“The Woman in the Yard,” shot in Georgia, features metro Atlanta actors Peyton Jackson, Estella Kahiha and Danielle Deadwyler. (Photo courtesy of Blumhouse)
Tyler Perry is back in the gray wig and long housedresses for Madea’s Destination Wedding.
::
Steve Murray’s monthly musings on TV in Atlanta and beyond.
Starring Atlanta’s Danielle Deadwyler, The Woman in the Yard is a Trojan horse. Marketed in theaters as a horror flick, at its core — and despite the frantic, supernatural thrashings of its last 10 minutes — it smuggles in an interesting meditation on grief. Neither the thoughtful nor the scary parts of the movie totally succeed. Still, getting a chance to watch Deadwyler do her thing is always a plus.
Streaming on Peacock, the latest from Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan, The Shallows) traps Deadwyler’s Ramona in an isolated dream house. Only, the dream party never really happened because her husband, David (Russell Hornsby), died in the same car crash that left Ramona hobbling with a broken leg.
Sunk deep in depression on the hot morning, she’s roused from bed by her teenage son, Taylor (Peyton Jackson), and young daughter Annie (Estella Kahiha). They’re hungry. The bills are unpaid, the power is out, and so is the phone. Oh, and there’s a spectral woman clad head-to-toe in funereal black, perched at the edge of their yard.
Ramona limps her way out front and asks the inexplicable visitor what’s up. From behind her veil, the woman (played by Okwui Okpokwasili) murmurs stuff like, “You called and I came,” and displays bloody palms. The following hour is a slow-motion cat-and-mouse drama that has the stage-bound feeling of a play, taking us ever closer to revelations about the guilt that’s depressing Ramona and may be the animating force behind the stranger outside. (The film owes a debt to The Babadook in scenes that make us wonder if Ramona’s depression will turn lethal against her kids.)
But then the mystery woman starts using her outstretched shadow to manipulate objects and break stuff inside the house. And Ramona suddenly starts to act like she knows she’s in a horror movie, ordering her kids (both young actors are good) up to the attic for a special-effects showdown. It’s a disappointing finale in a way that resembles It Follows, the acclaimed horror flick that ignored the careful setup of its first hour to explode in a boring, CG-driven extravaganza. By the end, I suspected that Woman’s screenwriter Sam Stefanak began with an interesting script about grief, but realized he had to make a Hollywood-style deal with the devil and retool it as a shriek flick.
NETFLIX
Creator Kevin Williamson, who shot Scream 2 in Decatur way back in 1997, returns to his home state of North Carolina and the site of his TV hit Dawson’s Creek for the satisfying, middle-of-the-roader family crime drama The Waterfront.
Big fish in their small seaside town, the Buckleys are secretly in dire financial trouble with a floundering fish market and a swank seafood restaurant that looks more successful than it is. That’s why Cane Buckley (Jake Weary) has started smuggling drugs on one of the family fishing boats, trying to nudge the family’s account books back toward black. His dad, Harlan (Holt McCallany), is busy banging locals and drinking too much while his wife, Belle (Maria Bello), looks the other way while also trying to save the clan’s finances. She’s secretly negotiating to sell the Buckleys’ prime beachfront properties to a developer (Dave Annable), who makes his interest in Belle very clear.
Then there’s the Buckleys’ daughter, Cane’s sister Bree (Melissa Benoist), trailing a broken marriage, an estranged teen son and a history of substance abuse. Although she serves as a conduit for some well-intentioned discussions about recovery, her character is a drag. Her main purpose, when she’s not badmouthing her own family, is to bring in DEA officer and no-strings sex partner Marcus (Gerardo Celasco), whose unclothed scenes ramp up the show’s beefcake appeal. (Supporting help comes from hunky Rafael L. Silva as a bartender with A Secret.)
Yeah, it’s all very soapy but expertly done. You could call it a Low Country slow boil, except for the sudden pops of violence provided by the drug-running setup and the frat-bro sadism of its Big Bad, the drug kingpin Grady. (He’s played with face-punchable smarminess by Topher Grace.) Like most shows, or movies like Woman in the Yard, the series suffers from a loud climax that’s too familiar: people run around a yacht shooting at each other. It confuses action for satisfaction. But the quiet coda, focusing on Bello’s competent, scheming Belle, made me hope Netflix greenlights a second season for The Waterfront.
