Alternatively, with the gunsmoke stock-still clearing from my flat-screen tv set, I don’t have to. I can buoy just now say with you: Holy crap all-powerful, they in reality did that.
OK, I will be venturing an initial thought, which I reserve the right to change: it feels like Boardwalk Empire only aired a series finale. It just happened to do that, probably, several seasons before the show actually must conclude. Jimmy Darmody is dead. It was a move that was incredibly well done, that made sense — for reasons I'll get narratively in awhile — and it was so tragically a waste as the death of a young man in a war. (That, like Jimmy notes, in a way it was.) Showed that Boardwalk Empire, as did the stones Nucky, keep that lump of metal cold and do what you feel needs to be done and must respect that.
But I must ask: structurally, what makes the show become now? I do not care who gets to walk on the beach in the opening credits: for all practical purposes, Michael Pitt, Steve Buscemi, was the star of Boardwalk Empire until today. As an actor, Pitt was magnetic, giving blood and passion to the meticulous history of the show. And as a character, Jimmy had the history and compelling story — the Lost Generation killing machine, deformed and wounded from his experience Over There, the guy who acted while others he declaimed banality, the future (or so we thought it was) in Atlantic City and organised crime. As the character seemed to naturally through which Boardwalk Empire was about to tell the sordid history of 20s (with links to history Nucky political corruption of the era). Instead, which was, in a surprising blindside, done. And waiting until we had two seasons has invested in him to do so, you could say Boardwalk Empire out – Game Thronesed game of Thrones.
With Jimmy went, a number of items in the series is suddenly cut loose. Richard Harrow is still a great creation, but as appropriate in the new order's hit? Al Capone is still out there and has a lot of history to do, but what, going to buddy with Nelson Van Alden, now playing house of Cicero? Gillian's convoluted story with him seemed to suggest a future family long, messy, but instead turns out to be a last piece of backstory for a life gone wrong. (And is presumably left with now orphaned son Jimmy). And Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano are still slowly, slowly, foreshadowing the modern drug trade that history says that it will be a pioneer, but I'm definitely worried that taking Jimmy out of their orbit threatens to transform their story (also with a great performance by Michael Stuhlbarg) in more than a reenactment.
But none of this is to say that, in terms of pure character and history, killing Jimmy was the wrong thing to do. From where I sit, picking up my jaw from the floor, now feels like the logical thing for the show to do. Considering what unfolded in this season, all the shit that went down between them, and Nucky Jimmy again and return to partner in the old days would have felt like a gimmick. I have to admit it: as the first half of the finale is gone and everything seemed to be falling rapidly in that direction (as in the Assembly of the Godfather in which marriage and "suicide" took care of Nucky), I was ready to be disappointed. It would be too convenient to put them back together. Whatever their history, Jimmy betrayed Nucky absolutely: don't try to have him killed, joined forces with men who wanted to erase the legacy of Nucky like a sandcastle. Having criticized the series enough for great drama, feinting at then pulls back — the recent season-ender of Sons of Anarchy jumps to mind — I can't blame Boardwalk for cold, hard look at what he called the logic of its history.
Thematically, the death has made even more sense. The Lost Generation for a reason. Jimmy was a member of a generation of great war soldiers whose lives were ended, literally or figuratively, before they could really begin: are dead, were broken, went home with half their faces are missing. Jimmy was abandoned by the forces of politics and war have so he was mistreated by his parents: he never had a chance. Or, rather, he had a chance — a theoretical, to become a leader and the taking of power — but was brought from those very forces: impetuous violence that had become a habit for him and the interference of his mother and his father's generation.
The usual structure would television show said that Jimmy lost this season was a setback that could learn and return from, but no, it was him being thrown off track by forces that were in place to its conception. "Dead in the trenches," he says, and Nucky did — if not years before, when he was born.
And that the waste of youth,
No comments:
Post a Comment