"TRIAL & RETRIBUTION" NUMBER EIGHT

Last night I watched the eighth tale of “Trial and Retribution,” which is a Lynda LaPlante series. I ordered all of them that are on DVD so far. Shocking as “Prime Suspect” was, this series is up to it, though nothing comes up to Helen Mirren IMHO. I don’t know whether there’s another later series that’s “even worse.” This sequence turns out to be about halfway through a series that has lasted at least until 2009. It’s a “long-form” series, airing three hours on two nights in sequence. That’s roughly like a double-feature movie. Part of the success is LaPlante’s experience as an actual police officer and the contacts she made and part is several central heat-generating characters, so that the focus can switch from one to the other. And part of it is that the stories are located in the unending dissonance between justice and the law, as are most of these cop series. Modern versions almost always portray flawed cops to go over the various lines.

The central character is, as the actor puts it, a “mean little old-fashioned intolerant and isolated Scots bastard who is a sentimental marshmallow when it comes to his ex-wife, his kids and his mother.” All of whom richly deserve to be dumped IMHO. He represents conservative morality, the conviction that he should go after whomever he personally considers to be the “bad guys,” without much consideration for the law or reflection on whether he is becoming corrupted himself.

In the stories he is opposed to relatively sane -- except for driving ambition -- young blonde women who are presumably the new sort of cop, though I haven’t noticed that type around here very much. “Eight” (the cast and crew refer to the stories by their number in the series) has an interesting theme (they have themes). Each of these types is relatively impervious to true, intimate love. In fact, the blonde is frigid or so the men tell her. She wants to be irreproachable, impervious, a modern bureaucratic cop. But that means stuffing rage.

In between is “Satch,” who is just normal, though he has an interesting face, the guy who witnesses, buffers, and sometimes looks on astonished. He is the confidante of both main characters. The rest of the officers move in and out of the same roles. We often see the rather foolish men acting like frat boys (gloating over porn) while the resigned motherly women shake their heads and go on with the work. In the course of solving two murders, the two main characters come up against the workers in a bordello and each of them is cracked open. Painfully. Problematically. Delicately.

The lady who captures the flinty Scot heart is a shapeshifter: one moment a mother, the next a dominatrix; once an innocent immigrant au pair, now a murderer. Story on top of story on top of story. But the actor who is meant to thaw the lady cop is Colin Salmon. remarkable enough that he is a running character in the James Bond series and was even discussed to play the first Black Bond. He's an excellent foil for Helen Mirren when he plays opposite her. At six-three with a Black Velvet voice and a “trust me” manner, he's a jazz trumpeter and drummer, able to convey an entirely seductive menace. The clinical attempt to revive his "partner" in the hospital after her fall is echoed by his personal attempt to give the "kiss of life" to the near-drowned blonde heroine at the end. (This woman seems totally unable to defend herself -- she has no moves.) The “conceit” is that he strikes a nerve in the icy lady cop. He is a more benign than usual version of a LaPlante enthralling charismatic villain.

When a writer creates a character, that invention must have both a spine and a hook. The spine is the main driving force of the personality; the hook is what pulls it out of its path. (Money, love, fear, ambition.) It’s possible for a character to have many hooks, different ones for different plots. But one spine. LaPlante plots give her actors a lot of room to explore around these two components. We should be able to see the spine pretty easily (though there might a spine beneath or within the spine) but the hook is a different matter. It keeps us guessing and watching. How strong is it? Where does it come from? Are there hooks pulling in a different direction?

The little Scots actor (actually a skilled Shakepearean theatre actor and a director) tells us that LaPlante watches carefully to see what the actors do in one episode, then picks up on the details and inspirations and feeds them back into the next episode. These stories are organic in that way, unfolding from the previous motivations of the actors into the plot structure of the writer as we get closer and closer to the heart of the character, which I would propose are where the hook connects with the spine. If a person were doing psychotherapy, I presume this is what the therapist would note for case files, but in a theatrical production the process is done by a group, which means it will be much more influenced by the culture -- not necessarily the culture at large (surely by now we all realize how many competing “cultures” there are) but the culture around the production. For instance, there is a polarizing and paranoid conviction about social class. Interestingly the very high class people are connected to two environments: the grand old English mansions you can buy picture books about and the fabulously severe and glassy condos in skyscrapers. (In Hollywood they are cantilevered over canyons.) Looking at these places is part of the fun. The scripts love to smuggle in a bordello or a topless dance club. This one made me giggle over the resemblance to the one in the Japanese cartoon movie patronized by corrupt vegetables. I wonder whether one influenced the other.

LaPlante often begins with an innocent child, unconsciously going along, when something intercedes. In the case a woman falls out of the sky. The child this time is not a victim, though he’s echoed by an autistic child in the plot. The “figure” or image of the blue satin woman falling out of the sky is a tour d’force -- I have no idea how they managed it. Then that blue satin woman is echoed by a blue satin eiderdown that was wrapped around the body of the falling woman’s mother. These images are so compelling that the script lets them be unrealistic. The eiderdown shows up in an evidence box smelling of heavy perfume, even though the bodies (her dog was there, too) were found almost completely decomposed and stinking. The eiderdown is as pristine as the elegant gown on the falling woman. We are asked to believe (in the end) that a small but determined woman can get the victim, who is quite substantial, into her clothes and over a high wall around the upper-story patio from which she fell, throwing her far enough out to plummet down the middle of the road. It is so poetic, so vivid, that we ask no questions.

Should we? How seriously should we take such a series? Are they genuine and sincere comment on the world or are they just a spectacular distraction? In the end we are Satch, watching, half-confounded, trying to figure it all out.

