Crime and punishing dialogue
A boozy legal eagle is a change from psychopathic killers and sex fiends.
It’s easy to feel uneasy as we sit back to unwind of an evening by watching yet another unspeakable psychopath pick off vulnerable members of the herd – often
attractive young women; increasingly, disturbingly, children – for our entertainment.
There’s the innocuous-sounding Marcella on Netflix, in which a normal day at the office involves a hideous array of corpses with their heads in plastic bags. A show has to be profound to get away with a storyline featuring the abduction and murder of a six-year-old girl, whom we see looking terrified in the boot of a car and then in a gruesome mortuary-slab scene. Marcella may be from the creator of Scandi-noir masterpiece The Bridge, but it’s not profound enough to make such scenes seem anything but gratuitous.
Still, the series has a strong cast – Sinéad Cusack as an evil property developer – and a mesmerisingly nightmarish atmosphere. Marcella is a detective, back at work after a long, troubled hiatus, and she’s still a basket case. Anna Friel portrays Marcella’s meltdowns – one in a stopped lift, to add phobiatriggering potential – so convincingly as to bring on an anxiety attack at home. Do I need this? And yet we binge on.
Twin Peaks: The Return and Lightbox’s Swedish thriller Jordskott took the detective show to new levels of supernatural, barking-mad incomprehensibility. Are they metaphors for approaching cataclysms, environmental and/or nuclear? In Twin Peaks, even David Lynch’s shouty, hard-of-hearing character, Gordon Cole, had no idea: “What the hell?” And Lynch wrote the series. We live in unfathomable times and these shows have zero interest in helping us out with that.
As far as this part of the world goes, Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake: China Girl is down with the dark, brooding bewildering zeitgeist, with some Campionesque gender warfare and disturbing sex scenes thrown in. But mostly our crime series are more Brokenwood Mysteries than Broadchurch.
TVNZ 1’s Dear Murderer, the story of real-life legal legend Mike Bungay, won’t trouble your sleep. We open on him putting on his legal robes like a priest donning his vestments. But any resemblance to anything but the most hell-raising cleric ends there. Bungay has got a woman off a charge of murdering her husband. “You can thank me later,” he says, to which she responds by punching him so hard his wig falls off. He gets punched a lot. We move on to the drinking and resultant daunting sex scenes, the courtroom high jinks and some ill-advised middle-aged dancing on tables.
Flashbacks to Bungay’s childhood in wartime Britain – beatings, evacuation, sexual abuse – are offered as pleas in mitigation for all of the above. As Bungay intones tellingly of another client, “The blows that life has dealt him must be taken into account.”
The ubiquitous Mark Mitchinson, who also played Bungay in 2015’s wacky crime romp, How to Murder Your Wife, hams it up as the sort of roaring boy who got away with things back in the day. An alcoholic female advocate who smashed up the place and drove drunk might not have been viewed so indulgently as a bit of a character. Never mind. By the end of episode one, Bungay lands the Bill Sutch spy case. Was this huge? “This is huge!” So huge it required a blast of punishing expository dialogue: “He was head of our delegation to the UN! He’s ex-secretary of industry and bloody commerce! Co-chairman of the Arts Council …” There must be a better way than simply reciting Sutch’s CV.
Still, Dear Murderer trips along giddily, so far, like a flamboyant defence lawyer on the turps. It remains to be seen if Mitchinson will be allowed to delve a bit deeper into a brilliant, flawed man. So far it’s a fairly old-school and unchallenging sort of entertainment. As Bungay says, pouring himself a scotch, “Roll up, roll up.”
DEAR MURDERER, TVNZ 1, Thursday, 8.30pm.
Dear Murderer trips along giddily, like a flamboyant defence lawyer on the turps.