Double trouble
Mark Ruffalo plays twin brothers in sombre drama
I Know This Much Is True Streaming, Crave
A single performer’s double act is among the showier manoeuvres that can be attempted on film. There’s the technical aspect: Getting one actor, twice, into the same frame — or cutting to fool the mind into thinking that’s so — is inevitably showy. And, too, there’s the way it maximizes the performer, giving opportunities for more acting as — from Nicolas Cage in Adaptation to James Franco in The Deuce to, yes, Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap, performers amp up the differences in their dual portrayals. All those actors capitalized, hugely, on the chance to create divergent characters who shared every physical detail, but little more.
Mark Ruffalo, playing twins Dominick and Thomas Birdsey, is given ample raw material:
The script, based on Wally Lamb’s novel, places Dominick, a relatively even-keeled fellow, in perpetual counterpoint to Thomas, whom we first meet when he cuts off his own hand in a public library. It’s an act of ritual sacrifice that Thomas believes will end the then-ongoing first Gulf War, and it’s also a way for the viewer to distinguish between two brothers. But when we see Dominick by Thomas’s bedside in the hospital, commonalities emerge. Dominick, acceding to Thomas’s request that doctors not attempt to reattach the severed hand, bears an attitude of irredeemable sadness that seems to share a border with Thomas’s ecstatic brokenness. Both brothers carry the weight of the world; Ruffalo, playing off himself, illuminates how they shoulder it differently even as he reveals the simple fact that the burden is indeed shared.
Ruffalo’s performances carry the series. This is his two-man show, with supporting characters glimmering in and out. In the main action, Dominick is providing care to Thomas, a brother who has for his entire life represented both a responsibility and a very rare source of mutual support, however conditional. Dominick is also recalling their entire story: Transported by memory, he examines the collapse of his marriage (with his ex-wife, Dessa, played by Kathryn Hahn, wrenching and mordant as ever) following the sudden death of their daughter. He further delves into the history of their family, from recent times, with a mother (Melissa Leo) ill from and eventually felled by cancer, to the farther-flung. Dominick hires a translator (Juliette Lewis) to interpret his grandfather’s handwritten memoir and, in so doing, finds out about the recurrence of twins throughout his ancestral line.
The show may, perhaps, be too effective for its own good at inhabiting Dominick’s mind. In its here-there-and-everywhere approach to the incidents of his life, it mirrors the thoughts of a person panicked by a situation coming to a head. But audiences could be forgiven, especially watching episodes on a weekly basis, for wondering what it all adds up to.
A reveal late in the run purports to be the solution to a mystery the viewer may not have known was even pertinent to the plot line.