Empire Builder

Empire builder

  HBO are pulling out all the stops for their new series, the 1920s-set Boardwalk Empire, starring Steve Buscemi. The feature-length pilot episode was directed by Martin Scorsese and is said to have cost over $18 million, with the first series overall running to over $70 million. Jazz Age-era Atlantic City was recreated to exacting detail on a huge set in Brooklyn, and it seems no expense has been spared in evoking the look and feel of the 1920s, down to the last detail. It’s clear that HBO are hoping Boardwalk Empire will be the next Sopranos or The Wire, a huge, complex, involving series that draws the viewer in and hooks them for multiple episodes. Perhaps taking a leaf from AMC’s book, Boardwalk Empire appears to be trying to recreate an entire era and mindset in the same way the much-loved Mad Men does for the early 1960s.

The show revolves around the chief treasurer of Atlantic City, Enoch ‘Nucky’ Thompson (loosely based on the real-life Nucky Johnson) and his role as the public face of respectable Prohibition-era temperance – a face built on his private criminal empire that keeps the city, in his words, ‘wet as a mermaid’s twat’ (You gotta love flapper-era obscenity). The pilot episode was an epic combination of classic gangster themes, beautifully exact period detail and intense characterisation and was pretty much a movie in itself. The question is; can Boardwalk Empire live up to its own expectations?

I haven’t yet managed to get into The Wire – not for lack of interest, more that it seems too huge to embark on – but I’m a fan of both shows that Boardwalk Empire can be said to be referencing: The Sopranos and Mad Men (and, to a lesser extent, Rome). The twelve years of Prohibition are a fascinating and oddly ignored period of American history. From the very moment alcohol was outlawed in 1920, it not only remained widely available, but was even more intensely sought out than it was before. The criminal empires of such legendary figures of Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano and Al Capone (all of whom appear in Boardwalk Empire) were built on illegal alcohol, and set in motion the terrifying, compelling gangster world that in some ways defined 20th-century America. Boardwalk Empire depicts the beginning of a world that the real-life Tony Soprano caught the drug-addled tail-end of. Not only that, but the 1920s were a period of intense social change in America and worldwide – women finally got the vote in all states, the First World War challenged the myth of loyalty to king and nation and black people began to place their stake in society and culture in a major way with the emigrations from the South and the development of jazz. This was a period when films about homosexuality were being freely made in Weimar Germany and even the relatively prudish United States was infinitely more liberated in its popular culture than it would be after the Hollywood Production Code.

So does Boardwalk Empire do this febrile period in history justice? Rather like the epic times it’s set in, it tends to succeed and fail on grandiose terms. Firstly, I have to comment on the ear-wrenching horror that is Kelly MacDonald’s attempt at an Irish accent. It probably isn’t the most dramatic failure of the series, but it is certainly the most audible. MacDonald plays an Irish immigrant named Margaret Schroeder, whose abusive husband comes to a sticky end in the pilot and whose subtly combative relationship with Nucky Thompson is the key dramatic fulcrum of the early episodes. Margaret is an interesting character; almost impossibly meek and virginal in early episodes; she reveals a will of steel and appealing sense of wickedness as the series unfolds. But that accent! Imagine Julia Roberts in Far and Away and you’re halfway there. Considering MacDonald is Scottish and a talented actor, one would expect her to do better. However a radio interview I caught once with an accent coach may provide an explanation, not only for MacDonald’s accent, but for all the hideous ‘brogues’ that are inflicted upon viewers of US movies and TV. According to the coach, when an American actor is taught an ‘Irish’ accent, s/he is encouraged to speak in a ridiculous ‘begorrah’ voice because apparently American viewers cannot tell the difference between an average Irish voice and an English one, and cannot understand a genuinely thick Irish accent. I’m inclined to believe this, if only because it explains why otherwise competent actors seem to consistently fall so spectacularly at the hurdle of the brogue. Left to her own devices, I’m confident Kelly MacDonald could sound convincingly Irish, but since HBO’s audiences are largely from the States (except for those who watch its programmes from various dubious streaming sources….ahem) she has been instructed to speak like Chris O’Donnell in Circle of Friends. The theory is backed up by the fact that not a single review of the show on Slate, Vanity Fair, Time Magazine and any number of US blogs has commented on her accent. Terrifyingly, she must sound genuinely Irish to them!

It’s a credit to MacDonald’s acting skills that Margaret is an interesting character despite her voice being less pleasant to listen to than nails on a blackboard. But she’s taken a while to establish herself, which leads into one of the other problems of the series – the use of lazy shorthand in defining some of the female characters. The other woman in Nucky’s life is the cartoonishly slutty Lucy, who is ‘acted’ by Paz de la Huerta as some weird combination of a sleep-walking crack whore and an extra from ‘Chicago’. She’s an utterly ridiculous character, and seems to exist purely to be the whore to Margaret’s madonna, even though Margaret develops into a far more complex character than her Temperance League goody-two-shoes persona in the pilot. There’s plenty of scenes involving Nucky and his ‘business associates’ living it up with good-time girls, but these don’t feel gratuitous in the way scenes involving Lucy do. She might as well have big red arrows pointing at her saying ‘Scarlet Woman!’. Other characters are written in a subtle and intelligent way, so there’s no excuse for this nonsense. Another female character, the mother of Nucky’s young protégé-turned-bad, Jimmy Darmody, is well-acted by Gretchen Mol but horribly miscast. Anne Bancroft as a woman who could be Dustin Hoffman’s mother in The Graduate is more plausible casting than Mol as Jillian Darmody. As the reviewer Paul Martinovic on Den of Geek has been saying: ‘And, as for Gretchen Mol, the only interest I have in her character is once more getting the answer to this question: just how did you give birth when you were nine years old?’. Unlike Martinovic, I think that Jillian is an interesting character, but her appearance compared to her ‘son’ is as jarring as Margaret’s accent. It yet again seems to confirm 21st-century TV’s mortal fear of casting a woman over 40 in a leading role.

