Derek Cianfrance aims straight for the heart, again
It’s an incredibly snooty thing to say, but I’m a certified Derek Cianfrance head. In cinema circles, I imagine, to gush as I often do about the director of Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines must seem a wildly naive quality for a person that barely ventures outside of the American art-form. But both those movies, which are all I have, Your Honour, are such tragic masterpieces. When I am older, dying and hooked up to tubes, I will draw one last wave of passing comfort from the sight of Siena Miller dancing to Ryan Gosling’s ukulele as he yodels, “You always hurt/ the ones you love.” The angel of death will be Gosling himself, as leather-clad and resplendent as he was stunt-riding and bank-robbing in Pines, with a polished gun pointed squarely at my temples.
Valentine is an Oscar-nominated effort about the slow decay of a young marriage, tressed in neon blue light when its scenes wander into dusk. Pines is a gorgeous overestimation of the intersections between people, specifically a suburban Robin Hood, the policeman that guns him down, and (then) many years later, the children they leave behind. I recall weeping at both movies, and I regularly make reference to Cianfrance’s deftness of hand. Valentine has its blue light; Pines revels in its protagonist’s kinetic energy, across highways, across life. The special effect is harder to spot in I Know This Much is True, a limited mini-series Cianfrance has adapted from a novel by Wally Lamb for (God bless ‘em) the house of HBO.
I think it’s the waterfall the story’s characters visit frequently to reflect on what life has become. Dominick Birdsey (Mark Ruffalo) has taken it upon himself to protect his twin brother Thomas (also Mark Ruffalo) from the world. Thomas suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and when the show opens takes a knife to his own hand whilst at a volunteer gig at a public library. The act is tangled up in Thomas’ religious beliefs, and his determination to protest the first Gulf War somehow. He winds up at the waterfall a lot, ultimately tragically, and Dom’s wife retreats here too - after they lose their firstborn child in mysterious medical circumstances, and before Dom decides to get a vasectomy. The waterfall is a place to bring loss, at different junctures in the series, different moments in its grainy anthology. It calms and it rages when it foams.
Having learnt first-hand what it’s like to help guide a mentally afflicted person back into the world, or just from one day into another, this is delicate viewing. Dom can only do so much in an ongoing battle against administrative lethargy and outright abuse of the system, in a set-piece that doesn’t necessarily have American healthcare in its crosshairs. It’s physically painful not just to watch Thomas sever his own hand, but maybe even more so to watch security personnel separate him from his brother, or watch manhood gradually separate the Birdseys in their college years. (Philip Ettinger is likeable as the younger twins, and adequately all over the place). The most taxing scenes of all might be having to watch the boys, in adolescence, negotiate a violent stepfather.
I’ll admit only crying when a healthcare worker Dom has trusted on and off embraces him at his brother’s funeral, two people who’ve shared the journey of helping navigate a third life. In its quest to balance what chaos and what tenderness rotate this world, I Know This Much … provides Rosie O’Donnell, Archie Panjabi and Kathryn Hahn ample emotional room within which to work. Rob Huebel and Juliette Lewis are sidelined, however, for having faces the audience is by now expected to associate with comic relief.
I Know This Much is True isn’t so much must-see TV as it is another vital statement from Cianfrance on the nature of trauma.
