12/28/2022 0 Comments True detective season 1 reviewsHays is visited by a vision from the past that asks him: “Did you confuse reacting with feeling? Did you mistake compulsion for freedom?” Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil?Īs compelling as Hays is, the season struggles with its supporting characters. I don’t want to be here.” They’re the words of the elder Hays, speaking to the film crew, overcome by the burden of his history.īut as the episodes wear on (the first two, evocatively directed by Jeremy Saulnier, air Sunday), they become more dour, and some of the old pretensions return. In the premiere episode, his 1980 self, while combing a house for clues, pauses, stares into the camera and says: “I’m ready to go now. We’re not so much flashing back and forward in time as joining the elder Hays - who hangs on to his memory by recording messages to himself - while he wanders about in his past. The dementia twist complicates a familiar story. (“You know how many times rats almost ended civilization?” Hays asks, in a tangent about vermin. The dialogue is more streamlined but keeps the leavening banter. Overacting, or at least speechifying, is another matter, and both Ali and Pizzolatto (who writes the first five episodes, with an assist from David Milch of “Deadwood” in Episode 4) rein it in. Of course, acting talent has never been the problem with “True Detective,” give or take a miscast Vince Vaughn. (The season’s exploration of race is intriguing but can feel forced, like the treatment of gender in Season 2.) In 2015, he is shaky and guarded, his memories splintered by dementia, as he tries to recall the case, and what may have gone wrong, for a “Making a Murderer”-style documentary. But the show really belongs to Ali (who just won a Golden Globe for “Green Book”), and he’s coolly magnetic.Īs Hays in 1980, he has a dry, outsider affect he served in Vietnam as a solo reconnaissance tracker, and as a black man in a largely white community, he stands apart. The season is nominally a story of partners, as if to keep up the tradition (and honor all those “True Detective 3” internet memes). They crack the story open like a rotting log, and all manner of sadness scurries out: the local dead-enders who come under suspicion, the spiraling marriage of the children’s parents, Tom (Scoot McNairy) and Lucy Purcell (Mamie Gummer). The new story returns to the South, a scrubby, hard-luck patch of Arkansas where the partners Hays and West catch a case involving two children who disappeared on a bike ride.
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