[[Author's note: American Crime is an anthology drama, meaning its second season is a standalone entity with an entirely separate setting, plot and cast of characters from its first.]]
The second season of American Crime begins with an allegation of rape – a teenage boy’s reluctant admission of being sexually assaulted by another teenage boy at a boozy party. This immediate provocation is quickly staged within another: a class divide, with the accuser, Taylor (Connor Jessup), the son of a working-class single mother (Anne, played by Lili Taylor), and the accused, Eric (Joey Pollari), a co-captain of elite private school Leyland’s basketball team. The narrative then expands again to the boys’ town, a conservative suburb of Indianapolis wracked by social inequalities, whose interest in protecting Leyland nicely coincides with its inability to even consider the concept of a male-on-male assault.
Through its complex observations of violence, sexuality and privilege, American Crime rattles with risk. In a culture where perspectives on such topics are often labeled “right” and “wrong,” Creator John Ridley transcends such artificial binaries by sacrificing ethical logic for moral logic. It’s an important distinction. His depictions of Taylor and Eric are equal in sympathy and tragedy, exploring dual manifestations of self-hate and violence that slip through cracks of repressive shells. Characters of privilege, most notably Leslie Graham (Felicity Huffman), headmistress of Leyland, and Terri LaCroix (Regina King, sensational), the wealthy black mother of Leyland's other basketball captain, are richly textured via respective examinations of educational management and insidious racism. Ridley’s method of exposing marginality complicates American Crime with thrilling incongruity; by reveling in contrasting images, he challenges viewers to think more complexly about the societal roles of wealth, community, race and family.
It sounds academic, but American Crime places every beat of its story in the quivering hands of its characters. The series is concerned less with ideas than experiences, a preference that’s made clearest in its astonishingly intimate visual language. The tight close-ups, the long takes of people still in their thoughts, the sounds that match with sensation more than reality – American Crime’s second season, directed by Ridley and a collection of exemplary filmmakers, tonally floats between different characters’ headspaces with bracing discord. Their stylistic choices surprise by habit, but are always made with voracious purpose: to feel, to explore, to understand. And they delve into nonfiction, too, as a way of amplifying their characters’ emotions. Episode three opens on a real-life sexual assault victim’s vibrant performance of slam poetry, while episode eight – tenderly directed by New Queer Cinema pioneer Kimberly Peirce – juxtaposes the continuing narrative with stories of actual survivors. These flourishes are certainly consistent with American Crime’s experimental nature, and while deliberate in intent and execution, they only add to the season’s seamless elicitation of raw emotion.
That depth of feeling extends to the show’s narrative construct, which maintains a novelistic richness even as it splinters and surprises. Like The Wire, a clear precedent, American Crime takes a two-sided and individualistic approach to depicting systemic limitations, whether they be related to education, policing, journalism or community. The lack of space for gay students to come out in certain communities (like the one here) is presented as horrifyingly consequential; Leslie’s obsession with curtailing and managing initially ignores the sincere claim of abuse from one of her students, but later evolves into a promotion of tolerance that none of her fellow board or community members support. Anne turns to the realm of cyber-vigilante-justice when neither the press nor the police properly investigate her son’s claims, only for the hacking attacks on those she perceives as culpable to hurt in ways she couldn’t have imagined.
In the name of protection and management, a bad event leads to a series of unimaginable events; the pain of one extends to the pain of an entire community. This is not an unreasonable, or fantastical, path of logic for American Crime to take. Ridley never loses sight of the human cost of neglect. Indeed, the cascading impact on Leyland is most wrenchingly felt by Taylor and Eric, two closeted students shouldering overwhelming burdens. Their internal dilemmas, played with incredible power by Jessup and Pollari, create new external tragedies. At times, this makes for an exceptionally sad rendering of gayness of a particular stripe, in a particular context. But the show soars by leveling the bleak with the humane.
This takes shape most remarkably – and tragically – in Anne, whose resilience in getting justice for her son is offset by the reality that her continued quest only plunges him deeper into a winless battle. Lili Taylor does the work of her career in the role, giving a performance steeped in determined love and mounting guilt. Her scenes with Jessup, often explosively quiet and pained, reach the pantheon of parent-child depictions in television, leaving an ache that reverberates long after each episode’s credits roll. The journey of Anne and Taylor is inevitably futile, given the conflicting interests of actors with better resources and more power, but it gets at your heart all the more intensely as a result.
American Crime zigs and zags in dozens of directions, binding its tapestry of domestic American life with an aesthetic focus on boundaries – societal boundaries, sexual boundaries, ethical boundaries, physical boundaries. This is the season’s center, its great thematic underpinning. Ridley never provides an objective recounting on the altercation between Taylor and Eric – only a firm understanding that the pair was acting out a fantasy, and that it got out of hand. But their truths are incontestable all the same: that Eric believes he did as was requested of him, and that Taylor believes he was violated. By living in a community in which they feel shame and isolation, Eric and Taylor lack the ability to negotiate their own boundaries. It’s an idea that extends to Leslie’s political maneuvering, which is as much an act of self-interest as it is institutional preservation, and the hypocrisy of the team’s coach, Dan Sullivan (Timothy Hutton), whose promotion of “team unity” prevents an acknowledgment of the fractures and divisions among his players, and later his own family (including his wife, a small but pivotal role played with typical excellence by Hope Davis). The two have fundamentally different notions of “right” and “wrong,” an understanding that comes to life in spectacular duets between Huffman and Hutton.
As popular fiction tells us again and again, it’s the system that is to blame – an educational system that prioritizes appearance, a criminal justice system plagued by racial and classist biases, a values system that denies the truths of too many. American Crime is bolder, presenting an assortment of individuals with severe blind spots but goals of relative purity. Its characters’ greatest sins come in the pursuit of protection for their children, or for what they’ve been tasked to safeguard, or for themselves, as feelings of shame and pain turn insurmountable. This combines to create a stirring, despairing yet vital encapsulation of natural human instinct and response – and of its most sobering consequences, as it operates within boundaries blurred by structural and societal disparities.
Where the line is, exactly, is the question that demands yet never receives an answer here. The season opens with the Leyland team on the basketball court; through blocking and fouling, they touch in an approved, delicate manner. They learn regulated contact and intimacy by osmosis, hearing the cheers in the crowd and the bellows of their coach. Ridley returns to this idea of delineated contact midway through the season, with a stunning dance number filmed for five uninterrupted minutes, uncut. Observed and admired by Leyland families, it's a routine practiced, perfected and executed with exacting flow. Within and beyond American Crime, there’s respect for what can be organized and performed. But there's also the implication that people, inherently, are complicated, unpredictable, wounded – and that, in turn, they can’t truly conform if doing so is antithetical to who they are.
Organically, sensitively and without compromise, the second season of American Crime traces how one person’s tragedy allows resentments and fears of all shapes and sizes to surface and come to a boil. John Ridley may know no bounds as a storyteller; he may come to confounding conclusions as an arbiter on human nature. But as a moralist, he is consequential; as an advocate, penetrating; and as a relayer of the human experience, essential. Nobody escapes the clutches of culpability in Ridley’s eyes – as he sees it, only with that understanding can we grow, and can we heal. It’s a difficult, but rewarding, proposition. By confronting our everyday horrors, American Crime uncovers the inconceivable: the beauty within the tragedy.
Grade: A