It’s not a formula that’s in vogue these days: a protagonist doing horrible things, forcing the viewer into the uncomfortable paradox of rooting for his comeuppance, but simultaneously dreading it because, after all, this is the main character. It reminds me of 70s cinema, and specifically something like French Connection, where Popeye Doyle does terrible things and is brought low by his choices. Or Sorcerer, where the men’s quiet desperation, a result of their misdeeds, turns explosive. Surely it’s no coincidence that the brothers in Black Rabbit are named Friedkin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Black Rabbit’s grit — perhaps there was once a white rabbit under here? — is also very 70s. Not just the tone of its grimly inevitable plot, but its relentless urban setting. The Friedkin brothers are constantly hemmed in by New York City, jammed shoulder to shoulder with other characters. The dense cinematography loves long shots filled to the frame with bystanders and buildings, with the winking lights struggling to illuminate night falling onto New York like a predator. As terrible things happen, the pressure-cooker plot thickens, gets grittier, recalls the edge of 70s cinema and its cruel antiheroes.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The blackly beating heart of this story is the relationship between the Friedkin brothers, vividly brought to life by Jude Law and Jason Bateman’s committed performances. Black Rabbit’s protagonists have spent half a century building lives and then bringing them to precarious tipping points, where they will do the wrong things and dig themselves into holes that will get even deeper. They are backed into increasingly tight corners. Doors shut, options narrow and are lost forever. As they make bad choice after bad choice, they are driven together into a pact of desperation, like two men on a lifeboat with only enough food for one of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And again there’s a duality here as Law and Bateman humanize these horrible men, each willing to lie, to deceive, to sink to meanness, destroying the lives of those they claim to love. Including — especially — each other. We learn what connects them even as we watch them betray that connection. It reminds me of Sydney Lumet’s last movie, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, also about brothers and also a callback to the grim cinema of the 70s. Both that movie and Black Rabbit are the stuff of Greek tragedy writ modern, as grim as fate, as cruel as murdered parents, sons, and brothers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Parts of the series are disappointingly formulaic, but not always. Surprisingly, the hackneyed “one month earlier” title card works, but you might not realize it when it happens. This opening flashforward is a common crutch when a writer or director doesn’t trust that his material is strong enough to grab the viewer’s attention. So he opens with something exciting that will happen later, and then, after a title card, backs up to the beginning of the story. But Black Rabbit’s title card retreat pays off nicely, because by the time the story circles back around, it has filled in some blanks you didn’t know were blank. So six episodes later, but two episodes before it’s over, you’re seeing something new and even surprising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two other formulaic bits almost feel unfair to mention, because they’re so common. Yet that’s precisely why they bother me in the uncommonly good Black Rabbit. One of them is ol’ “soft noggin” trope. This is where someone falls and fatally hits his head, which is used as a plot point of no return. If I were to infer things about human anatomy from movies and TV, it’s that the leading cause of death is falling down or getting knocked over, and fatally hitting your head on a rock, or a side table, or a countertop. In far too many movies and TV shows, this is some stupidly plotted crisis. The good ol’ soft noggin to the rescue, cheaply affording the writer his inciting event. I have fallen many times, often in close proximity to rocks, side tables, and countertops, and I’m still alive. Thousands of years of human evolution have given us thick skulls and autonomic nervous systems that throw out our arms or twist our bodies to protect us when we fall. Yet so many writers, at a loss for how to proceed, resort to implausibly soft noggins to advance their stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another common storytelling problem is the ending. Not the climax, which Black Rabbit nails. But everything after. A friend of mine says that American movies end ten minutes too late. His point is that too many modern storytellers feel the need to explain everything in the end, and to furthermore wrap it up with a comforting epilogue or denouement. Leaving the audience with an uncomfortable and unresolved high-note is a lost art. Everyone needs to go home happy and fully informed. No one should ever have to say “I don’t get it”, or have to consider ambiguities or suffer unresolved tension. So American movies take another ten minutes to make sure that doesn’t happen. If you haven’t overexplained, the thinking goes, you’ve underdelivered. Black Rabbit, being a series instead of a movie, ends thirty minutes too late. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But otherwise, it’s keenly plotted across its eight episodes, and to my surprise, it didn’t drag. The flashbacks are used sparingly. It maintains and even escalates its pressure-cooker pace as things go from bad to worse to still worse. As an eight-episode series, Black Rabbit has room to breathe and run, but it doesn’t deflate or stray. Last thirty minutes excepted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s not a formula that’s in vogue these days: a protagonist doing horrible things, forcing the viewer into the uncomfortable paradox of rooting for his comeuppance, but simultaneously dreading it because, after all, this is the main character. It reminds me of 70s cinema, and specifically something like French Connection, where Popeye Doyle does terrible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-television"],"yoast_head":"\n