Glossy outlaws
Every generation gets the Bonnie and Clyde it deserves. Arthur Penn’s 1967 American crime film, starring a young Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, spoke to a generation of disaffected young moviegoers during the Vietnam War, the battle for civil rights and a tectonic shift in social and cultural attitudes at the time.
Bonnie and Clyde tore a page from the true-life story of American outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who raised hell across the central U.S. during the Great Depression. Together with Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets and other films, Bonnieand Clyde became the standard bearer for the New Hollywood, a new wave of filmmaking in which young, independent directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola ushered in a new golden age of indie films, made by ambitious, untested film directors working outside the studio system.
Bonnie & Clyde, the new, two-night TV miniseries starring Emile Hirsch and Holliday Grainger in the Beatty and Dunaway roles, is quite different. It’s glossy and handsome where the 1960s film was down ’n’ dirty. It’s made for TV, not the movie theatre. It’s four hours in all, spread over two nights. It’s more talky and less tight. It gets deeper inside the characters — Grainger and Hirsch are fine in their roles — but the overall effect lacks the electricity of the original.
Bonnie & Clyde is worth a look though, even on an absurdly overcrowded Sunday — Masters of Sex, Treme’s final season, new episodes of Revenge and Once Upon a Time, The Amazing Race’s two-hour season finale, Homeland, now winding down its third season, and so on.
Hirsch and Grainger may not have the star wattage and electrifying screen presence of Beatty and Dunaway — yet — but their performances are marvellous. Hirsch, a Topanga, Calif., native, gets Clyde Barrow’s Ellis County, Texas, accent down cold, and Grainger, much changed from her breakout performance in The Borgias, gives Bonnie Parker shades of depth and reserve that go beyond Bonnie & Clyde’s pulp origins. It’s no classic, but Hirsch and Grainger provide reason enough to give it a try. (A&E, 7 and 9 p.m.; History, 10 p.m. Concludes Monday)