The Lower Depths: American Crime

Caitlin Gerard and Elvis Nolasco in American Crime, on ABC.

The current TV schedule is clogged with shows that use geopolitical and corporate paranoia, apocalyptic fantasies, and the never-ending battle between those guided by faith and ideology and the members of the reality-based community as the grist for sprawling murder-mystery conspiracy thrillers, such as American Odyssey, Dig, Fortitude, and whatever is taking up space right this minute on SyFy. American Crime, which was created by 12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley for ABC, is vastly different. It’s set in a tawdry, exhausted, post-crash America, with a cast of characters who are in the process of being ground up not just by The System, but by life itself. In the unglamorous setting of Modesto, California, a young man named Matt Skokie has been murdered; his wife, Gwen (Kira Pozehi), has been badly beaten and spends the first few episodes in a coma. In a TV landscape where the heroes are searching for answers or stumbling across clues that unlock mysteries that will dictate the fate of whole civilizations, American Crime is full of people who are doing their damnedest to keep the truth hidden, even from themselves.

Master Shot: Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer

While most of the hubbub at last night's Oscars concentrated on such worthy pictures as The King's Speech (which won Best Picture) and The Social Network, one of the best movies from last year actually didn't get a nod of recognition from the Academy. Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, based on Robert Harris's best-selling political thriller, The Ghost (2010), is a shrewd suspense drama which demonstrates that Polanski still has some clever tricks up his sleeve. And he's having a ball unveiling them. The fact that the film barely caught the imagination of the Academy, or the audience (except for a number of critics), just adds to the irony of the story itself.

The plot revolves around a British ghost writer (Ewan McGregor), whose name we never know, who has been given the assignment of completing the memoirs of his country's former Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). Although his agent tells him it's the opportunity of a lifetime, the previous ghost, a former aide to the PM, recently turned up mysteriously dead on the beach. Hence, the current job opening. Making matters worse, on the day the new ghost arrives, Rycart (Robert Pugh), a former British foreign minister, accuses Lang of authorizing the illegal seizure of suspected terrorists and handing them over for torture by the CIA (which, according to Rycart, leaves the former leader open to charges of war crimes). While Lang seeks refuge to avoid the reach of the International Criminal Court (which turns out to be the U.S.), his ghost writer begins to uncover clues in the memoir left by his predecessor that might possibly implicate Lang.

Donald Sutherland, 1935-2024

Elliott Gould, David Arkin, and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (1970).

Even in a roster as quirky as the list of actors who dominated American movies in the late sixties and early seventies, Donald Sutherland – who died at the end of June, just a month shy of his eighty-ninth birthday – was an outlier. Of course, he was different from his cohort in an obvious way: he was Canadian, born in the Maritimes and educated as an engineer at the University of Toronto, though he went on to train as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. And he carried his Canadian identity with him always, through nearly six decades of a career in the U.S. – he never lost his accent or his elocution-class diction, and his acting virtues included distinctly Canadian qualities like modesty, gentleness, understatement and an ironic wit that you might miss if you weren’t listening closely enough. His skill at conveying the interior conflicts of decent men amounted to a sort of genius, and his best roles permitted him to move that skill, which has generally been relegated to supporting performances in Hollywood pictures, into the foreground. His slender six-foot-four frame made him appear paradoxically slight and imposing at the same time, as if he’d slipped off a hanger in a closet, and he had rather a goonish face (which his frequent beard tended to offset). He looked like a small-town Canadian square, but he was as much a hipster as Elliott Gould, who partnered him memorably in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, the film that made them both famous. And, defying movie conventions, he was sexy at the same time, opposite Jane Fonda in Klute, Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now, Brooke Adams in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.