Anatomy of a Scandal review – none of these characters
speak like human beings
Borderline criminal dialogue, nauseating camera work
and a ridiculously far-fetched plot mar Sienna Miller’s turn in this Netflix
political thriller
.jpg)
Rebecca
Nicholson
Rebecca
Nicholson
Fri 15 Apr
2022 06.00 BST
There could
not have been a more fitting time for Anatomy of a Scandal (Netflix) to arrive.
This splashy, trashy drama, a starry adaptation of the novel by Sarah Vaughan,
deals with politicians who believe themselves to be above the law, and the
blind privilege of the ultra-wealthy. It is a twisty, slippery thing, so the
specifics are difficult to discuss without spoiling it. But Sienna Miller is
Sophie Whitehouse, happily married to Britain’s “most fanciable” minister,
James (a brilliantly oily Rupert Friend), until they find their lives swept up
in the scandal of the title.
None of
these characters speak like human beings. “My darling man, where the fuck are
you?” coos Sophie down the phone when her husband fails to turn up to a party.
“If the future doesn’t include you, Sophie Whitehouse, then the future is
shite,” he coos back, later on. Bleurgh. Maybe this is how posh people woo each
other. “You think like a poet … politics could always use more poetry,” says
James, but not to Sophie, which is where his most recent troubles begin. He
deserves to be put in the dock for that line alone.
It unfolds
at a pace, half in the present day, half in flashback to Sophie and James’s
time at Oxford, where he rowed and was a member of the Bullingdon-esque
Libertine club. There is boorish behaviour. People say “boys will be boys” on
more than one occasion. People meet in dark corridors to discuss dastardly deals.
It is part political thriller, part courtroom drama, and it attempts to wear
many hats. On the one hand, it is a twisty thriller that knows it is silly and
hams that up. On the other, it attempts a serious exploration of consent and
power, which sits uneasily with all the fireworks, and barely begins to unravel
the knots it makes for itself.
And there
are many fireworks. There is a cartoonish bastard of a spin doctor (“Fun on the
side with a filly?”) and a feckless prime minister with his own skeletons in
the closet. Music swells at a volume not heard since Love Is Blind, with the
lyrics similarly explaining what is happening on screen: “How the mighty
faaaaalll!” There are surreal flashes of people suddenly appearing in memories
of scenes when they were not there, or of the emotional impact becoming
literal, and dropping characters from a great height. The cameras appear to
have been supping from the subsidised bars in the Commons. Rarely is a scene
shot from an angle that isn’t tilted, twisted or upside down. Some scenes start
on a wonk and end with the floor on the ceiling. I understand that there is
chaos going on, but I felt nauseated after six episodes of it.
Anatomy of
a Scandal comes from the stable of David E Kelley, who has form with this kind
of thing – stoic rich women with slippery handsome husbands – having
executive-produced Big Little Lies and The Undoing, among many other shows.
(His co-creator here is Melissa James Gibson, who wrote for The Americans and
House of Cards.) Considering this deals with the upper echelons of the British
class system, it has a distinctly American feel. “The behaviour of entitled
toffs is no longer something the public finds cute,” says the spin doctor,
though my theory is that in Britain, we only ever did, or do, indulge it from
the safe distance of a period drama.
Even so,
for the first half, I was happily bingeing along, in the same mood as if
gobbling up an airport potboiler on the beach. Miller, Friend and Michelle
Dockery, who plays a stern barrister called Kate, a woman with a personality
best described as “workaholic wearing glasses”, are all clearly trying their
best with what they have been given. Although in the end it doesn’t quite land,
there are attempts to pick at complex themes of sex, power and manipulation.
Later in the series, there is a moment that appears to nod to Brett Kavanaugh’s
rage before the US Senate judiciary committee, following Christine Blasey
Ford’s testimony. In the stoic rich wife role, Sophie hints at discovering her
own privilege and ruthlessness, a curious thread that isn’t taken far enough.
Unfortunately,
and this is a big unfortunately, there is a twist. I hope this doesn’t count as
a spoiler, and I suspect it won’t, because at the moment Netflix’s main selling
point is “trashy thriller with a twist” so it feels inevitable that there would
be one. When that twist comes, it is so ridiculous and far-fetched that I had
spent the previous episodes certain that it could not be the twist, because
even this show wouldn’t be so daft. It’s a scandal that it is. My darling plot,
I thought, where are you?
No comments:
Post a Comment