"The Americans" never gets old: 1st Episode of Season 5 w/ Keri Russell & Matthew Rhys

There is an old  KGB joke which shows the cynicism that pervaded all aspects of Soviet Communism:  “ A guy goes into a food market and asks: “Don’t you have any meat?” Market owner replies: “We don’t have any fish. The market that doesn’t have any meat is across the street.”

If you haven't watched "The Americans" before you should.  It's the kind of television that never gets old.  We are not in the 1980s any more.  Or are we?

In the  First Episode of Season Five of "The Americans,"  there was a new character named Tuan.’ Tuan  is a young Vietnamese KGB trainee posted with Soviet spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings as their adopted son. He’s hard-core, a blind believer in the Soviet system, gung-ho to the point that even Elizabeth can hardly stand his psychotic utterings at the dinner table.  One astonished gaping look from Elizabeth  says it all. The kid is too whacked even by   KGB standards.

It’s not as if American espionage agents were playing softball.   The CIA has hired a dissident Russian working for the  U.S. to develop a strain of fungus that will destroy the Soviet Union’s wheat crop.   That’s a bit of overkill. The failure of the Soviet socialist-communist system is evident in filmed food lines, bare supermarket shelves, rotting food, tractors mired in mud up to the hubcaps.

The dissident scientist Alexei in  “The Americans”   has a great deal of enthusiasm for America, its freedom and plenty.   He criticizes  his home country while unwitting talking to Soviet spy Philip, who is disguised as an airline pilot.“Good thing you don’t work for Aeroflot. Their planes crash all the time. They’re dirty. You want food you have to stand in line for hours.  In Russia, you must share toilets, pay bribes. Awful country.”   

The Americans is never without humor, though it’s often of the droll, mordant kind. Stan Beeman is a Steven Martin style ‘lonely guy’ FBI agent when he pops in on the Jennings with a sixpack of beer.  Neighborly chit-chat.

Stan’s been isolated too long and divorced not long enough. He bores a wry Phillip (Matthew Rhys,  great actor, and real life husband of Keri Russell)  with a non-eventful tale about a woman he’s seen at the gym. “I met a woman,” he tells Phillip. To ordinary mortals, this would mean he has possibilities. To nerdish Stan however, it means the woman on the treadmill next to him smiled at him while walking away.  

But the primary concern of the Soviet spies  is to get a sample of a biological warfare agent developed at an FBI lab in Virginia.  The Lassa virus had accidentally killed one of the embedded Soviet agents and it’s up to Elizabeth and Philip to dig up his body to get another sample.    It’s not going to be easy.  The CIA secretly buried  the toxic foreign agent in a sealed plastic overcoat inside a metal box buried fifteen feet deep in Fort Dietrich’s   back yard.

A team of agents, under the guidance of Philip and Elizabeth, sap the perimeter of the American compound and beginning digging. And digging. And still more digging. It’s pretty hard to explain how about 20 minutes of film digging can make for exciting TV but it does. 

You smell the dirt in more ways than one. The KGB team digs up the stinking body of their dead agent, cuts a chunk of his flesh out for transport back to Moscow.  One of the KGB team members slips off the ladder and cuts his wrist during the process. This exposes him to the Lassa virus. He panics,knows he’s going to die.   Elizabeth calmly reassures him that everything’s going to be all right, don’t worry, be calm.  When the man calmsdown, Elizabeth pulls a pistol and  shoots him in the head. Dead fall into the hole.

The ends justify the means. It’s brutal.  

Welcome to the Rileys: James Gandolfini, Kristen Stewart, and Melissa Leo Shine

“Welcome to the Rileys” presents a very American-style movie which seems almost from a different era.  It kinda’ is, considering  that in the speed-of-light movement of media in 2019,  a film from 2010  seems light years behind the times.  

In the   incessant parade of Marvel Comics inspired  sequels, prequels, and whatever other money-drubbing special effects   eyeball candy is drummed into audiences, “Welcome to the Rileys” is a window to a world of loss, patience, compassion, and possibly redemption. 

The independent film project is so archaic that it relies on superb acting by the late James Gandolfini, Kristen Stewart, and Melissa Leo to make its story engaging.  Nothing explodes, rockets into the air, crashes (unless you count human ones), or bleeds profusely (except when one of Mallory’s tricks smacks her around because he’s not happy with the sexual services she’s expected to provide),    “He tried to stick it up my ass,” she tells Doug, who is glad there is one vice Mallory does refuse to engage in.

Doug is the proprietor of a successful plumbing supply chain.  Lois is his wife.  And ‘Mallory’ (who goes by several aka(s) is a . . . .

1)     teen-age prostitute

2)     stripper

3)     orphan runaway from Florida

4)     substitute daughter to fill an empty space

There’s a lot of concentrated dissonance in the lives of Lois and Doug.  Since the death of their daughter Emily in a car accident, the couple has been locked into separate emotional boxes.  Lois has not left the house for years, not even to walk down her driveway to the mailbox.  Doug bides his time through business and an ongoing affair with a black waitress at a local diner.

It’s when Doug goes to a plumbers convention in New Orleans that he meets Mallory in a strip club where he’s gone to hide away from his obtuse conventioneer pals.  He refuses everything she offers beginning with a lap dance, and then graduating to just about everything else.  “Except anal, I don’t do anal,” Mallory says.   

It takes her a good long time to realize Doug is a real live human being and a generous one to boot.  Mallory is quite a beautiful mess with her tangle of hair, sharp features, halting bird-of-prey eyes darting around.  There are a couple of camera shots where you realize Doug may be a better man than you are.   Not having seen Kirsten Stewart in those fantasy flicks, I wondered if that was a body double climbing onto Doug’s lap in the seedy private room of the strip club. Yikes, there was one shot where I’d definitely lose my religion — but not to digress.

  Doug decides to take up permanent residence in the claptrap rooms where Mallory lives.  He calls wife Lois to tell her he won’t be home for a while.  She’s so numb with shock and loss that it hardly registers.  Weeks pass and finally Lois crashes out of her torpor and goes to look for her husband.   It’s all new to her – getting into the car, actually driving, rediscovering the outside world — but at least it’s a beginning.  Or it could be an ending the way she drives, confusing reverse for a forward gear.  So then you have Lois, Doug, and Mallory living together in a ramshackle apartment in a rundown part of New Orleans.

Of humor there are only short precise snatches.  Because it’s all very sad and heartbreaking.  It’s not the kind of pain you can easily shuck off.  It’s a familiar kind of pain that has you caring fopr Doug, and Lois, and Mallory.

 

Okay, so  being the discriminating film watcher that you are, and having seen some of this in RL, you know that Mallory (and it could be any drug addict, child prostitute, teen alcoholic, or serial loser in your life circle) cannot suddenly change into that wholesome mid-western fairy princess to fill that huge hole in the lives of Doug and Lois.

But she can deliver on a ray of hope.  If the film stumbled in a few spots, you quickly forgot about it, so engaging were the actors, and so human the story.