KJ Apa and Madelyn Cline jaunt around Europe in “The Map That Leads to You.” (Courtesy of Prime)
Steve Murray’s monthly musings on TV in Atlanta and beyond.
Usually I’m the one giving out what-to-watch recommendations to people I know — from guilty-pleasure yukfests to lugubrious Nordic serial-killer series. A lot of the time, I’m hours and episodes ahead of what everybody else is binging. But I was a solid month late to the tawdry party known as The Hunting Wives. Finally, I understand why friends talked about it with equal parts glee, mortification, giddy endorsement and a dread of being judged. The Netflix show earns all those reactions.
Brittany Snow plays Sophie, a fragile blonde with secrets in her past, clinging to newfound sobriety when she first arrives in East Texas (played in the show by Charlotte, North Carolina). Her architect husband Graham (Evan Jonigkeit) has relocated them from deep blue Boston to red hat territory to further his architecture career. One of his top new clients is local bigwig Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney), who invites the newcomers to his mansion for a shindig that turns out, to liberal Sophie’s horror, to be an NRA fundraiser.
If Jed is the cock of the walk, the real power broker seems to be his wife Margo (a terrific Malin Akerman), who swarms Sophie, along with her very best frenemies, including Callie (Jaime Ray Newman). She’s the wife of the sheriff, a guy who seems a little too fond of his male deputy and who lets his wife take, um, charge in bed. Callie, meanwhile, has enjoyed a Sappho-rific relationship with the vigorously bisexual Margo and sees pert young Sophie as a threat.
Based on a novel by May Cobb, the show is good at depicting the bless-her-heart, backbiting flurry of Southern women welcoming (and sizing up) Sophie. The scavenger hunt of a trashy plot piles on dark secrets not just for Sophie but also for Margo, whose drug-dealing brother lives in a trailer park and shows off his natural talents in one eye-opening nude scene. The eight-episode show throws in murder, hypocritical Christianity, horny teenage jocks, more murder, lots of sex and a whole bunch of guns.
While she’s our putative heroine, it’s pretty hard to sympathize with Sophie when she slips — or, more accurately, cannonballs — off her sober perch and starts treating her marital vows more as suggestions. Like so many shows, The Hunting Wives becomes a case of diminishing returns the longer you watch it. But me-oh-my, the trashiness of it all is fun for most of the way. Netflix hasn’t confirmed a second season of the series, which ends on a cliffhanger. But based on the slightly shamed word-of-mouth it earned, they’d be crazy not to pull that trigger.
Estrogen is also a driving force in another Netflix limited series: Hostage. The title ostensibly refers to Alex Anderson (Ashley Thomas), a Doctors Without Borders physician who’s abducted by masked terrorists while on a mission in French Guiana. The true target of the crime is his wife, Abigail Dalton (Suranne Jones), who’s serving as Britain’s prime minister. The kidnappers order her to step down from her post at Downing Street, otherwise Alex — and the clutch of doctors seized with him — will be executed.
Complicating matters, Abigail is navigating a visit from another high-powered woman, French president Vivienne Toussaint (Julie Delpy). Up for re-election, Vivienne has tilted to the right, using a boatful of refugees as a bargaining chip with Abigail in a bid for populist votes back home. She’s backed by the money and viewership of her mogul husband Elias’ (Vincent Perez) conservative media empire, but she’s publicly criticized by her stepson Matheo (Corey Mylchreest), who has a complicated backstory with her.
Yes, like Hunting Wives, Hostage has its share of soap suds lathering its six episodes. But creator Matt Charman (he co-wrote Bridge of Spies for Steven Spielberg with the Coen Brothers) brings intelligence to the storyline and springs a series of clever surprises and plot reversals long after the central conflict seems to be resolved. As Abigail, Jones brings steel and humanity to the role; I still miss her roguish, cross-dressing turn in HBO’s prematurely canceled Gentleman Jack. Delpy brings the appropriate Marine Le Pen-like hauteur to her role, so it’s a pleasure when the character thaws and joins in realpolitik sisterhood with Abigail. Watching a show like this, about intelligent political leadership, is invigorating, even if it feels, at the moment, as fantastical and far away as something out of Game of Thrones.
