Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
‘The Gilded Age’ is all surface and no shine
IT TAKES a certain amount of wilful cluelessness to pilfer a designation meant to underscore the extreme inequality of a historical epoch – one in which the rich got obscenely richer and the poor got desperately poorer – and re-appropriate it as the name of a vehicle for wealth porn. And yet here we are with the escapist new period drama The Gilded Age, which takes as its chief concern the pearl-clutching clash between old and new money in 19th-century New York high society.
Creator Julian Fellowes, who delivers his long awaited follow-up to Downton Abbey here, is naturally taken by the surface, rather than the rot underneath. And so his cameras sweep and gawk over all that an HBO budget can buy: homes that could be mistaken for a royal palace; jewels that would induce mass hysteria in magpies; a beaded cape, worn to the symphony, that makes the fairy-tale train of Princess Diana’s wedding gown look like wrinkled shmatte.
The series’s headlining star is Carrie Coon, who’s trapped in an iciness from which Fellowes barely lets her stir. (She’s hardly alone; the sprawling cast is chocka-block with beloved actors, nearly all saddled with frustratingly underwritten characters.) Coon plays Bertha Russell, a relentless and monomaniacal social climber who, a century later, could’ve been an especially cold-blooded CEO of a Fortune 500 firm. But as a woman of the 1880s, Bertha must channel her energies into raising the standing of her family. With her railroad-tycoon husband George (Morgan Spector), she schemes to carve out, with a bejewelled shiv if necessary, a place for the Russells among the fading but still venomously snobby Upper East Side aristocracy.
The Gilded Age opens with Bertha, George and their younger child, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) moving into their newly built, architecturally defiant manor on 61st Street. Their haughty neighbours across the street, the widowed Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and her spinster sister Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon), won’t deign to step foot in the Russells’ home in the 80-minute pilot, nor in the four episodes after that. (The first season consists of nine instalments.) But as we learn from the get-go, the tight-lipped Agnes, a native of rural Pennsylvania, only married into old money herself, and her unhappy union, though short on details, is testament to the fact that the mouldiness of a fortune has no bearing on the morality of its owner. You
might expect Fellowes to do something compelling or layered with this naked hypocrisy, but you’d be mistaken.
The younger generation isn’t so tangled up in the prejudices of their parents. Agnes’s son, Oscar (Blake Ritson), who inherited his mother’s sharp tongue, would like nothing more than Gladys’s hand – and the purse strings that come with it. (He plans out an entire lifetime with his would-be wife, an innocent he presumes would be easily kept in the dark about his unconventional sexual pursuits.) Even bolder are the transgressions of Agnes and Ada’s orphaned niece Marian (Louisa Jacobson, the youngest of Meryl Streep’s daughters), a recent arrival to New York stuck in an impossible situation: having to marry among her aunts’ upper crust without the deep pockets to make her a desirable candidate for the merger of assets that such suitors would seek.
Marian comes to New York with a vague goal of pursuing a profession. She’s quickly outpaced in ambition and achievement by Peggy (Denée Benton),
a fellow passenger on the train from Pennsylvania who, by happenstance, ends up working as Agnes’s secretary while chasing her literary dreams. Like so many on The Gilded Age, Peggy harbours a secret – one that explains why she prefers the servants’ quarters at the Van Rhijn-Brooks estate, where the maids bristle that a black woman like herself holds a superior position in the household, to the Brooklyn home of her parents (Audra McDonald and John Douglas Thompson).
It’s difficult to parse what exactly The Gilded Age adds to HBO’s roster of shows about terrible rich people, the latter a symptom of our own gilded era, in which the most consistent protest we can seemingly muster up is to make TV shows about how miserable our overlords must be on their private planes. Fellowes chronicles his characters’ myopia, but he doesn’t quite critique it; he wants us to care about whether Bertha will get a chance to meet and curry the favour of the fabled Mrs Astor, the grande dame of the
elite. (In its worst moments,
The Gilded Age just feels like an oldtimey version of Mean Girls.)
Perhaps the female audience is supposed to take delight in the fact that the power players in this world are mostly women, but that skewed vision of history only emphasises how much these initial chapters soft-pedal the noxious and manifold bigotries of the era. Unconvincingly, the only victims of the runaway capitalism of the late 19th century seem to be other rich people, punished for their underhanded avarice.
There’s no doubt that years of research went into crafting The Gilded Age, and yet there’s a certain American
je ne sais quoi, as well as a sense of historical specificity, that’s conspicuously lacking. The divisions between old and new money that drive the show, for instance, were surely informed by ethnic, denominational and ideological differences.
But if The Gilded Age isn’t a serious show, it’s not a reliably entertaining one, either. Sure, the sets and costumes and gewgaws are fun to look at. But it’s also dispiriting to watch so many talented stars get so little meat to chew on. In the end, Fellowes can only offer what he’s most fascinated by: the gleaming gilt. |