It is a bad day for Miles, a mild-mannered trucker. Not two minutes into the pilot of “Reservation Dogs,” on FX on Hulu, some boosters jack his delivery van, full of Flaming Flamers hot chips. He loses his job. His wife leaves him, taking all his money. As he recounts all this to the owner of a local catfish joint, he laments, “Only thing left in the house was a bag of sugar. Now you know what’s gonna happen. Diabetes.” Unknown to him, the culprits, our Reservation Dogs, are celebrating the caper at a table nearby. Bear, their leader, overhears Miles, and feels remorse. Into the booth he sinks. His guilt takes the shape of an apparition, a sinister-looking Miles, who hisses in his ear, “When I catch your ass, I’m gon kick your ass.”
Created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, “Reservation Dogs” is a near-perfect study of dispossession. Chips are the least of what has been stolen. Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), Cheese (Lane Factor), and Elora (Devery Jacobs) are teen-agers living on a reservation in rural Oklahoma. The madcap quartet harbor pipe dreams of escaping rez life for the foreign land of California. To leave would be to honor the memory of their friend Daniel, who planted the idea in their heads before his death. “We’re saving our money so we can leave this dump before it kills us, too,” Bear narrates, in a home-video montage of their exploits. To finance their trip out West, the kids commit petty theft, like peddling stolen vehicles to meth heads for parts, and swiping steak from the market, so that Willie Jack can sell pies outside a health clinic. The chips get sold, too, to neighbors. That’s how survival works in this small town. Anyone can get got.
Like the series “Search Party,” which spirals unpredictably out of the bounds of the noir genre, “Reservation Dogs” evolves beyond the confines of the heist comedy. The Tarantino reference is front and center, but the show’s general vibe is more influenced by indie movies and hood films, and is reminiscent of the washed-out palette of FX’s “Atlanta,” with occasional swerves into the surreal. From the actors to the crew, the whole operation is run by people of Indigenous descent. The show may boast the single most exciting cast of the fall television season. The acting is confidently slight. As Bear, Woon-A-Tai is a mess of young masculine contradiction, desperate for the attention of his deadbeat father, Punkin Lusty (Sten Joddi), a rapper, and tentative in the embrace of his mother, Rita (Sarah Podemski), who protects Bear from his father’s empty overtures. Jacobs plays Elora as a wounded disciplinarian, keeping everyone on task, and Factor, as Cheese, is the squinty-eyed wise man. Alexis, as Willie Jack, is the true original. Sardonic, ambitious, and a little butch, she is the loner among the loners. Never has “fuck” or “love you, bitch” been mumbled with such spiky finesse. The cool humor of “Reservation Dogs” is a welcome downshift from the look-at-me joke density of some of its peers; it’s the kind of show that never forces a punch line.
The California reverie becomes peripheral. Technically, the eight episodes of this début season are driven forward by the gradual disclosure of the circumstances of Daniel’s death, and by the fallout from some of the group’s get-money schemes. But “Reservation Dogs” is a mood piece, and a sweet one, a collection of intertwined and poetic portraiture that focusses not solely on the central cast. Mentor figures pop up in this meditation on kinship, encouraging the young generation to reconsider home as a portal to their culture, rather than as a dead end. Take “Uncle Brownie,” the third episode. NDN Mafia, a rival crew, is threatening the supremacy of the Reservation Dogs. Elora begs her uncle Brownie, played by Gary Farmer, to teach her and her friends how to fight. (Legend has it that Brownie once took down ten or twenty or thirty men in one night.) Brownie guards his property, warding off intruders, and he smokes fifteen-year-old weed. He is the sort of man whom the group is afraid of becoming. But, in the kids’ presence, Brownie finds himself rejuvenated. He decides to make amends with those he’s hurt by offering them a fine cut of roadkill deer meat. As he pulls the carcass out of a trunk, the animal’s blood squirts onto his face. “I’m sorry, Uncle,” Elora says. “You still would have been home if I hadn’t come to your house.” “Exactly,” he replies, lovingly. “Exactly. I would have still been home.”
“Reservation Dogs” was shot entirely in the Muscogee Nation, and a strong sense of regionality dictates every detail in its compositions. Viewers are brought to the place, not to a facsimile of the place—that would never do, given that land, and who can claim ownership of it, is a central preoccupation. “We’re Indian,” Willie Jack’s father, Leon (Jon Proudstar), lectures her, while on a hunting trip. “We don’t own land.” But the land speaks, helping its inhabitants process personal and historical grief. This is the first trip that Willie Jack and Leon have taken in the year since Daniel died. Daniel, Leon’s nephew and Willie Jack’s cousin, used to join them on these hunts. Willie Jack is fixated on killing Chunk, a gigantic buck that the trio could never nail. Leon tells her why he’s been avoiding this year’s hunting season: after Daniel’s death, Leon encountered a being in the woods—a black mass, covered in hair, with red, glowing eyes. He wonders if he was being haunted by Tall Man, an omen of death.
The creature reminded me of the Monkey Ghost, another haunting, in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives.” Like that film, “Reservation Dogs” is interested in the permeable border between physical and spiritual life. Willie Jack encourages Leon to welcome the beast. What if it’s Daniel’s spirit? The screen goes black and we hear a gunshot, and then we get a glimpse of the felled prize, hanging out of the back of a pickup truck. From the woods, the figure looks on.
“Only Murders in the Building” is another late-summer comedy about the norms of a region, albeit a very different one. Steve Martin and Martin Short have reunited for this parody of the Upper West Side élite—obliquely parodying their own creative legacies—and, to get young audiences to tune in, the team has brought on Selena Gomez. The three play variants of the island snob. Martin and Short do their pas de deux, with Martin as Charles Haden-Savage, a downcast and obsolete actor, and Short as Oliver Putnam, a leechy, rococo theatre director who hasn’t had a hit in years. The two are longtime residents of the Arconia—a fictionalization of the Ansonia building—and in the elevator they encounter Gomez’s Mabel, an affectless illustrator. The three strangers are united by an obsession with a “Serial”-esque podcast, “All Is Not OK in Oklahoma,” which their idol Cinda Canning (Tina Fey) hosts, and by the mysterious death of their neighbor, a businessman named Tim Kono (Julian Cihi), which the police have ruled a suicide. They decide to start their own audio investigation, “Only Murders in the Building,” and go full Hardy Boys, disappearing behind trapdoors and limboing under police tape, to uncover the true cause of Kono’s death.
This ten-episode charmer, streaming on Hulu, is a fine sendup of media culture, in particular the true-crime genre, which makes stars out of corpses. The show was created by Martin and John Hoffman. Is it a vanity project? The production-design department of HBO’s “The Undoing” has nothing on the apartments in this series. An Ed Ruscha, likely owned by Martin, an avid collector, hangs in his enviable green kitchen. A romance ensues between Martin’s character and a bassoonist (Amy Ryan), presumably to give Martin, who plays the concertina, a chance to duet with his crush from the window. But he’s a damn good musician. No deep feelings are stirred, yet the laughs come steadily, especially because of Short, a master at embodying the helpless narcissism of Broadway’s show-biz denizens. He would tap-dance until exhaustion if we requested. ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment