Homecoming 2: The Perils of Forgetting

Just saw Homecoming 2 on Amazon Prime Video, and I wanted to review it before I forgot what I just saw.

Sorry, couldn't resist, but Homecoming 2 is even more about forgetting than was Homecoming 1.  It features Alex, who wakes up at the very start of the narrative not knowing who she is, and Walter, back from Season 1, sans Julia Roberts' character, still wanting to know who he is, i.e., what he forgot.

The cause of all of this amnesia is some kind of juice from a plant grown on the Geist farm.  When used as cream, it's almost miraculous in helping the skin heal.  When taken internally, either by food or drink, it makes you forget.

Just how long your mind is lost is not clear.  It could be forever.  It certainly is long enough that Alex does not stop her lover and partner Audrey from drinking the red drink with the drug, after Walter and Geist have spiked everyone's punch at the big party.   Alex not only has lost her intellectual memory of the woman she loved, she's lost that lovin' feeling.  I missed hearing the Righteous Brothers sing that great song, with that masterful Phil Spector production, in background.   (But here is it now, if you'd like to hear it.)

Since no such plant with those effects exist, Homecoming, especially this season, is almost as much science fiction as it is thriller, which is always fine with me.  Of course, it's not impossible that I at some point in my life consumed such berry juice, and I've forgotten not only that I consumed it, but such a juice even exists.  Hey, after sheltering in place at home for more than two months, almost nothing would surprise me.

Excellent acting in this second season, even though I missed Julia Roberts.  Stephan James was just superb as Walter, able to modulate from sweet to angry in an heartbeat.  Janelle Monáe was also excellent in the dual role of Alex before and after she lost her memories.   And Chris Cooper was perfect as Geist.

I've always liked narratives about memory - so much so that I wrote The Consciousness Plague - and Homecoming 2 is a most worthy addition to the genre.

See also Homecoming 1: Memory Spliced, in Ten Short Parts

Dirty John 1.5: John's Family

Other than a trenchant scene in which Ronnie (again) tells Debra off about John - which (of course) leads her to get even closer to John - episode 1.5 focuses on John's upbringing, by way of his father, who is as much a sociopath and swindler as John.

First of all, you couldn't ask for a better actor to play John's father than Shea Whigham.  Tina and I just saw him in Homecoming, where he was equally effective.  And of course he was unforgettable as Nucky's brother Eli in Boardwalk Empire.  The thing is, he plays radically different characters in each of these series, and brings home his character with searing, understated style in each of them.

In Dirty John, he's interested in earning money - by doing such things, for example, as getting his son John to eat a little glass in a restaurant, so he can extort some money from the owner.   John learns the hard way how he can play on people's vulnerabilities to not just to make money, but improve his position in this world.

Given what his father has done to him - not in terms of his school of hard knocks education, but in terms of the hardness of the knocks - it's not completely surprising that John puts his father out of his misery when he's already in bad shape in the hospital.  But this also shows that John has gone beyond his father in depravity - as far as we have seen, his father wasn't a killer.   And John has taken his father's advice to go after the families of people who oppose him to the level of threatening his own sister.

Debra doesn't (yet) know about John's murderous propensities, but how on Earth can she start taking him back, in view of what she indeed does already know about him? We got part of the story last week - she inherited her mother's insanely deep well of forgiveness - but there's something else that's deeply not quite right about Debra.

Again, I have no idea how this story turned out in reality, but I'm keenly interested in seeing how it turns out in this bizarre and compelling little series.

See also: Dirty John 1.1: Hunter and Hunted ... Dirty John 1.2: Motives and Plans ... Dirty John 1.4: The Forgiveness Gene

 

Homecoming: Memory Spliced, in Ten Short Parts

A powerful, unusual, vexing yet ultimately satisfying short series on Amazon Prime - ten 30-minute episodes - created and directed by Mr. Robot's Sam Esmail (with Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz), starring Julia Roberts, with great supporting acting by Boardwalk Empire's Bobby Cannavale & Shea Whigham, and Stephan James, whom I've seen here for the first time.

The plot concerns a government contractor with a plan for PTSD soldiers - treat them with a drug that will make them forget the memories that are unraveling them, with the result that they will be whole and happy again.  Julia Roberts plays social worker Heidi, with a heart and a brain.  Cannavale is her boss Colin, in charge of the project.  Whigham is government investigator Thomas looking into this.  And James is Heidi's patient Walter, beginning to fall in love with her, as patients in therapy often do.

But that's the best of what's happening.  The worst, we soon discover, is that four years later, in 2022 (the present are the Spring months of 2018), Heidi has lost all of her memories of working in Homecoming, and Walter is nowhere to be found.  We're now not only in Mr. Robot territory - one of differentiating truth from lies, what's real from what's implanted - but in Chris Nolan's pathbreaking world of Memento. 

And Homeland delivers, with one of the most memorable performances ever delivered anywhere by Julia Roberts, a storyline that surprises and yet all fits into place, and even an ending that's good for your heart.  Cannavale is suitably megalomaniacal yet vulnerable,  Whigham is aptly dogged and a little clumsy, and James has a winning quality, making it not surprising that Roberts' Heidi has reciprocal feelings for him.   Hats off to all concerned, including whoever came up with the square and letterbox screens, as a way of showing limited and full memories.   I predict that by 2022,  Homeland will become as much a classic as is Memento.