Julia Roberts and Sean Penn in Starz’s “Gaslit”: TV Review

“History is not written by the weak masses: bastards, commas, spiders and women. It is written and transcribed by warriors who carry the banner of kings.” So says G. Gordon Lead (Shi Wigham) in the opening minutes of Starz’s distort. If it wasn’t already obvious what field he sees himself in, the camera slowly lowers to reveal him with an open hand aflame, displaying a machismo as pointless as it is sickeningly dramatic.

What he doesn’t realize is that the series he’s playing is actually the story of those seemingly helpless and not as flattering masses as similar “soldiers”. Adapted from Robbie Pickering’s podcast slow burn, distort It is intended to cover untold (or at least lesser known) stories about water gate A scandal before a wonderful goal. The problem is that he tries to say it at a glance. All The sudden untold stories of the Watergate scandal that make for a very funny but brutally uneven miniseries.

Probably a very good movie embedded somewhere in the eight-hour episode, seven of which were sent to critics. Specifically, one very good feature about Martha Mitchell played by Julia Roberts, the wife of Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell (the sensitive prosthetic group, I’m told, is Sean Penn). After an agent locks her in a hotel room to deny the truth about the Watergate attack, Martha still whistles: only Nixon’s team publicly called her a paranoid drunk to discredit her version. .

Roberts is impressive in the first few episodes as Martha, who seems to spend her days at DC parties as if she owns a room and everyone in it (much to the annoyance of her husband’s colleagues), then calls her journalist friends to introduce him to you. . Votes from the mentioned parties (in addition to the anger of her husband’s companions). When Martha’s story takes a dark turn, Roberts peels back the thick layers of southern charm to reveal a more vulnerable side, her physical and emotional wounds testifying to the extent of cruelty the president’s comrades were willing to endure. Serve him.

Or maybe the movie is a dark comedy, with Wugham as the ridiculous and scarily intense protagonist at the center, surrounded by brainless actors like White House adviser John Dean (Dan Stevens), HR chief of staff Haldeman (Nat Faxon) ), an assistant. Jeb Magruder (Hamish Linklater) and political advisor Charles Colson (Patton Oswalt). The joke of your scenes. distort Do they seem to think they’re in a spy thriller or a major political drama or, in Liddy’s case, a dark war epic? apocalypse now. Meanwhile, his cowardice and incompetence is more like something developed by Armando Janucci or the Cohen brothers.

Perhaps even a little drama was made about Frank Wills (Patrick Walker), a Watergate bouncer who first noticed and reported the attack and whose life has been marred by its fame. Or a love story between John Dean and his more charismatic, liberal wife Mo (Betty Gilpin), who openly admits he hated her at first sight.

But it’s not entirely clear what all these narratives are doing as part of the same miniseries and experiencing a combination. Martha’s horrible story feels light because distort He can’t give his trauma the weight and attention it needs, not when he also needs to keep himself light enough to stage a bizarre farce about troubled political actors. Which, in turn, happens with explosive subplots like John and Mo’s romance when distort We can’t even prove what these two saw in each other, or why we should care in the first place. You don’t have time when you have all the other stories.

Not that anything works. Martha worried me from the most horrible and sad moments and I cried in the sixth episode where Frank was looking for his lost cat. (Full disclosure: I’m a total werecat.) In and around the White House, actors laugh from stage to stage, often. When they don’t do much, for example when Linklater Magruder avidly removes a butterfly from his garden, he looks just as stupid and embarrassing as the FBI agents who tried him in Kudian (played by Chris Messina and Carlos Valdes). Presence. s distort It really contrasts with the scenes of Lydia, who has become so unstoppable in the seventh episode that it borders on surrealism.

Together, these stories attempt to establish a new understanding of Watergate from its incredible and unknown perspective; well, if not necessarily the characters, at least the people who helped keep it going. In this version, supposedly important and powerful white men in the White House sit with Martha, a black security guard, a Latina FBI agent, for wise political wives like Mo. Scandal.

But the individual parts feel very rich and blurry, with very frightening tone shifts and very little sense of narrative pacing that will eventually lead to great notoriety. It seems to indicate that at first I didn’t even realize the series had to be eight episodes: after watching seven episodes sent to me, the seventh was as good a place to end as any. It’s a good idea to take control of these soldiers’ history and capture the masses. If the series doesn’t achieve anything, some members of the audience will be guaranteed to teach stories they didn’t know about before. What a pity to be in his mess! distort Take a short break somewhere about your equity.