SATIRE IN SEARCH OF A TARGET
Absurdist excess is both a strength and weakness in series with talent for obvious
We know Kate Winslet can play sad women. The queen of the HBO miniseries such as Mildred Pierce and Mare of Easttown has repeatedly delivered indelible, textured, riveting performances that reward repeated viewings.
If you've seen her in the Ricky Gervais show Extras, you know Winslet also happens to be hilarious, and you may have wondered, as I have, when she'd finally let her funny side loose.
Enter The Regime, HBO's six-episode miniseries about the messy dictator of a collapsing central European nation rich in cobalt and sugar beets, and an overdue showcase for Winslet's comedy chops. The series follows Winslet as Chancellor Elena Vernham, a charismatic demagogue too busy battling a mostly invented illness to tend to her (fictional) nation's economic woes. Largely confined to the palace, she's tended by her submissive husband, Nicky (Guillaume Gallienne), and a crew of backbiting advisers who indulge her whims. Her most recent delusion — a mould infestation Elena insists is destroying her health — spurs her to summon a disgraced military officer, Corporal
Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), to the palace to serve as her new moisture-measurer.
Winslet's grasp of the character is immediate, idiosyncratic and complete. Nonsensical, erratic and compelling, Elena winds up totally captivating Zubak. And his devotion to her health, eventually makes him her confidant. He edges out her husband, undermines her classist but otherwise nondescript advisers and prevails on Elena to pivot toward populist policies. Matters develop and devolve amusingly enough, with Winslet and Schoenaerts' chemistry escalating into codependent insanity until the show gets — for this viewer, at least — a little too dark and consequential to sustain the comedy at which it genuinely excels.
The Regime boasts an impressive pedigree. Creator and showrunner Will Tracy, a former editor in chief of The Onion, made The Menu and worked on Succession. Directors Jessica Hobbs (who directed episodes of The Crown) and Stephen Frears (who directed the 2006 film The Queen and the 2017 historical drama Victoria & Abdul) have both demonstrated a long-standing interest in female rulers. The Regime feels like a collective (and ribald) overcorrection to much of this former work.
As for Tracy, besides working on Succession which borrowed heavily from real-life circumstances (being based on the Murdochs), one senses, in The Regime, a creative mind rebelling against the limitations any specific referent (or reality principle) might impose. Tracy, who makes a hobby of researching dictators, deliberately expunged anything in the series that could be construed as a parallel to realworld events. Also discernible is a desire to turn the volume up on the absurd aspects of kleptocracy.
As for Hobbs and especially Frears: Having spent countless hours on stories about respectable English queens operating within tight and sometimes punitive constraints, perhaps there's some pleasure in getting to direct a libidinal female ruler who governs recklessly, from the id.
Understandable impulses, but they're also reactive rather than generative — and likely to produce something that might have been more gratifying to make than it is to watch.
That said, the absurdity and excess of dictatorship is a rich subject! So is the slow devolution of an autocrat. There's the paranoia to consider. The strange, embarrassing iconography. The codependency with — and resentment of — various yesmen. It's genuinely interesting to wonder what a female version of this might look like. The Regime suggests she might be pettily obsessed with how often her name appears in American headlines. She might wear skin-tight dresses with military lapels, sing off-key and — if conditions are right — eat dirt.
Bizarre and tantalizing details — but they don't add up to anything resembling a political story.
As ideological commentary, in other words, the series ends up more hobbled than potentiated by its fictional aspects. That doesn't seem to be what Tracy wanted. “It's an imaginary country, but it hopefully feels as though it's taking place within a geopolitical reality that we would recognize, and that it says something about how foreign policy works and how these regimes thrive and operate,” he recently told The Hollywood Reporter. He has also described The Regime as a satire, a fairy tale and a love story. Those are not, in this show at least, compatible modes.
The commitment to non-specificity, combined with the absurdist excess that makes The Regime funny, produces a series so careful not to say anything in particular that it feels more like a cathartic exercise than a standalone story.
As comedy, The Regime has a lot to offer. But satire is a parasitic medium. It requires a target. By insisting on its independence from any real-world government, The Regime (like Elena Vernham) risks getting so invested in making a spectacle it ends up standing for nothing.