True Detective: Season 3 ReviewPosted by sanclair on February 26th, 2019 An unthinkable act was committed and Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali), wearing only his undergarments in the chill of dawn, watched the fire flare up his garments, into a garbage can. In the silence of the night, punctuated only by the crackling of the fire, the detective contemplates not only the choices of his past but also the cloudy events that seem to announce themselves in his tomorrow. Suddenly triggered by his sharp military / military instinct, developed through years of investigation and wars, Wayne comes out of the trance and turns to look over his shoulder. He sees nothing but emptiness. It lacks, as we all do, the metaphysical ability to see through time, which allows us not only to live with the traces of the past, but also with the specters of the future.
Forget the gangsters, megalomaniac crimes, political theories, California and its labyrinthine avenues, endless motorways and deserted hills and also the idea of uniting four protagonists that seem to have come from different series, falling from parachute into a plot inspired by Greek mythology and overly interested in the corruption mechanism behind the Los Angeles transportation industry. Forget, therefore, everything that has nothing to do with the universe of True Detective and welcome to the third season of the police anthology of Nic Pizzolatto, who returns to good form in a narrative based on the disturbing microcosms of small towns, family conflicts , urban legends, two detectives on their travels the United States in, and, of course, huge time jumps. The most recent chapters of the best crime drama of the present day rescue (almost) everything that made the initial episodes have such an impact. In this third year, Pizzolatto demonstrates to have heard the critics received in the past, but returns to follow the mold of True Detective to the sting. This is not to say that the third season of the HBO series repeats the first, or even that it would be a demerit to walk a safe path, but rather that the anthology has its own internal logic - after all, when the author distanced himself from the concept of "real detective", everything almost went down, putting at risk the future of one of the most authentic projects of the little screens in these times. So why not use creative variation on a triumphant scheme? Now it is Ali and Stephen Dorff, interpreters of investigators Wayne Hays and Roland West, respectively, the prey of the cruel shock of temporality of the drama. But the dual structure of the first season, which matched the events in the lives of Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) in the years 1995 and 2012, is complicated. Pizzolatto finds more time, in narrative terms, to explore the negative effects brought about by the spiral of violence in the case of the disappearance of young Will (Phoenix Elkin) and Julie Purcell (Lena McCarthy) into the lives of the cops, who are inevitably affected by the unfolding of a mystery rich in misconceptions and memorable performances. At this point of the championship, it almost comes to sound repetitive again acclaim a performance of Ali, winner of the Oscar for Moonlight: Under the Light of the Moonlight and Green Book - The Guide; on the other hand, how to do the opposite when the actor presents us with one of his seemingly inexhaustible facets as an artist? Watching Don Shirley in the Green Book and his Wayne Hays in Season Three is, incidentally, the most direct way to understand the multiple angles of his talent and how Ali has the ability to become someone else without changing faces. Although they are completely dissonant personalities, both the pianist of the Oscar winner of Best Film 2019 when the policeman, they differentiate, above all, because of their similarities. Both Shirley and Wayne are men brutalized by their contexts, men whose affections are silenced and undermined by events beyond their control. Both are thus invested in the ceaseless and brutal pursuit, both interior and exterior, of finding their places in the world. And it is precisely the way in which Ali approaches these two almost complementary roles is that he highlights him from his peers, and potentially credits him to the status of one of the great interpreters of his generation. Because in True Detective, Hays is first a soldier who tries to be useful to his nation in times of peace (1980); a police officer sentenced to bureaucratic service because of his "indiscipline" (1991); and finally an embittered old man, haunted by the ghosts of the past and harmed by an aggressive memory failure (2015). Like it? Share it! |