DA VINCI REVISITED

I’ve already written a post about the “DaVinci Inquest” long-running Canadian series but maybe there’s a little more to say. I’ve probably watched more episodes of this than any other cop series, (through the magic of DVD which is different from watching weekly on television), mostly because there are more episodes available. This is a very popular show and stayed alive for a long time by transforming itself (first Da Vinci is a cop, then a coroner, then the mayor) while remaining rooted in a real life person. So far I don’t have access to the mayor version on DVD, at least through Netflix.

Many a cop show has played out before my eyes -- I can even remember back to Dragnet, though I wasn’t a big fan until Hill Street Blues came along. That really grabbed me because by then I’d been an animal control officer knocking on doors and responding to emergencies. It was the Seventies, the Patty Hearst years, and we were all a little crazy. After that I followed Bochco along through all his permutations, even the ill-advised one that was a musical -- whatever the heck it was called. But Bochco was tame compared to something like the English “Wire in the Blood,” based on the truly vicious novels of a lesbian interested in torture. Without Robson Green, those shows wouldn’t even be tolerable.

Incidentally, both Bochco and Jack Webb thought about creating a show about animal control officers, but there were two problems. One was that animal actors are difficult and the other was that the American public (and probably all the English-speaking countries) simply will not tolerate any understanding of pets except the most Valentine card portrayals. I haven’t seen the Animal Planet shows -- which from descriptions seem to be only about cruelty and emergency calls -- but they appear to be the only way the public will tolerate law enforcement shows about pets.

Getting back to da Vinci, one of the most obvious qualities of this show is its “Canadian-ness.” And B.C. Canada at that. Among these the most salient is the character of the center-pole leading man, Nicholas Campbell, who is not exactly Shakespearean but not a loose cannon in quite the way Cracker is. (Cracker is a prototype of the genius wildman.) He drinks too much, but who can blame him? He likes women but is too obsessed with his job to sustain a relationship. Occasionally he loses his temper, but it is always justified. He doesn’t think in terms of solving the crime, but solving the problem: what are the solutions for murdered prostitutes, street kids, drug trade, abusive nursing homes? He’s almost like a public health official. In short, he lives at the intersection of Idealism and Romanticism.

The acting is universally excellent from Donnelly Rhodes, who represents the old Dragnet model, to Ian Tracy, more along the lines of Brad Pitt. That their partnership really works means that the writers understand both types. Old cops either get fried and hardened into ineffective cynics or they develop a sense of humanity based on “seeing everything.” The Ian Tracy character is both smart and compassionate. In fact, it is the compassion straight through that tips this towards NW Canada -- a place where the rain falls gently on us all.

Tracy gets a bit of the “sex” stuff since he’s romancing Suleka Ramen, the dishy pathologist who works alongside the coroner’s ex-wife, but it is the most tender and quiet sort of intimacy. When he is working to understand a Guatemalan torturer who has just been lethally poisoned by either his victims, his bosses, or his cohort, he’s on the bed with Suleka who is reading a book about a victimized Guatemalan woman. She moves down close to him, leaning over him, and he merely strokes her face gently with the backs of two fingers. It is intense. Likewise, when the coroner’s daughter misses her piano teacher, a lovely woman who insists on giving him the lesson since it was paid for, she takes his hand to teach him to play scales. Innocent but... In an American show, he would be bending her over backwards and trying to undo her clothes.

I’m impressed by how many of the actors, like Suleka and the female detective Venus Terzo, are “people of color.” There are Asians, Aboriginals, Blacks, various blends and versions, everywhere. And they are accurately portrayed. Evan Adams, who plays “Thomas Builds the Fire” in Sherman Alexie movies, has appeared both as a street scruff and again as an Alderman. I could swear that one character, a defense attorney, was played by Sherman himself in his early years, but I couldn’t find any record. This inclusiveness is partly because Canada, as a part of the British Commonwealth, is open to former colonies of England and is seen as a desirable place to start over or take refuge. (There are few-to-no Aussies, who prefer Hollywood.)

But I think even more than being a realistic version of Vancouver, which is a port city after all, this originated with Chris Haddock, who invented the show in the first place. His signature screen shows a jazz bass player from overhead, twirling his instrument. I suspect it’s someone famous (I’m too out-of-it to know) and I’m often aware of both the jazz understanding of race (“It don’t matter if you can play!”) and the jazz sense of structure (themes, riffs, solos, inventions). Once in a while the romantic "soul" understanding of the underworld takes over, for instance in the story about the addicts taking refuge in a “shooting gallery” after one strung-out doctor’s son literally shoots a shopkeeper. Old-cop-think is to call the Swat Team and blast ‘em outta there. But the hero talks his way in by using a hit of drugs as bait, finds only two unarmed kids, and gets them safely out. It’s clear that the reason they have no drug money is that they’ve spent a small fortune on candles, which makes the dank interior of an abandoned warehouse look like a Jean Cocteau fairytale.

One of the other characteristic elements is that of the normal and level-headed onlooker, in this case usually played by Sarah Strange who is sometimes described as the coroner’s secretary or -- by him -- as his “associate.” She does the legwork, the phone calls, the little trivia that would clog up the plot, but also she simply looks, widens her eyes, tilts her head, or otherwise comments. She’s no Greek chorus, but she does put that outside comment on what could otherwise be pretty extravagant.

There are few special effects except for the quite wonderful local scenery. One doesn’t see people screwing or beating each other up or burning up, but one does see the bodies afterwards. VERY realistic bodies. That’s the dark note that balances the romance.