‘TOP’ OF HER GAME
Moss back on the ‘Lake’ with ‘China Girl’
By ROBERT RORKE W ITH “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Elisabeth Moss graduated from solid supporting actress on “Mad Men” to full-fledged television star — creating in Offred a kidnapped mother turned into a baby machine by a nightmarish male-controlled futuristic society.
She’s a heroine everyone could easily empathize with in an award-worthy way.
Det. Robin Griffin, the Australian character she played in the limited Sundance Channel series “Top of the Lake” (2013) and now “Top of the Lake: China
Girl” (2017) — airing through Tuesday on Sundance Channel at 9 p.m. — is more complex than Offred, who is both underdog and victim, and “Mad Men’s” Peggy Olson, who ignored a child she gave birth to in order to pursue her career. As “China Girl” reveals, Robin has some of the same baggage as Peggy: the child given up. But this time, the character meets the kid. She is Mary (Alice Englert), a 17-year-old hellcat with a filthy mouth and a deadly infatuation with a pretentious intellectual (David Dencik), and Robin ventures tentatively into a friendship with her.
Very conveniently (perhaps too neatly), Robin’s recovered motherhood storyline dovetails with the mystery at hand: the murder of a pregnant Thai teenage surrogate named Cinnamon left for dead inside a bobbing green suitcase in the waters off Bondi beach in Sydney. While the first two episodes of “Top of the Lake” focus on Robin’s complicated, unfortunate past, the clues in the murder story unfold very slowly — probably too slowly for American audiences — but when they finally do, the series, directed by Jane Campion (“The Piano”), picks up some steam — with Robin breaking the usual rules for TV detectives when interrogating suspects (no lawyer present, for one) and getting into a hair-raising, near-death struggle with an ex-colleague with a professional axe to grind.
Robin is an isolated, off-putting person. She won’t be charmed by a younger, admiring colleague (Gwendoline Christie, shedding Brienne of Tarth’s armor from “Game of Thrones” for a pedestrian police uniform) and won’t even knock back a cocktail with the local coroner, who tells her, “I don’t take the corpse home with me.” Moss goes about her detective business with grim certitude. Only with Englert, who is Campion’s daughter by the way, does the light glimmer in her blue eyes. This contrast ultimately makes the personal side of “China Girl” seem a richer storyline, especially because we get to meet Mary’s adoptive parents, the handsome, mellow Pyke (Ewen Leslie) and the wackadoodle Julia (Nicole Kidman), a feminist who’s just gone gay. The freckled Kidman, wearing a curly gray wig, uses her dismissive frown to great effect. With her success in “Big Little
Lies,” one wonders when the right combination of producer and writers will create the perfect series for her.