Cumberbatch dazzles in this stylish take on 1980s excess
News that a TV adaptation of the Patrick Melrose novels was in the works quite rightly raised some eyebrows. Edward St Aubyn’s pentalogy, a semi-autobiographical series about a young aristocratic addict who was abused by his father, would surely be impossible to film. The stories are all character rather than plot, and most of their strength comes from St Aubyn’s merciless prose, which captures Patrick’s broken interior with riveting exactitude.
Lucky the first episode of Patrick
Melrose, based on the book Bad News, which aired on Sky Atlantic last night, renders all fears misplaced. From the first scene, in which a groggy Patrick (Benedict Cumberbatch) answered the phone to learn his father had died in New York, everything clicked. David Nicholls’s script was impressively faithful to its source, while Edward Berger’s direction beautifully captured the novels’ icy stylishness: the austere English tailoring, the opulent hotel bathrooms, the oppressive earlyeighties Manhattan restaurants.
At the centre of it all was Cumberbatch. His features are now so familiar, it’s easy to forget that before Sherlock and Star Trek and Doctor Strange there was just a young actor with amazing range and depth. As Melrose travelled to New York to collect his old man and embark on a Herculean drink and drugs binge, Cumberbatch deployed his whole bag of tricks: dozens of different voices, withering humour, self-pity, elation, lust, suicidal misery, confusion, loathing, affection, sometimes all within a sentence or a single word.
Even the intoxication stayed the right side of pastiche. Those who saw Leonardo Dicaprio’s Quaalude “walk” in The Wolf of Wall Street might have thought the genre had been mastered, but Cumberbatch trumps him there, too. There were other actors, other characters – especially Hugo Weaving as the hideous Melrose Snr – but they hardly got a look in. The men and women around Patrick tolerate him, more or less, because of his princely bearing and the money in his pocket, but he cannot forgive himself.
Plenty will find the same problems here that critics had with St Aubyn’s novels: that it’s a superficial, uneventful and self-indulgent parade of posh people making problems for themselves. Most will see a brutal, funny, virtuosic examination of how the mind, under stress, can make a torture chamber of the most gilded surroundings. Ed Cumming
If you hadn’t heard of Donald Glover last week, chances are you have now. On Saturday night, the cultural polymath released the state-of-the-nation track This Is America under his rap alias Childish Gambino. By Monday, the accompanying music video had become the most talked-about in recent memory, by turns satirical and polemical in its exploration of gun crime and racial tensions. Even the Today programme pored over the lyrics and provocative imagery.
BBC Two must be delighted. Indeed, since it bought the rights to
Atlanta, the show’s creator and star has graduated from critical darling – adored by anyone who watched the cult US comedy Community – to global sensation. Admittedly, series one of Atlanta isn’t exactly new; it aired on Fox in 2016. But those who missed it then would be wise to catch it now on terrestrial TV. Offbeat and richly nuanced, it unfolds at a meditative pace while making sharp observations about pop culture, capitalism and crime. There aren’t jokes or set-ups – yet it’s very funny, the deadpan exchanges perfectly judged.
At heart, Atlanta is about a broke, down-on-his-luck Princeton dropout called Earn (Glover) and his efforts to kick-start a music-management career by representing his cousin Paper Boi Miles (Brian Tyree Henry), a talented local rapper who sells drugs to make ends meet. As was the case in last night’s opening double-bill, it’s a show that feels authentic, and has fleeting moments of vituperation in its analysis of American racial attitudes – there was a toe-curling scene, for example, in which a white radio-station employee felt completely at ease saying the N-word to Earn.
In the lead role, Glover is superb, possessed of a kind languid charm that allows the actors around him to thrive: Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out), especially, whose philosophical stoner Darius is brilliantly off-centre. Yes, it occasionally feels a little too pleased with itself, but ultimately Atlanta is timely, atmospheric and potent – much like This Is America.
Patrick Smith
Patrick Melrose ★★★★★
Atlanta ★★★★