It’s good, not great

Kate Winslet can only be described in adjectives and it’s not hyperbole. Winslet, 45, has the kind of classic, resplendent beauty that we often encounter in worldfamous paintings guarded by stanchions and velvet rope. A Rembrandt woman in a Monet setting. The sort of perfection that’s assured, calm but with a story to tell.

Ms Winslet is also talented and prolific. she has acted in about 40+ feature films and several serials, including the 2011 Mildred Pierce and now, Mare of Easttown. In both she plays the title role.

Mare of Easttown is a gently cruising seven-part series about dogged detectives in pursuit of the truth.

Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet), born, brought up, married and divorced in Easttown, is like the town’s representative detective in the prescient. She takes crimes in her town seriously and personally. When she drives around neighbourhoods, she watched over the houses and its people. Her presence is reassuring.

The slow-burn series set in a suburb of Philadelphia, US, creates a warm bond with this town, its people and their problems. Mare and her mother, Helen (Jean Smart), ground the show and carry most of the burden to make the town feel livedin, with a past and a present. Their kitchen-living room, with a couch, a small table next to a fridge with beer and food, chatter about what’s happening in town, feels like the nucleus of the world. We want to stay there, because it’s fun, warm and sustaining.

Since the series dropped, Kate Winslet has been praised for playing a middle aged woman with a grandchild and a sexual appetite. She has also been lauded for telling the director “don’t you dare” when he suggested airbrushing her “bulgy bit of belly” that was showing in a sex scene.

There is much to celebrate about a stunning A-lister actress surrendering to a character that is flawed, makes mistakes, is haunted by their consequences and wants to get lost in Costco T-shirts and oversized check shirts.

For an actress known for her luminous beauty, that takes daring. But also cunning.

There is very little that sets Mare of Easttown apart from other murder mystery series that get top billing on most OTT platforms.

Mare of Easttown is nothing more than a boilerplate detective series. Like most, its story too swirls around raped, missing and dead girls.

Some of the earlier series, in fact, like Bridge, The Killing, Marcella, Happy Valley, Top of the Lake, The Fall — all with women detective protagonists — had better plotting and many of them cared a bit more about their victims.

Mare of Easttown’s plot is usual — one crime is followed by a few more crimes, of which at least one suggests a pattern while the others are intriguingly different. Together they cast suspicion on a wide variety of people — those who do suspicious things, have a doggy past, seem to have a motive, and others who seem incapable of committing the crime and have an alibi.

As the detective, while fighting her own demons and struggling with some personal crisis, goes about investigating clues, alibis and motives, a lot of unraveling takes place in various homes and relationships.

Many men and women in the past have risen similarly over heaps of dead, battered, wronged women. That’s why it is a bit precious to celebrate Kate Winslet or Mare of Easttown as a feminist leap. Especially because the series is totally uninterested in the crimes, and even less so in the victims of these crimes. Its concerns and interests lie with families, units and not the single women who are dead or had gone missing.

After the most dramatic and heart-pounding Episode 5 about two missing girls, Episode 6 simply moves on.

The show briefly visits one girl whose mother’s moral presence was like a dark shadow stalking Mare for a year. But it has no time for the other girl, who was a prostitute and an addict.

Mare of Easttown doesn’t bother to tell us what these women went through, who was the guy who took them.

There was another girl — a single mother with no money and an uncaring father. She got pushed around, beaten, humiliated, and then turned up dead.

A family conspired against her.

But the series has little time for her. Its sympathies lie with the families, the fathers and mothers who stand up to protect their own, even when they commit or cover up crimes. Tears are not shed for dead girls, but for protective mothers. Their suffering, and not actions, is foregrounded, repeatedly.

Even the town’s priest who has a disturbing past gets redemption through suffering and to be the healer of the town.

These flawed characters, this skewed moral core and forgiveness is part of the show’s appeal. But it is no leap in any direction.

Winslet is very talented and her silent, almost stoic exterior is like an invitation to have a conversation with her troubled inner cosmos, and that is a major part of what makes Mare of Easttown worthy of bingewatching.

Also, her beauty. Despite her ugly hair bleach, Kate Winslet is always gorgeous. Even the small bump on her upper lip, her limp pony tail add to her middle-aged sex appeal. The camera is riveted by her beauty that is made more appealing because it’s framed in grunge.

There is no contest for the most daring, unflattering role for the world’s top female filmstars. No prizes are given out to actresses when they refuse to be airbrushed to perfection. But if they were, Nicole Kidman would win hands down with her makeover as the deadbeat, withering detective Erin Bell in that supremely idiotic 2018 film, Destroyer. And for letting all her warts and more show, Jennifer Aniston would also be in the running as a woman in constant pain in the 2014 movie, Cake.

Again, I am not creating a contest here. Just context.