NETFLIX
Creator Lena Dunham should know better than to give her new show a title that lazy critics like me can use against it. But here I go: Too Much really is, but it’s also not enough.
The 10-episode comedy is a fictional gloss on Dunham’s own life experience. After six seasons of her HBO series Girls, and the thousand think pieces about Modern Young Women it inspired, Dunham relocated to London and met and married British musician Luis Felber. The two serve as executive producers of Too Much, and he provides its music. You could look at the show as their fictionalized wedding album… for better and worse.
Dunham/s fictional surrogate here is line producer Jessica (Megan Stalter), who temporarily relocates to London following an ugly breakup with boyfriend Zev (Michael Zegen of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a specialist at nebbishes who disappoint their partners). Zev has moved in with new girlfriend and influencer Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski), who’s everything Jessica isn’t: self-confident, sexy and thin.
I’m gonna get this out of the way because it’s literally front and center: Stalter, like Dunham, is a large woman. While it’s still unusual to have a plus-size lead on a mainstream show, and refreshing from the inclusiveness angle, your viewing comfort may vary. Especially when Felber’s fictional avatar turns up: Will Sharpe as musician Felix, who meets Jessica following one of his underattended gigs when she first arrives in London. Trim and buff, he makes for an odd-couple pairing with Stalter.
Sharpe may be best known in the States for playing Aubrey Plaza’s sensitive husband in the second season of The White Lotus and the tour guide in last year’s film, A Real Pain. He’s playing a slippery figure here, a quietly toxic fellow just sexy enough to get away with a certain level of sketch. He brings all the subtlety that his co-star Salter lacks. In the show’s better scenes, the imbalance of their acting styles works because Sharpe has a stabilizing presence; he levels things out.
Stalter found recognition on HBO’s Hacks as the spoiled nepo agent Kayla, where her shtick wore a little thinner each season. She’s a big personality, but she’s an undisciplined actor, and her skill set varies from scene to scene. In Too Much, she’s often good enough – especially when directed to calm down and display some vulnerability – that it’s a shame she doesn’t have the chops to carry the show. Too often, trying to sell a scene, she simply gets louder.
Full disclosure, I bailed after six episodes, because I was getting claustrophobic from all the time spent by Jessica and Felix in her cramped bedroom and in her bed. Dunham’s writing (She co-wrote all the episodes and directed eight of them) is well-observed, but ultimately self-absorbed, reflecting her mainly Millennial characters. The series gets stealth supporting performances from older pros Richard Grant, Naomi Watts and Andrew Scott. But the focus inevitably returns to Jessica, her messy bedroom and her tiny, neurotic dog, Astrid. I’m happy Dunham and Felber found each other. But I’m not interested enough in them to want to know all the (fictionalized) ins and outs of the ways they overcame their emotional insecurities, toxic patterns and old relationships en route to the altar.
NETFLIX
Probably the funniest scene (of the unintentional variety) in Madea’s Destination Wedding is when our smack-talking heroine and her family stomp into a government office, get their photos taken and are issued travel passports in just a few minutes. Yeah, wouldn’t that be great?
Realism isn’t what you go for in Tyler Perry movies, especially the ones where he pulls on that gray wig and the long housedresses to embody his alter ego. He also plays her husband Joe under old-age makeup, and without any, their long-suffering son, Atlanta DA Brian. It’s Brian’s daughter’s wedding in the Bahamas (partly played by the Dominican Republic) that motors the very thin plot of the comedy. The movie is basically a series of brightly shot scenes of Perry (playing one or all of his three characters) standing around in casinos, on airplane sets, or on buffet lines ad libbing riffs with his longtime Madea-movie extended family (Cassi Davis, David Mann, Tamela J. Mann). It’s cheap, sometimes funny, totally forgettable. The usual.
On the more serious side of things, I’m planning to take a deep breath and settle in with all five episodes of Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Disney+). While I doubt it can match the emotional depths of Spike Lee’s 2006 HBO series When the Levees Broke, the world is even hotter now, and the storms are worse. Maybe we can learn some useful lessons from everything that went wrong 20 years ago. Happy(?) watching.
::
Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous column here.
