BOARDWALK EMPIRE “21″ Season 2 Episode 1 – Tim Van Patten, one of television’s finest directors, took the helm of the second season’s opener and he directed a whole slew of high calibre actors to top notch performances in what is one of television’s slickest shows. Unfortunately, being a slick show does not make you a cool show, or even a good show. Last year Boardwalk Empire frustrated me: somewhere under the surface there roamed a great show which was so tightly wound it hardly had the chance to breathe. I was hoping that with the second season, the actors and writers would have gotten into a groove, seen the mistakes they made last year, and build up on the excellent twists the finale offered to make a season with even more intrigue, more suspense and way less banality.
Unfortunately, this first episode doesn’t offer a lot of hope for less banality. It’s a perplexing quandary: I mean, this is an episode which, in one of its opening scenes, featured Michael Kenneth William’s Chalky White’s illicit booze shed getting Swiss cheesed by a group from the Klu Klux Klan. You’d expect a plot which started like this, and turned into Nucky playing both the blacks and the whites for fools to his own benefit, would be awesome. But there’s just nothing to care about, and I think it all has to come down to Steve Buscemi’s performance. Buscemi is a great actor. He’s a guy who will swipe a movie right out from under your feet in an amazing supporting role. But here, as the charming, suave, cunning lead gangster/politician, he’s seriously miscast. His role is meant to be a center of gravity, like the midst of a whirlpool around which all things swirl in pandemonium. But Buscemi lacks the gravitas and presence to lead such a production. Looking at the likes of Michael Pitt or Michael Shannon, it’s impossible to believe that Nucky as played by Buscemi would cause either of these guys’ concern.
Without Buscemi’s gravitas, Shannon can often feel like he’s overplaying a role. Thankfully, that’s not the case in this episode as Agent Van Alden gets a visit from his painfully pious wife, who lends Shannon someone he can play off of and, therefore, gives him the space to go a little bigger in his performance. Really, they’re relationship and its awkwardness is something to be relished and I wish she could indeed like in the heathen grounds of Atlantic City, if only to see how she and Paz de la Huerta’s character would manage. Last year I found de la Huerta’s character Lucy insufferable, but after seeing her at award shows and in Gaspar Noe’s stunning film Enter The Void, I’ve a newfound love of de la Huerta’s craziness, which has always been a staple of Lucy and, now that she’s paired up with Van Alden in the show’s most creative pairing, I’ve become a total shipper.
I love Kelly MacDonald but please let me know that she’ll have more in the way of storylines other than weekly visits to her son’s school to interrogate a nun in a terribly modern scene where her character is forced to question a nun – no ultra religious Irish Catholic (and most of them were all zealots, back then) would have dared doubted the authority or the right of a nun to smack their child with a ruler.
Then, I don’t know how she’ll get into Nucky’s mess since she and Steve Buscemi, hard as they try, just have zero chemistry. But this sort of works for their characters, so it’s not a bad part of the show. Buscemi is best when he’s not trying to be charming and slick and suave, and is instead trying to awkwardly bond with Mrs Shroeder’s son or ranting away about the neglect he’s faced from Jimmy.
Jimmy meanwhile has possibly the most interesting storyline of the year as his relationship with this estranged father the Commodore is expanded and his gang business with him and Nucky’s brother grows. Michael Pitt is very good in this role and it’s one of the biggest snubs of the Emmys that he was not nominated.
Also a standout is Gretchen Mol, a fantastic actress who has taken the role of Jimmy’s unusually young mother and turned her into one of the best characters on the show, simultaneously alluring and pathetic, wise and precocious, comforting and strange. She has an edge to her which I wish the show would have. But no matter how many shocking punches Van Alden throws, the whole pace of Boardwalk Empire is imbalanced from the center.
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