These are the two most glaring problems in the show, but when they are laid aside, there’s a lot to like. Chiefly Steve Buscemi, in his first TV leading role, who pulls the show together as the enigmatic, subtle and nattily-dressed Nucky Thompson. Nucky, as Jimmy Darmody puts it, is trying to be ‘half a gangster’ – living the high life on the proceeds of bribery and kickbacks, supplying Atlantic City with booze through deals with Italian gangsters, but trying to keep his hands clean and his head above the murderous violence that Prohibition is helping to engender. Nucky is the go-to man in Atlantic City when anyone has a problem, yet despite his double life he hasn’t lost his true human side; as the show unfolds his complex nature becomes apparent. It helps that Steve Buscemi is such a compelling actor – he packs more narrative into a single glance than most would with reams of dialogue. This is the biggest leading role he has taken on to date, and it’s great to see him finally shaking off the constraints of being a ‘character actor’.

The opening episode shows Nucky’s tendency to try and have his cake and eat it, as he strikes a deal to provide Arnold Rothstein with oceans of booze, only for Jimmy and Rothstein’s driver, one Al Capone, to secretly plot the hijacking and robbery of the consignment. The smoothly-planned operation goes awry and ends in bloodshed. To protect his reputation, Nucky arranges for Margaret’s husband to be framed and killed (helped by his knowledge that he beats her), the booze to be dumped and pays Jimmy off to make himself scarce. This leads Jimmy to set up camp with Al in Chicago. Despite Nucky’s attempts at damage-limitation Rothstein doesn’t take kindly to being deprived of his end of the deal, and the incident sets in motion a slow-burning feud between Nucky and Rothstein and his crew of thugs, including Lucky Luciano. The action moves between Atlantic City, New York and Chicago, as the family tree of the big gangs is traced and their evolution explained. A recurring theme is the shock experienced by the nineteenth-century surviving gang bosses, mostly of Irish, Greek and Jewish extraction, at the levels of random violence used by the new, mostly Italian generation – embodied in the person of Al Capone, played with a scary viciousness by English actor Stephen Graham. African-Americans feature too – one of Nucky’s bootlegging associates is the grimly commanding Chalky White, played by Michael K. Williams of The Wire fame.

Michael Pitt, an actor I’d never heard of before, is a revelation as Jimmy Darmody. Some blogs have unkindly intimated that he’s the ‘poor man’s diCaprio’, but while he shares some of the same intense qualities as Leonardo, he is more than able to make the role his own. Jimmy is a war veteran who’s had his humanity blunted by the horrors of Verdun, yet his fierce intelligence and philosophical nature have saved him from the depraved depths the other Chicago gangsters he works with sink to. He is exacting in his revenge, but knows that as an Irish-American he will always be an outsider with the Italians, and needs, like Nucky, to decide once and for all if he is ‘fully a gangster’. As an aside, the various ethnicities cheerfully use now-unacceptable derogatory terms to refer to each other – terms like ‘dumb Mick’, ‘fucking kike’ and ‘filthy Hun’ abound.

The anti-gangster is as alarming and unappealing as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano at their worst. Nelson van Aldren, Fed agent and head of the anti-Prohibition drive in Atlantic City, is a man so repressed as to be barely human. He recites Bible passages while torturing a man for information, and whips himself rather than admit to his passion for Margaret. Van Aldren is on a mission: to gather enough evidence to bring down Nucky Thompson, and will stop at nothing to get it. He could be cartoonish but Michael Shannon imbues the character with a surprising humanity, as well as being possessed of the most compelling voice I’ve heard in a long time. The unhealthy puritanism that drove much of Prohibition is personified in van Aldren, but at the same time the show avoids simplifying the issue – Prohibition was not inspired merely by prudes, but by many who genuinely believed banning alcohol would help working-class people rise out of the terrible conditions they suffered in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was a popular cause with suffragettes too, who had valid reason to believe that alcohol made more women’s lives a misery than men’s. This aspect of the movement perhaps explains why the independent-thinking Margaret becomes involved in the Women’s Temperance League in the first place. These women were not just the schoolmistress-y prudes of popular cliché, but fighters for the good cause.

There are endless other narrative threads in this programme, but they can’t all be contained in one blog post! Boardwalk Empire is not perfect – it suffers occasionally from heavy-handedness and there are a few too many characters and stories running simultaneously – but the richness of the plotting and acting makes up for this. Its production values are glossily gorgeous too, only let down by the rather obviously CGI-generated ocean in the boardwalk scenes. Like Mad Men, it succeeds in evoking the period with little, well-observed details. The full ferment of the early 1920s, the period where the 19th and 20th centuries clashed resoundingly, is called up in the clothes, conversation and rooms of the characters.

One of the best episodes so far is ‘Nights in Ballygran’ where the self-delusions and sentimentality of Irish-Americans is brilliantly exposed. The spectre of a largely imaginary Ireland looms heavily over the lives of many of the characters, informing actions and lifestyles that would be unrecognisable ‘back home’. Yet some of the attendees at Nucky Thompson’s St Patrick’s Day dinner reminded me unnervingly of the sickenly complacent Fianna Fail TDs that have recently been exposed for the criminals they are. That’s the kind of programme Boardwalk Empire is – by holding up a mirror to the past, it tells us a lot about the present.