Brits To the Rescue: "Slow Horses" Remounts With Elan
Is there anything more modern—after the now-requisite whinging about the price of everything—than exchanging notes with our fellow cyber-citizens about what to stream?
It’s the kind of thing that can take a dinner party (you know, those formerly regular gatherings of like-minded persons to compare dietary restrictions), and send it corkscrewing down some contentious rabbit holes. Whose fave show is hipper, and whose is just going for some middlebrow okey-doke?
In recent months, there have been fewer choices over which to debate. Finding shows to your taste is a bit thorny in these days of post-“Peak TV” when all the Hollywood talent who in 2021-22 busted out of Covid to make deals with the streaming services next saw their prices cut, and their deals reduced or slashed. (E.g. as cited on The Ankler this week, the gent who created the hugely reinvigorated series “Suits” just had a pitch turned down flat).
Turns out there’s a crack of light—this week, “Slow Horses” began its six-episode Season 4 AppleTV+ run, airing each Wednesday through October 9. (The initial positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes was an all-but unprecedented 100%.) It stars—or is the word “scrutinizes”?– Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, grumbling head honcho of a sub-group of “rejects” exiled to a shabby London office doing the shabby spy jobs for the secretive MI5 security branch. Nominated in July for multiple Emmys, it induces we viewers to lean into in the snap and snark of the dialog presenting a cadre of cast-aside operatives who actually wield surprising skill sets. The group’s youthful hero is River Cartwright—as played by next big thing Jack Lowden. Real-life husband to Saoirse Ronan, in a different world he could easily play the James Bond figure the entire enterprise lightly mocks. River will be central in the season after pulling what Lamb depicts as “Arguably a batshit move.”
The reflexive internecine sarcasm—which hovers only a rounding error short of venom—remains in bountiful supply. When the troubled and lovable Marcus (Kafiff Kirwan) is handed a conciliatory cuppa tea by the also-troubled Shirley (Aimee-Ffion-Edwards), he can barely utter his thanks before Shirley adds, “I pissed in it.”
The series has been lending an ear to this combative pair for good reason, and true to its nature of letting us peek into the hearts of people merrily slagging each other, this new season brings to the Slough House pigpen a surveilling, ominous character, Coe, who's nearly as mute as Banquo’s ghost in MacBeth.
But it’s sometimes the most contained among us who can break our hearts with a single, devastatingly accurate line. (Forgive the tease, but thank me for excising any spoilers.)
Some theorize that Oldman, barred from recreating his great perfomance in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (2011), is using Lamb to take the mickey out of the LeCarre world of corrupt spooks. But he and show runner Will Smith have both claimed fanboy status as to that material.
I’ll say one thing about the season-concluding backstage scene that gathers various figures familiar and not so familiar: there are no truly minor parts in what these show-makers have created, just an expert dovetailing of complementary dramedy arcs.
This is not to compare main man Will Smith to the man Lord Buckley called Willie the Shake—he’s more, dare I say, a late-civilization sort of Moliere, who once said, “You haven’t achieved anything in comedy unless your portraits can be seen to be living types.…making decent people laugh is a strange business.”
In fact, while operating mostly in 1650s Paris under the usually forbearing but watchful eye of Louis XIV, Moliere drew flak from various dramatically repurposed, real dukes and ladies. The King happily liked comedy, As chronicled by Mikhail Bulgakov (the scalpel-sharp Russian farceur has been appreciated on this blog:
https://dogtown.ghost.io/ghost/#/editor/post/66046cc80314de0001200d33
Moliere had apprenticed as an itinerant actor in the stately dramas of Corneile until crowds pelted him with baked apples and he changed course. “The rabble needs farces--we shall give them farces.”
When July brought the annual Emmy nominations, “Slow Horses” received nine Emmy nominations, including nods for best drama, lead actor in a drama (Oldman) and writing in a drama for Smith.
If that last name brings up an image—of a lanky, slightly dissolute Englishman, mind you—it’s because Smith, like Moliere, began his career treading the boards. As a wry stand-up comic, he waas soon who was recruited by the team of Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais (as the amusing “Posh Boy” on “The 11 O’Clock Show” that spawned Ali G), and by the satirical wizard Armando Iannucci, who deployed him both on camera and in the writer’s room for the political satire “The Thick of It” (He came along for similar roles on the American version, “Veep.”)
