Season 1, Episode 1: ‘Chapter One’
The protagonist of more than 80 novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, the star of radio plays and TV movies and a long-running series starring Raymond Burr, the subject of a pretty good Ozzy Osbourne song: Perry Mason has seen many incarnations since his 1933 creation.
But the prestige-television version of the character for HBO, played by Matthew Rhys and brought to you by the co-creators and co-writers Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald, is not your father’s Perry Mason. Or your grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s, for that matter. As seen in the premiere episode of the new “Perry Mason,” he’s not even a criminal defense lawyer yet. He’s closer to the “criminal” end of that descriptor than the “lawyer” one, in fact.
As played by Rhys, the gifted co-star of FX’s grim, great spy thriller “The Americans,” Perry is what you might call a hard-luck case. A veteran of World War I (World War II lies eight years in the future) who lives on his family’s decrepit dairy farm, he has a 9-year-old son he doesn’t see and an ex-wife who can’t stand him. He ekes out a living as a private investigator, tailing a Fatty Arbuckle-type actor on behalf of a movie studio hoping to catch him in a morals-clause violation — then landing himself in hot water when he tries to charge the studio more money after catching an up-and-coming starlet in the act as well.
Mason’s inner circle includes his jovial partner, Pete Strickland (Shea Whigham); E.B. Jonathan (John Lithgow), an attorney who hooks him up with jobs; Della Street (Juliet Rylance), Jonathan’s legal secretary; and Lupe (Veronica Falcón), a pilot with whom he has extremely enthusiastic sex … when she isn’t busy trying to buy his farm in order to make room for the airstrip from which she operates.
It’s through E.B. that Perry lands the case that kick-starts the episode, in gruesome fashion. In a sequence directed with sinister verve by the HBO mainstay Tim Van Patten (“The Sopranos,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “Game of Thrones,” you name it), the parents of baby Charlie Dodson race to rescue their son from kidnappers who’ve placed him on the Angels Flight railway, promising to free him in exchange for an exorbitant ransom. When his mom and dad retrieve him, they discover, to their horror, that he is already dead, and that his eyes have been sewn open. (Yeah, we’re a long way from Raymond Burr.)
Perry and company come to the case by way of the wealthy lumber magnate Herman Baggerly (Robert Patrick), a member of the parents’ church, led by a charismatic figure called Sister Alice. As he investigates, Mason runs afoul of the Los Angeles Police Department detectives assigned to the case.
“I don’t trust the Los Angeles Police Department to do the job that’s needed,” Baggerly says. In today’s climate, that line packs a punch — even before we see one of those detectives execute the cabal of kidnappers, with whom it’s clear he was in cahoots, in cold blood.
Corruption, torture, murder, full-frontal nudity, foul mouths, a dead baby: “Perry Mason” boasts the full complement of HBO’s genre-revisionist techniques. But Rhys is the glue holding it all together. I can’t recall the last time I saw a lead performance this embodied, for lack of a better word; Rhys’s every glance, expression and gesture seems made of weariness the way Abraham Lincoln’s cabin was made out of logs. Credit must also go to the costume department, led by Emma Potter, who dress him exclusively in clothes that look as if they were pulled out of the hamper into which they were tossed three days earlier. When we discover that Mason bribes the mortician in order to steal clothes worn by people who have died in them, Yeah, that sounds about right is the only appropriate response.
And Rhys’s performance as Perry isn’t just empty, woe-is-me sad-sackery. Perhaps it’s his alluded-to experiences in the Great War bleeding through, but he comes across like a man who is the way he is because the awfulness of the world really, really gets to him. (“Worst thing you’ve ever seen,” the mortician tells him about the dead baby. “What do you know what I’ve seen?” comes the reply.) When Perry examines the baby’s mutilated corpse, delicately extracting a thread used to stitch the infant’s eyes open, the camera lingers on his face as he chokes back horror and sorrow. A slight tremor of the lower lip is the only physical catharsis his body allows him.
It’s that shot, more than anything else, that sold me on this version of the character and his journey through Los Angeles’s 1930s underbelly. Any show that kills a child owes it to its audience to take that killing seriously; this sounds like a truism, but such killings can provide cheap pathos and shock value in unscrupulous hands. Despite its Hollywood glitz and Perry’s Murphy’s Law antics, “Perry Mason” is, at first blush, a show that understands the gravity of what it has chosen to present to both its protagonist and its audience.
It’s also a show that provides the viewer with some unalloyed pleasures. I, personally, am a sucker for the lilt of Lithgow’s voice, and I’ll watch Whigham act in just about anything. Van Patten directs the episode with verve, eschewing the more staid tones of typical prestige fare.
Similarly, the jazzy score by Terence Blanchard stands in stark relief against both the symphonic approach and the burbly synths that have become the industry standard. “Perry Mason” doesn’t really look or sound or feel like anything else on television right now. That’s a case I’m willing to take.
From the case files:
“Everybody’s up to something. Everybody’s got an angle, hiding something. And everybody is guilty.” This drunken rant by Perry, delivered to his love interest Lupe, sure sounds like a mission statement for the show to me.
Gayle Rankin does excellent work as Emily Dodson, the slain baby’s mother. Her scene with Mason, in which she IDs him as a veteran from the way he holds his cigarette — instinctively shielding the ember with his hand to avoid being seen in the dark —and ruefully remarks on his son’s age, is appropriately painful to watch.
When the opening title appears above a street scene, Perry walks right through the letters, as if the show can’t wait to get underway. It’s a subtle trick, but it adds a sense of urgency.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
