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| (Netflix) |
Glenn Kessler, Todd. A. Kessler and Daniel Zelman – after their big success with Damages – have now given us Bloodline, a star-studded family drama about secrets and lies and murderous treachery and bastard sons. The Rayburn family is a trademark in the Florida keys, with an established resort property dating back to 1968, and the Rayburn children serving as foundational pillars to their community. Meg Rayburn (Linda Cardellini) is her father’s lawyer, as well as an attorney connected to the city’s restrictive commercial development; John Rayburn (Kyle Chandler) is the respected town Sheriff; and Kevin Rayburn (Norbert Leo Butz) rents out boats to whoever might want them (those boats come in handy later, trust me). Yet a deep secret is brewing beneath the surface, coming to a boil when brother Danny (Ben Mendelsohn) returns home. He brings along with him buried pains and lingering resentments. Sally Rayburn (Sissy Spacek), with her agile spiritedness and brave smile, is an embodiment of what this family has attempted to repress for so long, and she believes she can make everything okay if she just tries hard enough. But the past is irreconcilable, and there are some things you just can’t fix. We know from the first episode that the season will end in Danny’s death, and irrevocable tragedies will ensue.
We
hear reiterations of regret and anguish uttered throughout by Chandler’s John
Rayburn, whose soft and morally convincing drawl attempts to convince us that what was done was absolutely necessary, that it had to be done.
After finishing this whole season in two days, there’s one scene that sticks in
my mind, one that defines what this show worked towards in terms of character.
John, Kevin and Meg – after the dirty deed is done – are all sitting across
from each other in the dimly lit living room. It’s raining outside, and they’re
just looking at each other in the silence. John explains to them why they
have to move on with their lives -- that Meg needs to go to New York, that Kevin
needs to get back with his wife (now pregnant), and he needs to keep on with
work like nothing ever happened. He then comes to a realization: “I just
realized something. This family never says it. I love you.” The camera pans toward Meg and Kevin -- they are absolutely devoid of
any emotion. The bonds feel tenuous and strained. All their lives, they’ve
felt the pressure of having to live up to the name, “Rayburn,” and now that
they’ve sacrificed a Rayburn to that purpose, an emptiness registers and a startling realization finally settles: as John says later, “I thought the
best thing that ever happened to me was being born a Rayburn. Now, I'm not so
sure.” Danny was the common enemy, the evil and deranged brother, but, without
him, all they have are each other. They aren’t anything to each other now but
their bloodline (ka-zing!).
Netflix
allowed the creators to shoot on location in the Keys for eight months, and,
boy, at least creatively, did that choice pay off. The slow-burn wouldn’t work
as well as it does without the lusciously picturesque landscapes of the
mangrove swamps, the glittering crystalline waters, the dirty white sand
beaches, the crispy leaves of the palm trees. From Rafi Quintana and Wayne
Lowry to John Rayburn’s wife and kids, every character in this town feels so
inhabited and familiar -- and yet, not too familiar at the same time. That's because the
Keys feel like a character, too, in the most noirish sense, a foreboding
organism of fiendish beauty that is concealing rot and corruption and the dead,
brutalized bodies of dead immigrant women.
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| (Netflix) |
Mendelsohn’s performance is the highlight of this show – his off-kilter smile,
his charismatic garishness, his walk, his gruff laugh and general menace add so
much subtext that not much exposition is needed for this character. The
creators allow us, like they allow the other Rayburn siblings, to put him
together, to sketch out and imagine what his motivations and sufferings are.
Certainly, making the inn a drug haven allows him to
compromise the Rayburn family name; indeed, all his actions feel pursued to
enact sabotage against his family. The actor gives us insights that the writing
merely teases, the perfect example of this being when Danny takes out his niece
on the boat. She reminds him of her dead sister, and he gives her the same
necklace that her sister wore on the day she drowned. John keeps
insisting that there was a threat, but we know better than that; he was recreating
a moment, finding some temporary happiness, attempting to create some kind of
peace for himself. Jane Rayburn – John’s daughter – is the only one who doesn’t
judge Danny, who makes him feel loved and like someone with some life
experience to impart. The sexual tension we detect, which makes this
relationship hinge unsteadily on creepiness, is an added ingredient Mendelson adds
to draw us in further into the enigma that is Daniel Rayburn.
If
love feels too far gone, even in those moments where he feels happiest and most
at ease, respect and immensity is what Danny really desires. He doesn’t need
Spacek’s Sally, with her placating smile and John Lennon sunglasses, timidly
molding him into her husband, Robert, or John’s fake good-brother routine with
its false pretenses. He’s demanding authority through sabotage, but,
unfortunately, he doesn’t understand the extent to which his own family wants
to sabotage him. “We never made him feel included,” John Rayburn admits to the
trustees that want to promote him to county sheriff. He’s assuaging his guilt,
of course, by admitting that to the group by the show’s end, but it ironically
underlines how the idea of “Rayburn” is ingrained into every character’s
individual psyche invariably.
When
tragedy struck, when their sister died a long time ago, it was blame and malice
towards Danny that created the Rayburn family and made it “strong.” Mendelsohn embodies the bruising and emotional scars in his pained walk, and he made
us delve deeper into this man who, in one scene, we might think monstrous, and in another, rightly indignant towards those who hurt him the most. At first,
when the Rayburn siblings, knowing that their family business was compromised,
hid the cocaine away from DEA, I was confused: why would they incriminate
themselves if they did nothing wrong? Their supposed justification was to
protect their mother, whose tepid sensibilities (she never even bothered to
look at her husband’s will, probably because she knew Danny wouldn’t be in it)
might be shattered by the idea that her son was using the inn to smuggle cocaine
for a brutal killer. But we know she’s stronger than that, and it appears next
season that she is poised to be the heroine of this story, as Lenny Potts is
preparing to tell her the truth about her children. The truth is, as we know,
they hid the drugs at the expense of Danny’s life, that John watched as a
killer from Wayne’s clan entered into his room and said nothing, that they
chose their malicious, brutal father over their vulnerable and hurting brother.
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The
flash-forward, a Kessler/Zelman trademark, is thematically poignant for this
reason, because we’re meant to be asking ourselves what brings them to that
point of predestined tragedy. It’s an old idea in literature, dating back to
the Greeks, the idea that one cannot escape their fate, but Greek tragedy feels
especially alluded to here; John hiding his brother’s dead body,
deceiving his mother, using an antiquated idea of family and community to
justify his actions. Ultimately, however, it is his blindness which threatens
to annihilate him and those he “loves” most. Patriarch Robert Rayburn (Sam Shepard) has a
stroke and loses memory the moment he tells Danny that it was his siblings, not
him, that decided it was best that he didn’t stay in town. John's love
tracks death in its wake, and his siblings are blindly led along by their blind
shepherd, but “if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”
Bloodline gives us actors at the top
of their game, from Chandler and Cardellini to Mendelsohn and Spacek, who are
forces to be reckoned with, in terms of nuance and dramatic depth. (I imagine
Chloe Sevigny will be given more to work with next season, seeing as the
creators have already teased out a deep connection between her and the
deceased.) The thrills are muted, hence the term “slow-burn,” but it’s utterly
gripping nonetheless, with many layers of mystery to peel back. All there
really is to do is sit back, relax, wait 11 seconds after the credit sequence
rolls and watch the next episode.