads increased the anticipation.
“Ozark,” from Netflix, caught my eye moistly because it starred one of my favorite actresses, Laura Linney, alongside an actor who doesn’t receive nearly the credit he deserves, Jason Bateman. The cast impressed me more than the plot description, about a Chicago family that hastily has to move to the Ozarks to avoid being killed execution-style by drug dealers Bateman’s character indirectly cheated. My eagerness was misplaced. “The Last Tycoon,” which begins streaming on Amazon Friday, covers more ground than Fitzgerald in trying to be political on more 1936 fronts than Fitzgerald addresses, but it does so ham-handedly. Lacking the merest hint of subtlety, it peddles melodrama and easily drawn heroes and villains with broad strokes that are too obvious and matter-of-fact in treatment to make any impact. Even when the subject turns to Nazi diplomats trying to control the content of Hollywood product headed for a lucrative German market.
One associates F. Scott Fitzgerald with smoothness and class that is absent from “The Last Tycoon.” Even sets and costumes that are designed to be opulent come off as copied from a textbook or period magazine. They look 21st century rather than from the 1930s. This lack of care particularly affects the scenes from silent movies starring Minna Davis, allegedly the greatest actress of her time, who was killed in a fire. Anyone who watches Turner Classic Movies late of Sundays, when it unreels silent films, can see “The Last Tycoon” didn’t get the silver balance or texture of the black-andwhite image right. Like the program’s sensibility, tailoring, and construction, these shots seemed to smack of current manufacturing and not from 80 years ago.
“Ozark,” on the other hand, goes way beyond its casting in finding ways to engage and entertain. Laura Linney, whose name made me take a look in the first place, doesn’t have much of note to do until the end of “Ozark’s” initial episode.
Careful storytelling and shrewd character development are the lures. Hailed as a cousin in situation to AMC’s bygone classic, “Breaking Bad,” “Ozark” shares the knack that series had to draw you into characters, to fill almost formulaic scenes of threat and danger with tension and suspense, and to make you like people, at least the Bateman character, who are knowing and willing criminals.
The first episode, which I as far as I got at the time of writing, shows so much promise of plot, character insight, and intrigue. All of which “The Last Tycoon,: with all its trappings and concerns, lacks.
“Ozark” sidles into its situation. Except from advace program notes, I’d never suspect that Bateman’s character goes beyond being a routine Chicago financial consult to be a successful, and skillful, money launderer.
He seems like a typical suburban nebbish who works hard to keep his family from having to think about money, although a spat over $10 arises, but whose wilder side is limited to pleasuring himself while looking at Loop prostitutes from his car window and tawdry extra-marital affairs.
Everything about “Ozark” takes its time. You realize the show benefits from that when a scene, the outcome of which you must know, moves you to the edge of your chair in anxious expectation.
“The Last Tycoon” rushes. Granted, it has a lot of territory to cover and adds more by adding the Spanish Revolution, Nazism, attendant and pre-dating anti-Semitism, and the Depression to the tussle Fitzgerald provides involving Communist-sympathizing unionists and the studio Bomer’s character, Monroe Stahr, née Milton Sternberg, partially runs.
Dealing with any of these topics or issues, “The Laat Tycoon” pushes the situation in your face. It presents what it has to show baldly and literally, without the texture that involves you. Nazis, even in the form of a polished diplomat, will always seem sinister and insidious, but “The Last Tycoon, makes Hitler’s emissary to Hollywood, one who censor scripts to insure the purity insisted upon by the Third Reich, so egregious, the finesse of his bullying rates a scowling “hrrumph” rather than the outrage it would rightfully engender in a better crafted piece.
“The Last Tycoon” want to raise hackles. It almost begs his audience to see how politically aware it is and how fashionably 21st century its attitude about an earlier era is. It feels because it doesn’t know how to charm, make its characters likeable, or make you angry beyond small reaction to scenes in which a foreign government cows an American industry or a Central Casting villain spouts anti-Semitism.
Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon” includes a struggle between immigrants who rose from poverty because of their ability to tell stories in celluloid and create both a film industry and a California desert town to house it. As it does with all issues, Amazon’s “The Last Tycoon,” written and directed by Billy Ray, reduces this into a simplistic rubbing the wrong way between Hollywood’s scrappy strivers and those execs, generally WASP, execs who are part of a country-club set.
The humanity of “Tycoon’s major characters, even sympathetic ones, is absent. Actors are used as chess pieces to get through scenes. Matt Bomer is handsome — How could he not be? — but shows no depth, and Kelsey Grammer walks through his part. Bomer and Grammer are both competent, but neither moves the series, or the battle waged between them as artist vs. businessman in an industry that requires both, past the surface. Mark O’Brien is much more effective as a Depression waif fighting for survival with only his wits as assets. Bit actors playing Monoe Stahr’s secretaries fill the screen more than “The Last Tycoon’s” stars do. About the only lead that shows some fullness of personality is Rosemarie de Witt as Grammer’s wife.
The opposite is true of “Ozark.” The only moment I thought rang false or was overscripted and underfelt is one in which someone about to be killed answers his assassin’s question about how he managed to deceive him. If someone is going to kill you anyhow, why give him information he wants? Since his conscience doesn’t preclude murder, why not let him stew in ignorance and wonder?
“Ozark” nurses its moments. They get a chance to breathe. You see the shadings around dynamics and enjoy how complex Bateman’s character, Marty, turns out to be. Writer-director Bill Dubuque gives a series of family scenes a chance to play out fully, so you understand the routines and boundaries of Marty’s household. Especially important is a scene in which he kisses both his sleeping children before going into his chosen nighttime activity.
Then there’s a value added by Jason Bateman, who I once again say is underrated as an actor.
Bateman is rarely bravura, and as Marty he is called on to speak logically and persuasively more than to emote, but he always firs into a character, any character, and always seem genuine. He reminds me of James Garner minus some swagger. His approach to roles is simple and natural. He makes scenes resonate by being totally unaffected and genuine.
Bateman has been working in television with some visits to feature film, since he was a child, and his experience shows. His Marty doesn’t have to flash. Flash might even get in the way. Marty is a typical guy with an atypical situation. He has a pay a gangster his partner bilked $8 million in purloined profits and set up a money laundering scheme in Missouri’s touristladen “redneck Riviera” to keep that gangster happy.
Bateman uses his everyman approach to make you root for Marty, or at least understand Marty, at every turn. Also fine in the first episode are Esai Morales as the gangster seeking the $8 million and Mariana Paola Vicente as a Chicago hooker who plays a fantasy scene.
Despite how much I looked forward to it, I probably won’t watch more of “The Last Tycoon.” I am eager to get back TO “Ozark” to see how Dubuque develops and it what happen when Marty’s family resituates in Missouri.