Critic's chair: Guy Somerset on Kate Winslet's return as a tough detective in Mare of Easttown
On the whole Mare of Easttown isn’t what you would call a ‘meta’ kind of show. There is more humour in it than you might think given the grimness of its plotlines and characters’ lives. But it isn’t humour of a playfully self-referential kind.
There is a line, however, in the first episode that not only epitomises the bone-dryness of the humour but also speaks to the nature of the show itself.
Mare of Easttown is set in the Pennsylvania township of the title and stars Kate Winslet as Mare, a detective burdened with more woes than most and wearing a permanent scowl as she blunders impetuously and pig-headedly through one bad decision after another. (And yes, Winslet, a Brit, totally nails the by-all-accounts very difficult Pennsylvania accent.)
The show marks Winslet’s much-vaunted return to HBO after her award-winning turn in the title role of director Todd Haynes’s 2011 mini-series adaptation of James M Cain’s 1941 potboiler Mildred Pierce. The role was played previously by Joan Crawford, who won an Oscar for it.
Among the many high points of Haynes’ five-parter was Guy Pearce’s performance opposite Winslet as a scoundrel lounge lizard on the make.
The other heralded aspect of Mare of Easttown is it reunites Winslet with Pearce, who plays a creative writing teacher who has burnt out after his one, albeit National Book Award-winning, novel in the 1990s.
A measure of the novel’s success, Pearce’s Richard Ryan tells Mare as he tries to pick her up in a bar, is it was made into a TV movie starring Jill Eikenberry. Mare’s not heard of her.
I never said it was going to be a belly laugh, but the line is a beautifully observed one about what once passed for prestige television in the United States.
Nowadays, rather than former down-cast stars of LA Law, television gets the stellar likes of Winslet, Pearce and many more besides.
But whereas Mildred Pierce wore its mantle of prestige television well, it sits more uncomfortably atop Mare of Easttown.
The performances and direction – by Craig Zobel – certainly merit it and so does much of creator Brad Ingelsby’s dialogue and other writing.
But the story – of the year-old unsolved disappearance of one young woman and then the fresh murder of another – and a lot of the related plot developments are a tad stale.
Even one of the show’s greatest strengths – how it unravels the threadbare fabric of the Easttown community in the wake of the murders – has been a staple device of many dramas since Broadchurch templated it in 2013.
Mare of Easttown casts our suspicions wide and the viewer can’t help but feel played.
Oddly, given his role in Mildred Pierce, Guy Pearce’s Richard is one of the few characters who appear beyond reproach. So far, at any rate, after previewing five of the seven episodes.
In fact, Pearce is a bit of a red herring altogether, featuring only peripherally and seeming to have wandered in from an entirely different show as Winslet’s dashingly haired occasional love interest. As if to emphasise the point, when Winslet goes on a date with him she transforms from the dour and badly dressed Mare into the sort of gowns and luminescence we are familiar with from Winslet on the sofa of The Graham Norton Show.
Richard is going to have to up his game considerably in the last two episodes if he’s going to even approach Pearce’s rotter in Mildred Pierce. He does seem too good to be true, but still …
The real double act – and source of most of the humour – in Mare of Easttown is the perpetually sniping one between Mare and Jean Smart as her mother Helen.
Mare shares her home with Helen, as well as Mare’s teenage daughter and young grandson. Mare’s ex lives with his new partner in the house out back. The set-up and bickering banter and melodrama it entails have a touch of the cutesy complicated home lives meant to add character to detectives in long-running network procedural shows.
But Winslet and Smart in particular, but also the others, especially Angourie Rice as daughter Siobhan, transcend this.
(Rice, incidentally, like Pearce, is Australian. Don’t the Americans have their own actors anymore?)
Mothers and daughters, and sons, is the central theme of Mare of Easttown.
The power of longstanding female friendship, the disappointments of how life turns out, the devastation wrought by drugs – these are others.
Long-running network procedurals don’t really do themes, so Mare of Easttown is clearly more than one of those. But not as much more as it could be.
It would have been refreshing to view this family and wider community without the murders propping up the show. It is telling that the most shocking and upsetting aspect of the first episode isn’t actually the murder that ends it.
Prestige television hasn’t just evolved from starring Jill Eikenberry to starring Kate Winslet. It has in many cases also devolved from being adaptations of National Book Award winners to being yet another run-of-the-mill murder investigation. Mare of Easttown‘s is an exceptionally well-executed and highly watchable investigation. But then so are those in CSI.
Mare, however, would sympathise with Winslet and Pearce about the difficulties of repeating success.
At one point, she tells the parachuted-in newcomer (Evan Peters) with whom she is forcibly partnered and has a sweet mutually supportive relationship: “Doing something great is overrated. Because then they expect that from you all the time.”
This time they have landed somewhere short of greatness, but Easttown is for all that a place you should visit.
Mare of Easttown (first two episodes available now on Neon, remaining episodes each Monday).
