Complex family makeup only part of story
Alan Ball’s “Here and Now” doesn’t have to be set in Portland — in fact, given the city’s defining relationship with the comedy “Portlandia,” it might have been better if it had been set in, oh, I don’t know, Berkeley.
But the Portland setting does help viewers get that the HBO series premiering on Sunday, Feb. 11, is actually a comedy, in the Chekhovian sense.
As evidenced by the film “American Beauty” and the series “Six Feet Under,” Ball not only understands the symbiotic relationship between tragedy and comedy, he is especially adept at mining that thematic synapse.
Audrey Bayer Boatwright (Holly Hunter) and Greg Boatwright (Tim Robbins) are parents of a multiracial
family. She is a former therapist, he is a philosophy professor who, of course, is finding that all the philosophical knowledge in the world cannot assuage the depression he feels as he is about to turn 60.
The couple’s younger daughter Kristen (Sosie Bacon), their only biological child, is a junior in high school and in a hurry to grow up. One brother, Ramon (Daniel Zovatto), adopted from a Colombian orphanage, is now 22 and in love with Henry (Andy Bean), whom he met at the combination coffee shop and laundromat he frequents. Daughter Ashley (Jerrika Hinton) was adopted from Liberia and has her own fashion line. Brother Duc (Raymond Lee) is a Vietnamese adoptee and a “motivational architect.” He also says he’s celibate.
The whole United Colors of Benetton construct is a pack of lies — characters who lie to themselves and to each other, without even the faintest sense of betrayal much of the time.
Greg is more of a father to his adoring teaching assistant Michael (Kevin Bigley) than he is to either of his actual sons, something that Duc in particular resents.
Michael is always kissing professorial butt with comments such as how much he loves “the way you marry Epicureanism with presentism and then reboot them both into something deeply, deeply moral.”
The line is deliciously evocative of a lofty pronouncement in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound”: “Let me at once say that it has élan while at the same time avoiding éclat.”
Greg has written only one book in his career and is still coasting on its success, although his approaching milestone birthday reminds him of how little he’s really accomplished in his field.
The birthday not only weighs on his mind, but becomes the mechanism for the slow but inevitable tumble of the family house of cards.
“Here and Now” is nothing if not unpredictable. You think, for example, that Hunter’s character is such a brittle control freak, it’s no wonder that Greg seems so defeated. And yet, there is a core of abiding love in the relationship. Another relationship seems blessed with exceptional love and commitment, until one half of the pair disappears in the middle of the night.
The most unpredictable aspect of “Here and Now” is its supernatural element. All of a sudden, Ramon sees the number 1111 everywhere. It’s one thing when it appears to be on the digital clock where Henry works, but when the number appears as disembodied columns of fire, his parents waste no time in putting him into therapy.
Well, that’s not exactly true. For a few minutes, Audrey sees nothing wrong in being her own son’s therapist until she’s talked out of it.
Instead, Ramon begins therapy with Farid Shokrani (Peter Macdissi), whose son is in school with Kristen. Farid has his own family issues, including his wife’s attempts to get him to be more strictly observant to Muslim traditions.
There’s no question that Ball is pushing it here: There are moments when events feel a bit too manufactured. The show’s strength, though, is rooted in the rather poignant search for genuine emotions and personal authenticity shared by both the members of the Bayer-Boatwright clan and the Shokrani family. In both cases, but in different ways, these are families who have allowed themselves to be pressured into displaying what they think is proper behavior.
Most of the performances are quite good. Zovatto, Bean, Lee and Hinton are especially appealing. Robbins is saddled with a challenging set of conflicts in Greg’s character and does a pretty good job trying to keep up with them, but the character remains somewhat elusive in the four episodes made available to critics. Bacon has a different challenge. Kristen feels more manufactured than any of the characters, as if Ball consulted a book about what a precocious adolescent would be like living in a family like the Bayer-Boatwrights. The actress makes us like her character, even if we don’t fully believe her.
We’re so used to Hunter playing complex dramatic roles, but, of course, she is adept at any genre. Here she is often comically over the top, neurotically insistent on how everyone should behave and dress. Yet she credibly and rather tenderly reveals Audrey’s vulnerability when we’re not expecting it. It’s key to the theme of the series, really: that there are real lives and real emotions struggling to break through the social pressure and detritus of contemporary life. Those struggles are what draws us in to this complicated world to root for Ball’s precious and flaw creations.