I found this one because of my excitement over Mel Gibson's return to gun-wielding in the upcoming Edge of Darkness movie. Turns out its a remake of a BBC mini-series from '85, also directed by Martin Campbell. I figure I'd check it out and get ready for the Mel version, but after devouring this superb 6-hour thriller I no longer have much hope that the new Edge of Darkness will be fit to kiss the old Edge of Darkness' dildo. Kissing dildos? I'll get to that.
Ronald Craven, played with intense burning eyes by Bob Peck (the "clever girl" raptor food guy from Jurassic Park) is an inspector with the Yorkshire police. On a rainy night, he picks up his college-aged daughter Emma from a political rally and they are ambushed on the steps of their home by a crazed gunman. The man shouts Craven's name, but then Emma runs forward and is shot and killed. Understandably, Craven's life falls apart in that instant and all that is left is the ache of grief and a rage that sets him upon singular path of revenge.
Craven has a lot of enemies, men he has put away. He believes the gunman was after him and Emma just got in the way, so do his superiors in the police force, who run up a list of potential enemies from Craven's past. But as he wanders through his daughters empty room in a daze of grief, touching her things and breathing in her scent, he discovers something strange. And he does something even stranger.
First the really strange thing. He is trying to soak up what remains of his beloved daughter, holding her childhood teddy bear, smelling her clothes. As he sits on her bed, Craven opens the drawer of Emma's bedside table and discovers her dildo which he holds up an eyes with surprise. It's a genuine moment, a realistic discovery that a father might make in a similar situation. It makes him realize that his little girl, was after all a woman, and not a little girl at all. What does he do next? He kisses the dildo. HE KISSES HIS DEAD DAUGHTERS DILDO. When this happened my brain basically exploded and I had to pause the movie and collect myself. It was very tough to recover from this small, but utterly fucked up and perplexing act. I thought I knew exactly what I was watching when I pressed PLAY on the DVD, but all that went out the window when lips met vibrator. I had a hard time understanding the characters motivations for that act, but chalked it up to extreme grief and after some considerable head-scratching, was able to recover. It's not that I was disgusted or creeped out by the act, it's that I just didn't understand what was going on in the heads of the writer/director/actor that led to that bizarre dramatic choice. I guess you could say it took me out of the movie for a few minutes. I've since learned that I wasn't alone in my reaction, and that Craven kissing the dildo is an infamous moment in British TV.
Ok, now the strange thing that Craven discovers besides his lack of parental boundaries, is a geiger-counter and some radiation gauges among Emma's pamphlets from Gaia, an anti-nuke, eco-conscious political organization she belonged to. He also finds a gun. When he holds the Geiger-counter up it begins crackling to life. Craven pulls a lock of Emma's hair from his jacket pocket, a last memento he cut from her head as she lay cold on a morgue slab. This lock of hair is tripping the gauge. Emma was irradiated. Between this discovery and the gun, he begins to think that maybe the gunman wasn't looking for him afterall, that he was there instead for Emma. Why?
The "why" leads Craven on an intense hunt for the truth, and it's a journey that takes him to parliament buildings, MI-5 corridors, the Scottish highlands and even hundreds of feet below the earth. Helping and manipulating Craven in equal parts, are two shifty British spies and an American CIA operative played by the great Jo Don Baker, who threatens to steal the whole movie with his southern charm belying a world-weary political soldier with blood on his hands.
The interesting thing about Edge of Darkness is that it doesn't try to obscure the answer to Craven's quest or litter the road with twists and turns that end up feeling cheap or contrived. It's pretty clear who is responsible for Emma's death from almost the first episode, the trick becomes proving it. The enemy here is the nuclear power industry, and the high-level executives who show the world a benevolent face, but work behind the scenes to double-deal and circumvent the provisions put in place to stave off the nuclear nightmare that haunts the world. These sharks in three-piece suits are playing a very dangerous game and they are backed by billions of dollars and crooked politicians. Craven, who wasn't particularly political before, now sees what his late daughter was fighting against, and becomes determined to see her plan through. While he is helped along the way by Jo Don Baker's CIA operative and the British spies, they each have their own agendas and use Craven's grief as a tool for exacting their own plans. Craven may be the fish out of water in this cutthroat world, but he's no fool, and allows himself to be moved as a pawn in so much as it positions him closer to his enemies.
