Translating English puns is often impossible – a glance at every synchronization of the “Simpsons” is sufficient for this realization. It’s rarely funny. When friends and colleagues of the title character a fabulous HBO series “Good night, Mare”, one wonders why they often giggle so funny. In German, the words only express the wish for blissful bed rest. In the original, on the other hand, “Good Night, Mare” describes the nightmare that the policewoman experiences almost continuously. In the suburb of the US metropolis of Pennsylvania, a lot is depressing. Oh what: everything.
Early in the morning of another dreary working day, Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) is called to a backyard full of bulky waste, the owner of which hangs in the bathroom next door. Minutes later, the small town investigator sprains her foot while chasing a fugitive petty dealer. And then she is supposed to reopen the discarded case of a missing woman because her parents are making mood against politics and the police on television. At least the sun would shine over the fermenting concoction of abuse, bullying and monster trucks, unemployment, alcoholism and junk food. But it doesn’t.
[„Mare of Easttown“, auf Sky]
When the chronically exhausted woman in her mid-forties returns home from work, a bit of idyllic after-work hours would be needed in the four-generation household. Instead of relaxation, however, Mare expects the house of her cynical mother (Jean Smart), where she lives after the divorce with daughter Siobhan (Anjourie Rice) and the four-year-old child of her older son, who took his own life while on drugs and therefore does not experience the upcoming custody dispute got to. No wonder Mare Sheehan is always in a bad mood.
It all started so well for the local high school basketball star. Lady Wolf was beautiful, popular, cool – a provincial queen from a picture book. But then, instead of being a professional sportsman, she became a police officer like her father, had children at an early age like all local women and put her life on the files of a region with an irritatingly high level of violent crime, including the death of a neighbor. When she lies dead in the river after an argument with the new friend of her baby’s father, the spiral of escalation rotates faster with each of the seven episodes on Sky. Good night, Mare!
Showrunner Ingelsby has already worked his way through the region beforehand
Showrunner Brad Ingelsby, who was allowed to process his youth in this morally and materially ruined region in fictions from “American Woman” to “Out of the Furnace”, would be doing an injustice by reducing “Mare of Easttown” to a murder case. On the surface, it might be about the hunt for a felon. Underneath the mystery façade, however, a milieu study of the middle class, called White Trash, of the American high-performance society is developing on the way to the lower class. And nowhere could this descent be more impressively expressed than in the face of Kate Winslet.
[Wenn Sie alle aktuellen Entwicklungen zur Coronavirus-Pandemie live auf Ihr Handy haben wollen, empfehlen wir Ihnen unsere App, die Sie hier für Apple- und Android-Geräte herunterladen können]
Everything about the protagonist of an everlasting nightmare exudes that melancholy, bitter resignation that garnered 74 million votes for the failed Donald Trump. When Mare trudges through the thicket of mutual contempt with the corners of her mouth hanging down and the bleaching out, the social division wells out of every forehead crease. When she manically sucks on the e-cigarette, half the world struggles for breath. When her colleague from abroad asks Zabel (Evan Peters) how he copes with life in the provinces, she recommends “lowering demands”. When she explains to the psychologist her grandson’s wrongdoing with his father’s disturbances, the camera searches for 90 uncut seconds in Winslet’s eye for redemption. And even if she finds a little of it in the bed of the empathetic writer Richard (Guy Pearce), the intimacy is immediately suspect.
In view of this epic cascade of desolation, it is all the more to be thanked those responsible for not slipping into cheap clichés at any time. The people here may therefore be suspicious of all conceivable crimes up to the pastor: At the same time there is a solidarity that tells as much about the country as the hateful conflict. It is the story of the small community of fate, the fairy tale of the microcosm, which “Mare of Easttown” neither celebrates nor condemns, but rather portrays it in a movingly beautiful way in all simplicity. In the best series of rainy spring.
–
