Butler's Cinema Scene

Taron Egerton, Jurnee Smollett

“SMOKE” (Apple+)

Sociopaths and psychopaths  are the common currency of today’s streaming environment. 

The problem, of course, is that now we’re so inundated with psychotic characters that they’ve become a bit ho-hum. It really takes something special to grab our attention.

Enter “Smoke,” a miniseries from crime specialist Dennis Lehane that delivers not one but two world-class psychos, both of whom specialize in setting things on fire.

Loosely based on the real case of an arson investigator who spent his spare time starting the blazes he was allegedly trying to solve, this show stars the chameleonic Taron Egerton as Dave Gudsen, chief arson detective for a municipal fire department in the Pacific Northwest.

Davis is a fascinating study in two-faced fiendishness.  He’s got a huge ego which he tries to hide behind a facade of professional composure and good-guy cameraderie,  but his megalomania keeps oozing out around the edges. He loves to give presentations in which he shocks his audience by planting incendiary charges in wastepaper baskets, timing them to go off at key moments during his talk. 

At home Dave’s ass-hat smugness  is quickly alienating his wife and stepson.

And he’s writing a novel (a desperately bad one) about an arson investigator very much like himself, a brilliant fellow who can run circles around the bad guys while satisfying every erotic fantasy of his curvy female partner.

Dave’s real-life female partner, Michelle (Jurnee Smollett), can only roll her eyes at this fiction.  She rather quickly goes from admiring her new mentor to suspecting that Dave may himself be responsible for a series of fatal arson incidents.

The scripts take a slow burn approach (sorry about that) in revealing Dave’s double life and the reluctance of his long-time boss (Greg Kinnear) and other colleagues to grasp just what’s going on.

Ntare Guam Mbaho Mwine

Meanwhile, there’s that second psycho, a pathetically sad but genuinely scary fellow named Freddy Faso (Ntare Guam Mbaho Mwine). This friendless loner lives in a shabby apartment, mans a grill at a fast-food franchise and dreams of joining the mainstream.  Fat chance. Freddy is a loser in virtually every way. A man without a voice, he makes himself heard by setting fires to punish those individuals (other customers celebrating at the local bar, his bosses) who he blames for his own misery.

Freddy is such a weirdly compelling/repellant character that Mwine’s performance should be incorporated into college courses about mental health.

And the fact that “Smoke” gives us one arsonist tracking down another arsonist (kinda like Dexter stalking other serial killers) turns the show into a sort of moral yo-yo.

And  while we’re cataloguing the series’ assets, let’s not forget a late-in-the-proceedings appearance by John Leguizamo, nothing short of superb as Dave’s former partner, who has long suspected he was teamed with a firebug and has now come out of a boozy, drug-riddled retirement to lend his hand in the investigation.

That said, not everything about “Smoke” works.  There’s a rather unnecessary backstory about Smollett’s character, who as a child was almost burned to death by her crazy mom.  And in the next to the last episode the writers throw Michelle a wildly improbably curveball that the show almost can’t recover from.

At nine episodes “Smoke” feels a bit padded.   But the high points compensate in the end.

Owen Wilson, Peter Dager

“STICK”(Apple+)

I didn’t expect many surprises from “Stick,” and I didn’t get many.

But what I got was sufficient. The show is funny and diverting and occasionally even shows a little heart.

Owen Wilson plays Pryce Cahill, a former professional golfer now fallen on some very hard times. Then he discovers Santi (Peter Dager),  an unknown teenage golfer who might just be the lovechild of Lee Trevino and Tiger Woods.  

Pryce decides to go on a tour of golf tournaments with the kid, bringing along the boy’s mother (Mariana Trevino) and Pryce’s former caddy, the gloriously misanthropic Mitts (Marc Maron).The goal is to somehow recover his long-lost pride and, hopefully, humiliate his long-time rival Clark Ross (Timothy Olyphant), who now runs a world-class golf club. (Is this supposed to reference Trump? Not sure.)

Among the supporting players are Judy Greer as Price’s long-suffering but still supportive ex-wife, and Lilli Kay as the evocatively gender jumbled waitress who becomes Santi’s first love.

Anna Maria Mühe

“WOMAN OF THE DEAD”(Netflix)

A female undertaker becomes an angel of vengeance in “Woman of the Dead,” a German thriller that is more nuanced than it first sounds.

When her policeman husband is killed in a hit-and-run outside their mortuary in the Austrian  Alps, Blum (Anna Maria Mühe) goes looking for answers.  What she uncovers  over the course of two seasons is a conspiracy of very rich men who make snuff films starring illegal immigrants lured to Germany by the promise of good jobs.

Blum is a fascinating character, a doting mom of two who spends her days embalming corpses. Even weirder, the recently dead often talk to her from their perch on the slab.  Is this her imagination? Is Blum a bit bonkers?

She apparently has no qualms about personally eliminating the men she blames for her husband’s demise. So as viewers we’re torn between her need for answers and her shocking vigilantism. Will she get away with it?  Do we want her to?

It helps that Mühe isn’t movie-star glamorous.  We can definitely see her as a wife and mother.

And should your attention wander, there’s always the spectacular mountain scenery.

| Robert W. Butler

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