This thoroughly excellent series, expertly written and staged, presents viewers with a really interesting and seductive take on political espionage, one where all the players are aware of each other and even mingle at the same parties, lying through smiles as they ruthlessly work every angle. These puppet masters exchange pithy one-liners and knowing jabs while they patrol the invisible political borders that separate allies from enemies. Character actor Jo Don Baker as Darius Jedburgh (best name ever?) pulls this off wonderfully, with a gleam in his eye and a nonchalance towards matters of life and death. His character has been all over the world, played cards with warlords and pulled the strings of despots from the jungles of South America to the deserts of Afghanistan. He enjoys being the gregarious Texan in the button-down world of London and he knows his booming voice and large stature makes it impossible for him to blend in, so he doesn't even try.
Jedburgh and Craven have some great scenes together that explore their mutual respect as well as distrust for each other. One particularly good scene has them discussing the differences of their nature over a fine bottle of wine and a meal in a bomb shelter hundreds of feet below the earth. This episode, which has Craven and Jedburgh descending into the tunnel system below a nuclear power plant is a series highlight, wowing with its production values, ratcheted tension and body count.
Not simply content to deal in noir-ish action and topical politics alone, Edge of Darkness works as a fine drama to boot, with Craven continuing a series-long dialogue with the ghostly memories of his daughter, both as a child and as a young woman. He pieces the case together by talking with her, arranging the facts as words out of her mouth, but in doing so he also keeps his heart an open wound. Peck's performance as Craven is amazing, expressing more intelligence and emotions with just his eyes than most actors can muster with their whole bodies. Another fascinating element of the story is the almost mystical element in the form of the real life Gaia theory (that the Earth is a single living organism and will do whatever necessary to ensure life) weaving its way into the plot. In fact, as I found out in the special features, the writer Troy Kennedy Martin had intended to end the series with Craven transforming into a living tree, but this was squashed by nervous producers. The ending that was chosen is no less mysterious, mythical and satisfying.
I was pretty hyped for the Mel Gibson Edge of Darkness, but after seeing this totally kick-ass original, the trailers look as if the whole story has been boiled down to a simple revenge tale. This is a shame, since the miniseries is so dense, rich and engaging because of its multi-faceted narrative. I'm pretty sure Mel won't be spelunking in nuclear caves or kissing any dildos. It's a shame that this BBC miniseries has extinguished the fire I had to see Mel's version, but on the plus side, it gave me one of the best pieces of television I've ever seen.
So glad you checked this out, Mr Onions, and shared your thoughts. I watched this series a few months ago and was equally blown away. Regardless of Mel's involvement, or even Martin Campbell's, the director of both the original miniseries and the current feature, how could the update come close to the complexities, nuance and odyssey of the original idiosyncratic trudge through political and emotional shadows.
ReplyDeleteI remember when this first aired on the BBC, I was more interested in going out on the town than watching TV at that point in my life, but the images I did catch were stamped on my memory - the daughter getting shot, the silhouette of the shooter outside the house in the rain, a drunken conversation between Craven and Jedburgh across a narrow table that sounded part threat, part friendship and spoke to the mysterious adult male world that I was slowly entering, the repeated motif of the train hauling it's radiated load along urban tracks. I missed the dildo scene. Who knows how different my life would be if I had seen it during my tender teenage years.
I do remember the phenomenon that the series was at the time. It was expensive; a huge risk that quickly became one of the landmark events in British television. It made an unlikely heartthrob of Bob Peck, who then travelled a well-trodden path of many unique, charismatic leading men of landmark brit film and television into supporting roles in major hollywood fare (see Charles Dance, Richard E. Grant, Ray Fucking Winstone for starters).
Watching it recently, for the first time, I was expecting to be disappointed. This is 25 years old television after all. I thought it might be clumsy, overwrought (in a bad way, not in the good way that it is). Its idioms are borrowed from the US - film noir and political conspiracy thriller - and acknowledged in Bob Peck's trenchcoat and Clapton's bluesy, spare score (sometimes, once in a while, Eric pulls something out of somewhere to remind me he does have a soul), and we don't borrow well - the result is often an unsatisfying pudding of influences speaking to no-one in particular. But the writing is so bloody good, and the directing so economic and deft, and the production design so gritty and real, and the performances so steeped in the muck and rain of a grotty, dysfunctional, class-burdened Britain, the sheer scale and scope of the narrative and the many themes (grief, loyalty, trust, betrayal, duty, Gaia to name a few) are so audaciously pulled together. And that dildo kiss reverberates through the whole six episodes and beyond.
Now that's a fucking comment! You reading this mom?
ReplyDeleteI can't believe I forgot to mention Clapton's score, which he basically redid to great effect in Lethal Weapon. It's pretty integral to the tone of the series.