Also on Netflix, also femme-centric, the original movie Night Always Comes stars British actor Vanessa Kirby as Lynette, a woman barely making ends meet by working at an industrial bakery by day and turning tricks as a mid-level escort on the Portland, Oregon, hotel circuit by night. She’s determined to make a big payment to save the rundown house she grew up in, where she still lives with her brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen) and their surly mom Doreen. Jennifer Jason Leigh, a figure once vital to any indie film worth seeing, is reduced here to a couple of scenes as that nightmare mother, buying a car and blowing all the money earmarked to keep the house from foreclosure.
That means Lynette has to come up with $25,000 by 9 a.m. the following day. Her ploys involve tricking with a regular, married client (Randall Park), stealing his Mercedes with plans to sell it and embroiling her bakery co-worker Cody (Stephan James, giving one of the best performances in the movie) in cracking open a rich guy’s safe. In other words, the movie is all about Lynette digging herself ever deeper into danger. Based on a novel by Willy Vlautin, Night tries to explicate Lynette’s actions by giving her an abusive history as a teen, when she was involved with an older guy named Tommy. He’s played by Lawrenceville native Michael Kelly, who’s miscast because he’s too likable.
The movie’s biggest casting error is front and center. Is anybody less plausible to play a beat-down American named Lynette than the elegant Kirby, who grew up posh in London? She was ideal as the young Princess Margaret in The Crown (Night director Benjamin Caron directed a bunch of that series’ episodes), and she made sense as one of the sleek, lethal spies swirling around Tom Cruise in the Mission: Impossible flicks. But playing a desperate working-class working girl exceeds her range. There always seems to be an invisible cloud of Swarovski crystals encasing her.
At a time when economic inequality is at a peak and more Americans than ever are barely scraping by, Night comes off as an example of glib, chic poverty porn.
AMAZON PRIME
Every time I go to a paint store, I wonder who has the job of naming the colors. You know what I mean: Tangerine Spritzer, Birch Memories, Strawberry Giggle — things like that. Maybe the same sort of person gets to come up with the pronoun-laden titles of the romance novels that get adapted regularly for big and small screens. Like the Blake Lively lawsuit generator, It Ends with Us, or the mom-meets-young-pop-star saga The Idea of You. That last one, starring Anne Hathaway and shot in Atlanta (posing as L.A.), came from Amazon Prime. So does The Map That Leads to You.
Based on J.P. Monninger’s book, the movie stars model-gorgeous Madelyn Cline as Heather, traveling through Europe with two besties for one last, fun summer before taking a boring bank job in New York. Addicted to following rigid travel plans, her normally anal approach to life gets rocked by the arrival of Jack (Riverdale’s KJ Apa), who flings himself into the overhead luggage rack above Heather’s seat on a train through Spain.
Following the European itinerary his great-grandfather recorded in a journal he kept after serving in World War II, Jack is basically a manic pixie dream boy. And in another reversal of old romantic tropes — spoiler alert! — he’s also, to some degree, a gender variation on the role Ali MacGraw played in Love Story, where her free spirit shook smitten Ryan O’Neal out of his stodgy, white-collar ways.
Up to its truly stupid ending, Map is enjoyable as a bubbleheaded travelogue through various sun-kissed summer spots of the continent. The Gaudí Cathedral in Barcelona? Check. The Roman Forum? Check. The film is directed by Lasse Hallström, who won arthouse film lovers’ hearts with My Life As a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Chocolat. If the promise of those movies never developed into anything greater, he’s at least a craftsman you can always count on for quality — even if it’s just quality schmaltz like this.
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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.
