Meantown

Mare of Easttown a TV Mini Series by Craig Zobel.  Written by Brad Ingelsby.  With Kate Winslett, Julianne Nicholson, Jean Smart, Guy Pearce.  HBO.  ****1/2

As a person who grew up in Pennsylvania, I know there is an element of crabby, pessimistic, life-denying people who live there, especially in the smaller industrial communities.  There’s also another group, exemplified by the woman in a factory where I once worked who had a homemade sign above her workbench that said Think Nice; that group reached its apotheosis in Fred Rogers, whom I think of as the true spirit of Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania.  But that crabby group does exist (it’s a fucked-up day in this shithole neighborhood, and I don’t want to be your fucking neighbor), and I think it comes about because of the rocky mountainous landscape, the harsh weather, low paying jobs in dingy factories (people glorified steel mills, but it must have been hell to work there), and the difficulties of life in general.

That crabby spirit is captured beautifully in Mare of Easttown, a town where everybody knows everybody else, their whole history and the history of their family.  They’re married or they were previously married or they’re cousins, sometimes all at once.  There’s a lot of drug use and casual sex and a huge amount of drinking, on the part of almost everyone.  There’s also a lot of human meanness.  It’s the kind of place where they still remember—and celebrate—the girl’s state championship basketball team from twenty years ago (or something like that), even remember the girl who sank the winning shot (Mare herself) but also probably remember she could have passed it to some other girl, who would then be the hero instead of her, goddammit.

Mare (Kate Winslett) is now a cop, a little bit chunky and out of shape; in an early scene she scales a fence to chase a peeping tom but hurts her foot when she comes down, so she limps through the early episodes.  It’s the kind of place where they have a peeping tom and find out who it is and hold that against him for the rest of his life, the poor bastard; he’d have a better sex life if the town weren’t so repressive.  We can blame the Catholic church for that.  Everybody seems to be a Catholic (as in the Pittsburgh of my youth).  Another reason to be grouchy.

It’s also a place where young women—often women who have trouble with drugs, and have turned to prostitution—have been disappearing lately.  People resent the fact that the police department—Mare in particular—haven’t solved this crime.  And then, in episode one of the series, a young girl, the loving mother of a newborn, is murdered.

There have been a number of sensational shows since the pandemic began, must watch TV that people binge.  I am not a binge watcher, or a binge anything else.  No matter how unputdownable a book is, I can put it down if I’m sleepy and it’s time for bed, and I would never stay up far into the night watching some TV series.  Mare came closest to making me a binge watcher (and I hated myself in the morning).  We watched three hours one night, three the next, and broke our reading habit to watch TV on a Monday evening just to see the final episode.  I much prefer reading to watching TV.  But for three nights I joined the Tube Team.

Apparently writer Brad Ingelsby is a Pennsylvania native and knows whereof he speaks, the kind of town where Mare lives with her mother (Jean Smart), her daughter, and the small child of her son, who committed suicide; where her ex-husband is about to remarry and lives right behind her, in a house with his fiancé; and where the local Catholic priest is her cousin.  This series is a character study of a person and a town.  It’s also a whodunit, and one of the primary pleasures is figuring out who the murderer is.  Despite the fact that it’s a heinous crime, there seem to be any number of candidates.  Mare is a woman who has never really looked at, or come to grips with, the central fact of her life, that her son was a drug addict and killed himself.  She’s been too busy trying to solve other people’s mysteries.  She’s been happy to be busy.

The writing is great, as is the direction; the cast is superb, with actors both known and unknown, and the plot unfolds in relentless thrilling fashion.  There’s a subplot about a creative writing professor (Guy Pierce) whose only novel won the National Book Award but who has been unable to write anything since.  Despite the fact that literary women are falling all over him, he falls for Mare, has an ongoing romance with her, and sometimes advises her to take a closer look at the hard things in her life.  He’s the only person in the story who isn’t really an Eastown guy (and isn’t somebody’s cousin).  As a person who’s known a lot of writers, I’m not sure I buy the National Book Award winner who’s never written another novel (unless his name is Ralph Ellison), but he is a good character.  How in the hell did he wind up in Eastown?  Oh, the humiliation of looking for jobs teaching creative writing.

This is the kind of series that you don’t want to reveal much about, both because it’s so complicated, with a large cast of characters, but also because the plot twists are a major part of the pleasure.  I will just say that I was riveted to the screen for the first six episodes, didn’t even come close to guessing who done it, and there’s an action sequence in the fifth or sixth episode that is absolutely thrilling, especially because Kate Winslett doesn’t suddenly turn into Rambo, but looks like an out of shape police detective trying to deal with the first real emergency of her life.  Oh shit.  Oh my God.  Or, as they say in Pittsburgh, Aw no.

I will admit to mild disappointment with the seventh episode, both because I didn’t quite believe who done it (it was a surprise, maybe a little too much of one) but also because there’s a suggestion that Easttown, by going through this trauma, will emerge as a warm wonderful place where everybody loves and helps each other out.  There’s a service at the Catholic church which is absolutely jammed; everybody in town seems to be there, and they don’t even look hung over.  I’m supposed to believe that?  It wasn’t a good thing that this trauma occurred, and Easttown hasn’t fundamentally changed.  I’d lay odds that a few days later the place was as mean as ever.

The Catholic church didn’t become warm and fuzzy either.