Smith has lauded Oldman for injecting Lamb’s ever-witty invective a just-perceptible edge of heart, asserting to the Times, “On paper everybody should hate him. He’s horrible. He’s bullying. He’s mean. But I think he gives it out to people that deserve it.”
If there’s a single quality that best defines Oldman’s work onscreen, it may be his sense of mischief—which “Slow Horses” has brought to its fullest fruition thus far. Rather than tread into any spoilers—and rest assured Season 4 is happy to venture into surprises, some painful, and some of sly misdirection—I think I can offer a quick glimpse of the likable citizen underneath the brilliant thespian.
Oldman was coming off a spate of high praise for playing Sid Vicious in “Sid and Nancy” in 1986, and another star-making acting feat as Joe Orton in “Prick Up Your Ears” the next year. We were booked to do a piece for then-launching Premiere Magazine on the set in North Carolina where Nicolas Roeg’s “Track 29” was shooting. It would be almost no one’s best outing; Oldman sportingly let our interview turn into a ramble around the sprawling set. I recall he was lightly amused that I was a bit ga-ga about meeting his co-star Teresa Russell (who after all is the subject of his character Martin’s Oedipal fixation). As his sole acting job for the day was to stomp on a blood bag for some sort of cockamamie Roeg insert shot, we decided to kill some time in the cafeteria, and were stopped short to trade a look at the sight of a sole beer tap, brand unknown, but tested as satisfactory. On that occasion I saw his lack of self-seriousness-he was the guy on the next bar stool, readily answering this or that. I do recall the slightly mocking smile he gave when the second assistant director came into inform me I was to interview Ms. Russell in a sidetracked freight car that was out of the baking Carolina sun. As I stuttered a nervous goodbye, he shared a bit of side eye and just a whisper of a smirk: “Best of luck, mate.”
A later encounter came in mid-Spring of 1989 when Rolling Stone was scouting around for fresh talent to fill the annual hot issue. He was still on the rise, having just won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”
It must have been rising director Phil Joanou who signed off on my half-baked plan to spend a night in the Manhattan bars that feasibly had been go-to spots for the notorious Irish gang The Westies who were featured in "State of Grace." Prepping for the film took him away from then-wife Lesley Manville and their young son, and while never obtusely Method in his approach, he was already bringing some coloration to the shambolic rogue Jackie Flannery whom he’d portray in the film.
We met up in some Hell’s Kitchen bucket ‘o blood; moments later, Uma Thurman was suddenly in the room. She was 18, coltish, but with a certain self-sufficiency. He was 30, certainly not oblivious to her beauty but with a cordial, sly distance. She’d just been chosen as the cover girl of The Hot Issue. Beers were savored, then slugged. When Thurman did a bit of an acrobatic move on a brass stanchion in one bar, he gaped with the rest of us. She was a kid, albeit a sophisticated one, Whatever chemistry between actors is, it was palpable down to the soggy floorboards.
“State of Grace” was released in September of 1990, up against a little effort called “Goodfellas.” Beaten readily at the box office but well-reviewed, it showcased an Oldman turn as a lank-haired, deadly hood Jackie that Leo DiCaprio would later cite while accepting a Lead Actor BAFTA for “The Revenant” in 2016, calling the performance one of his inspirations, adding that it "influenced an entire generation of actors".
As I became aware of a couple of our small group peeling off, I called a woman friend who knew from showbiz protocols, and the stars and we their courtiers drank to some state of now hard-to recall satiety.
It must have been the fourth or so stop on the pub crawl when it seemed like a good time to wander off . For the rest of the saga they lived—the 1990 marriage and the divorce two years later—I stake no claim as to being what Willie the Shake and other dramatists of his age employed as the “Fifth Business”--the fuzzy figure all but offstage in a role, Robertson Davies wrote, that was “neither Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement.”
There will be much more to say in this space about the remainder of the “Slow Horses” season—enticing new characters and scenarios, a deeply twisting tale that rambles across the continent. Overall, we’ll watch Oldman at work, owning scene after scene. He scores without sweating a bit, and whether with a smirking send-off or a fart, he’s as always, there to prove (as noted by a zealous corporate rival– he’s “nott the shambling fool you appear.”)
Do give it a watch—aesthetically speaking, to borrow a Lamb locution, it may very likely "stir your nethers”.