Rectify is a narrative artwork as could only be conceived in television. Rooted in Southern Gothic, conceived with precise cinematography and uniquely rendered through an artful abstraction, the series – like TV – is never just one thing. It plays to the small-screen's every advantage and constraint, emerging as a formal hybrid of literary depth and cinematic detail.
The series takes its rhythms from classical orchestra, with every instrument in harmony and every piece contributing to its mesmerizing whole. Creator Ray McKinnon’s writing sets the tone, capturing consistent, ethereal beauty. He strictly establishes a sense of place, infusing scripts with the customs and traditions of the South as he knows it. (It’s where he calls home.) He understands its natural juxtapositions, with tension buried beneath churches, diners and the dew of ice-cold sweet tea. Within this world are intensely provocative components, but it nonetheless exudes a beguiling allure. It all but envelops you.
Rectify's premise draws from its setting. Daniel Holden (Aden Young) grew up in the small town of Paulie, Georgia, and was arrested on charges of murder and rape as a teenager. He waited on death row for decades before an abrupt and tentative exoneration; as Rectify begins, he exits his “little box,” slowly emerging under the glaring sun of the open sky. He’s re-entering a society that abandoned and marked him; a family that has moved on and changed; and a world in which he’s now an anxious, curious foreigner. His return to “existence” as we know it essentially calls into question the existence of all around him.
Rectify is fundamentally an ensemble work, using Daniel as a catalyst to explore people who are similarly at existential crossroads. There’s the journey of Teddy (Clayne Crawford), Daniel’s brutish stepbrother, and his devout wife, Tawney (Adelaide Clemens), with whom Daniel forms a passionate, troubled connection. We dig into the life of his feisty sister Amantha (Abigail Spencer), who essentially gave up a life to prove her brother’s innocence, and his mother Janet (J. Smith-Cameron), blistered with guilt for remarrying and having another son. Daniel bounces around at the series’ center, reacquainting himself with food and technology and the muggy greenery of Paulie. He’s damaged and unpredictable, but lovable and endearing just the same.
These stories are threaded by Rectify’s quiet spirituality, gliding in unison like a cinematic fable. As the carefully-measured third season begins, families wracked by decades of internalized pain start to drift and break apart, while the case to officially incriminate or completely exonerate Daniel reignites. It's a sharp contrast, but McKinnon plays with it fluidly. He demonstrates a stronger command of tone, vividly swerving between engaging mystery pulp and resonant character drama.
McKinnon’s careful dialogue manages to fill his characters distinctly – in Tawney’s stringent politeness reflecting her steadfast faith, or Amantha’s wry cynicism complimenting her undying familial loyalty, or Daniel’s off-the-cuff ramblings revealing a soul somewhat separated from its body – as does the complex, evocative visual language of his directors. The third season’s second episode ends with a harrowing monologue from Teddy, drunkenly confessing his demons while parked in a car, in the black of the night. Gabriel Mann’s music turns spooky; the camera lens surrounds Teddy’s expression of vicious guilt with pure darkness. Crawford’s performance here is electrifying, a masterful combination of tenderness and menace. But the production surrounding him only adds to it. It’s a mood piece, a pivotal character scene and a penetrating confessional, all in the same breath.
That, essentially, is what Rectify pulls off again and again. Its aesthetic ambitions run in congruence with its narrative work. In the season finale, as Daniel plans to pack up and head out of town for good, he stares out at a parking lot. He humorously asks his lawyer, John (Luke Kirby), if this would be considered a “bad view” – he’s still not quite sure. He’s only been out in the world for a few months; even the exterior of a low-rent apartment complex glistens like a place of wonder. McKinnon, as the episode’s writer and director, shows us how. Via the camera, its beauty is rooted in the banal. It’s all in the moment – in the swelling music overwhelming the dirty gravel, and in the weight of the scene for Daniel, finally prepared to move on and create a new life. You see it through Daniel’s virginated eyes, an experience of ever-changing and evolving perception.
There’s beauty in all corners of Rectify. Every character is written, shot and played with raw empathy. It’s what makes the show so aggressively personal; the wistful regret and bruised love within this family is so palpable that it all but physically hits you. In the framing of the camera, characters are boxed-in metaphorically, a parallel with the only life Daniel knew for decades, and the performances texture that overriding motif. In season 3, Crawford devastatingly locates Teddy's scars, and shows how the past informs his insecurities; Spencer carefully allows Amantha’s softness to filter out of her hard exterior; and Cameron triumphs in affirming Janet's strength, embracing her character's entrenched guilt to reveal a core of determined love. In the lead role, Young continues to astonish, journeying Daniel back into civilization with morbid humor, somber affection and graceful intelligence. There's longing, regret and helplessness between the Holden family members, and each actor interprets these ideas with heartbreaking pathos.
Ultimately, Rectify is not especially interested in empirics. It doesn’t build with obvious themes or a clear direction. Rather, its storytelling is spare. It’s all sensory, with the emphasis on emotion. The third season ends with Daniel finding a sort of rebirth in the sea, or “the source,” as he calls it. The sequence that follows, of Daniel in the ocean, and of his imagined conversation with Tawney gently flowing into her own dream, is exemplary of Rectify’s strange, deep brilliance. It combines the real with the surreal, the sad with the celebratory. Daniel’s baptism delves into the subconscious, and into the supernatural potential of connection – previously unseen to my eyes, as so much of Rectify is.
What the third season comes down to is existence – in how we grow and how we function, in the role of justice and family, in the inexplicable nature of love and connection. It’s not an idea McKinnon wrestles with merely in text. He captures his characters and the world around them with sheer curiosity, mining extraordinary artistry out of the daily grind of pool painting jobs, supermarket training summits and arduous family get-togethers. As a method it’s luminously rhythmic, humanely layered. He’s searching as much as his characters are, affirming the joy of melancholy and the tragedy of redemption.
He’s affirming the indefinite. The intimacy that forms between an ongoing series and its loyal viewer is mirrored by Rectify's own evolution, building and deepening as every new page of its story turns – as our connection to the Holden family amplifies, and as we watch this memory painting expand with the ache of the finite. But, such is the reality of television. Such is the soulful greatness of Rectify.
Grade: A