Review Thursday: My new favorite show

I remember seeing the warnings posted around "campus" when I was a student at NYU. Beware a well-dressed woman who claims she's found a wallet right near you. Beware when she asks you to hold onto the money until they can find the owner of the wallet. Be especially on guard when some other stranger become involved in the debate. These notices appeared frequently one year. They told a little story about gullibity, street theater and greed, for they outlined the specifics of a con called the "pigeon drop" which has been around since the Depression.

I found the notices as compelling as a soap opera in miniature. I follow them avidly, and began to do my own research on this kind of American folk hero, the con man. I read books like the Big Con and watched movies like The Sting and David Mamet's wonderful House of Games. In short, I was totally obsessed with con artistry.

And you could chalk my ardor for the FX series the Riches to that initial obsession, but in fact I think there is much more to it than that. It's a show about the American version of the gypsies, the Traveller clan, and concerns a family of grifters headed by Eddie Izzard as Wayne Molloy. Overall, the show's definitely got a little FX low-budge clunkiness in terms of the writing and production value. But Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard are both sensational in completely unique ways, and together they are a force to be reckoned with. Who knew that two Brits would play a couple of white trash Southern thieves so soulfully and convincingly?

The Riches starts out with Driver's character Dahlia getting out of prison after two years. Driver as Dahlia actually looks like someone coming out of prison, not a dressed-down movie star, and her performance in the series is continually rich and surprising. She bears both the wounds of being let down by Wayne, and also the drug habit she picked up in prison, and often the pain she's able to express in the role in wrenching.

That's not to say the show is depressing; to the contrary it's often hilarious. Part of it is the fish out of water premise--through a twist of fate, the Molloy family assumes the identity of a pair of wealthy suburbanites, the Riches of the title. Part of the humor comes through Izzard's hilarious, charismatic performance. He discovers the man he's playing is a securities lawyer, and goes so far as to con his way into a job. One further surprise about the show is that Wayne Molloy et al are not the best con artists. Much of the fun is watching them fail and weasel their way out of another mess. It's cheesy, but I guess that's what makes them so "relatable" and appealing.

Even when the script falters, Driver and Izzard pull it up through their talent and chemistry. And I think that a lot like another one of my favorite shows, Weeds, the casting here is really superb, from Margo Martindale as a pill-popping neighbor married to a gay man to Hartley Underwood as the high-strung, one armed neighborhood bitch. I've been watching the first season on DVDs-through-the-mail, and I highly recommend it for anyone who likes a good dark comedy with indelible characters.

Picture Monday: Top Secret Attack Band in Prospect Park

IMG_0185, originally uploaded by Brooklyn Bridge.

Perseverance

I don’t like walking around with a chair on my head. If given the choice, I’d prefer not to crazily wave my arms around and make animal noises. If you ask me to do an interpretative dance about a flower rising from the ground, I might just stand there, staring at the floor, wishing I could disappear.

So then what was I doing in an acting class? I’d always considered myself a “serious” writer and filmmaker, someone who could weave words or bits of film together into a seamless whole, so imagine how naked I felt when I had to leave those props behind in a special acting class for film students at NYU called “the Actor’s Craft”? I know I was completely out of my element with the improv games and the yodeling contests until the teacher asked us each to bring in a story. We were to perform a monologue about our “defining moment.” This, I could handle. I was a serious writer, after all.

I thought about one particular moment when I was ten years old, and I really wanted to play basketball. I thought about what I found when I showed up at the first day of practice at the City Civic Center Youth league: seven boys and the coach staring back at me as I entered the gym. I barely knew the difference between a point guard and a forward, except that one of them was supposed to be in the front, and suddenly I found myself in a group of boys who seemed to have basketball hardwired to their brains. I wasn’t sure which was more intimidating, running with these guys during games, desperately trying to find a footing, or afterwards, when I would head off by myself to the decrepit and disused women’s locker room. I remembered leaving that silent and empty space, going home and begging my parents to let me quit. They reminded me that I was the one who signed up, and so I would have to follow through with my intentions and play out the entire season.

It was this last part that I focused on in my presentation to Actor’s Craft. I skimmed over the misery and told the class about how the experience had defined my sense of determination. Every good story needs a driving theme, and I was sure that mine had one, something important about perseverance in the face of a challenge, stick-to-it-tiveness, never-give-up-and-you-can-achieve-anything-ness. Because if this story were a TV movie, could it end with anything other than this brash ten-year-old misfit sinking the game-winning three-pointer? Good stories demand creative license, drama, and by God, that was something I was prepared to deliver.

The teacher of Actor’s Craft didn’t ask for the TV movie version, though she did want us to use our defining moments for something that might demand a little creativity. She was going to assign each of us a partner, and we would meld our “defining moments” into something new and improvisatory. The details of the assignment grew hazy as I realized that I was to be paired up with my secret class crush: a brilliant flame-haired film student named Mike. I decided that I could learn to like this improv thing. The beauty of the actor’s craft was opening up to me, now that I could use it finesse a romantic subplot into the mix.

I went over to his dorm one night after class. I ignored the Grateful Dead he had playing in the background—I wasn’t going to let it spoil the mood as both of us circled in on each other’s “defining moments”. His was suitably grand and cinematic: he remembered watching the aurora borealis from the top of some mountain in Canada that he had hiked to with a Deadhead pal of his. Mike had been absent the day of my basketball monologue, so I told him the whole story.

I could see him thinking about it, as Jerry and the gang grooved on behind us. “I know it might be hard for you to relate to being the lone girl on all-boys basketball team. But really, it’s a story about . . .” I began. I could see that now was the time for self-revelation. And I decided to give him the real, unvarnished me, and not the TV movie version. “It’s a story about being . . . an outsider,” I finally said.

He thought about it, really tried to delve into his mental files of experience. For Mike was a “method” man; besides being a talented filmmaker, he had this acting thing down pat. He had no problem walking around with a chair on his head.

He scrunched up his face and frowned. “It’s just that—“ he began. “It’s just that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that.”

I looked into his bright green eyes and they just didn’t seem as compelling. I was prepared to overlook the Grateful Dead thing, the tie-dyed shirts, the fact that he was just a touch, okay, maybe a lot shorter than me. But this? He had never felt like an outsider? My crush burned away like the cone of incense he had stationed on his tapestry-covered dresser. I could see now that we would never unite.

Still, our stories had to. “That’s okay,” I said. “Because, you know, it can be looked at in a different way, as a story about . . . perseverance.”

“Perseverance . . . okay,” he repeated. “So what about we’re both playing basketball, but we’re like really committed to the game, only the aurora borealis is up in the sky above us, while we’re playing . . .”

There’s always room for revision. An inept ten-year-old basketball player had gotten cut and so had my budding infatuation, but Mike still held out the promise of a happy ending. And as our newly minted universe lit up and took a life of its own, it was a small consolation but a real one: two happy hippies playing basketball with dogged determination while the Aurora Borealis glittered above them, the offspring of a union that was never meant to be.