Butler's Cinema Scene

Tobias Menzies

“MANHUNT” (Apple +): A largely overlooked but crucial moment of American history gets an almost microscopic examination in “Manhunt,” a gripping and immersive dive into the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and its aftermath.

Created by Monica Beletsky (“Fargo,” “Friday Night Lights”), this seven-episode series focuses on Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies), Lincoln’s Secretary of War who, as the show begins is celebrating the defeat of the Confederacy and looking forward to implementing his boss’s reconstruction program in the South.

When Lincoln is assassinated near the end of Episode One, it becomes Stanton’s obsession to find the killer and uncover a conspiracy that might lead directly to Jefferson Davis, the former Confederate President now in federal custody.

The assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth (Anthony Boyle, doing a 180 from the selfless bomber navigator he played in the recent “Masters of the Air”), spends nearly two weeks on the run, determined to reach Richmond VA where, he is sure, he will find shelter and a hero’s welcome. Aside from his rampant racism, Booth’s salient characteristic is his ego…he’s a matinee idol despite lacking the acting chops of his more famous brother Edwin. Killing a President seems to him a pretty good way of achieving immortality.

As a history lesson “Manhunt” will be, for most viewers, a revelation.  

Killing Old Abe  was just one facet of a plan to bump off the major figures in the Lincoln administration. The killers missed most of their targets; eventually several individuals were convicted and hanged.

Though battlefield hostilities had ceased, a Confederate government in exile in Canada continued its attempts to manipulate events in the U.S.

Lincoln’s Veep, Andrew Johnson (Glenn Morshower), won a place on the ticket because his conservative credentials might draw voters dubious about Lincoln.  It worked and Lincoln won re-election;  with the President’s death, though, Johnson took over and jettisoned the former administration’s ambitious plans to bring hundreds of thousands of former slaves into American society.

The dismayed Stanton prophetically protests that the result will be a permanent underclass. 

Menzies, perhaps best known as the sneeringly vile villain of “Outlander,”  is spectacularly good as Stanton, creating a character whose conscience pushes him to act even when his body is breaking down (an asthmatic, he outlived Lincoln by only two years). When Johnson attempted to replace him on the cabinet, Stanton barricaded himself in his office for nearly three months to prevent the transfer of power.

Lincoln (Hamish Linklater) is prominently featured only in the first episode,  but is seen in flashbacks throughout the production. Getting more screen time is Lili Taylor as his widow, Mary Todd Lincoln.

The series revels in some of its minor characters, like Oswell Swann (Roger Payano), a freed black man who for a price guided Booth through a swamp;  Mary Simms (Lovie Simone), an enslaved woman who became a key witness in the trial of the conspirators, and Boston Corbett (William Mark McCullough), a former drunk turned Union soldier and religious fanatic who fired the shot that killed Booth.

Indeed, the series has been extremely well cast, the one big mistake being Patton Oswalt as a self-serving “detective” helping track down the killers.  Despite a luxurious beard, I kept expecting him to crack wise.

Matthias Schoenaerts, Kate Winslet

“THE REGIME” (Max):  As a black comedy about fascistic populism “The Regime” could hardly be more timely.

Yet it nevertheless wore out its welcome well before reaching its eighth and final episode.

First, the good stuff:  Kate Winslet is at the top of her game as Elena Vernham, the chancellor of a small Eastern European country whose outward charisma covers a host of insecurities (mold in the palace…eek!!!) and a casual brutality inherited from her late father, a former chancellor whose ghastly corpse resides in a glass coffin.

In the first episode we are introduced to Corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts). a thug who eagerly butchered a group of striking workers and now finds himself promoted to the position of Chancellor Verhnam’s body guard.  It doesn’t take all that long for the dead-eyed Zubak to find his way into the boss’s bed and a position of real power.

We’re given a handful of nervous advisers whose main job is to keep the Chancellor from doing anything too ruinous while trying to ensure their own survival (sounds  lot like the Trump White House), and a chief of household (Andrea Riseborough, looking even more androgynous than usual) whose young son the childless Verhnam insists on raising as her own.

At its best, “The Regime” (it was created by Will Tracy) bears a close kinship to the savage political satires of  Armando Iannucci (“The Death of Stalin,” “Veep,” “In the Loop”).

Problem is, once having set up its premise, the show seems stuck in a loop, hitting the same notes over and over with few variations. Thank heaven for Hugh Grant, who shows up midway as a sardonic former chancellor now residing in one of Verhnam’s prisons. 

Production values are high, and the acting solid enough that I stuck with it. Still, I hoped for more. 

| Robert W. Butler

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