Prime Suspect

Movies to See Right Now (at home)

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Helen Mirren in PRIME SUSPECT

This week: a binging recommendation for Labor Day Weekend, a revealing new documentary, a remembrance and the most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE.

REMEMBRANCE

Chadwick Boseman in MARSHALL. Photo credit: Barry Wetcher; courtesy of Open Road Films

Actor Chadwick Boseman, an emerging superstar after his iconic role in Black Panther, was able to humanize real life icons like Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and James Brown. My favorite Boseman performance was in Marshall, available from all the major streaming platforms,

ON VIDEO

Prime Suspect: Binge the 25 hours of Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren’s extraordinary performance as Detective Jane Tennison. And here’s a look at its great supporting performances. All seven series of Prime Suspect can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime).

Coup 53: Superbly researched documentary on the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat manufactured by the UK and the US, complete with new revelations. Available to stream on Virtual Cinema; I watched it at the Roxie.

APOCALYPSE ’45

Apocalypse ’45: Never-before-seen color film and the memories of survivors bring to life the grisly final two years of WWII in the Pacific. It premieres this weekend on the Discovery Channel .

The August Virgin: In the best movie of summer 2020, a young woman switches up Madrid neighborhoods to mix things up in her life. It’s a lovely and genuine story of self-invention, and it’s on my list of Best Movies of 2020 – So Far. The August Virgin is streaming on Virtual Cinemas, like San Rafael’s Rafael or Laemmle’s in LA.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

On September 6, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast the top heist film ever, the pioneering French classic Rififi: After the team is assembled and the job is plotted, the actual crime unfolds in real-time – over thirty minutes of nerve-wracking silence.

RIFIFI

PRIME SUSPECT: the supporting performances

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Helen Mirren and Zoe Wanamaker in PRIME SUSPECT

Throughout the seven seasons of Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren is surrounded by generations of Britain’s finest actors. Some of the finest performances are by the actors least known to the American audience.

John Benfield in PRIME SUSPECT

Jane Tennison is always beset by the sexism of other police officers. In the first four seasons, John Benfield plays her boss, Mike Kernan, who is out to get her at first. Kernan cautiously warms to Jane, but never reliably has her back.

Tom Bell in PRIME SUSPECT

If Mike Kernan is Old School, then Tom Bell‘s Detective Sergeant Bill Otley is Neanderthal. Openly hostile and insubordinate to Jane from the outset, Bell’s Otley evolves over seasons 1, 3 and 7.

Zoe Wanamaker in PRIME SUSPECT

In season 1, the prime suspect’s partner is played by Zoe Wanamaker in a searing performance. Full of piss and vinegar, her character sloshes buckets of defiance on the police. Wanamaker is unforgettable when her character gets a revelation about her own unknown tie to the murders from Jane.

Here are more of the very best supporting performances in Prime Suspect:

Struan Rogers in PRIME SUSPECT
  • John Bowe as the narcissistic sociopath of a serial killer in season 1.
  • Colin Salmon as the charismatic but troubled Black cop Bob Oswalde in season 2.
  • Jenny Jules as Sara, the sister of a teen who may be a victim or a perpetrator in season 2.
  • Struan Rodger as Jane’s commander in season 3, who silently appreciates Jane’s moxie when she turns the table on their boss.
  • David O’Hara as the terse and unsmiling Manchester street detective in season 5.
Ciaran Hinds in PRIME SUSPECT

Other notable actors in Prime Suspect:

  • Tom Wilkinson, before The Full Monty and his two Oscar nominations for In the Bedroom and Michael Clayton.
  • David Thewlis, the same year as his acclaimed performance in Naked.
  • Ralph Fiennes gets his very first screen credit, before Schindler’s List and The English Patient.
  • Ciarán Hinds, one of my favorite character actors (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Rome, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows).
  • Peter Capaldi, playing a drag queen before his Doctor Who.
  • Mark Strong, before his string of popular action pictures.
David Thewlis in PRIME SUSPECT

binging PRIME SUSPECT and Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison

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Helen Mirren in PRIME SUSPECT

Prime Suspect, the perfect Labor Day weekend binge, pairs one of cinema’s greatest actresses, Helen Mirren, with one of the most compelling characters ever on episodic television, Detective Jane Tennison. At once a sensational crime show and a high brow character study, the seven seasons of Prime Suspect follow a female protagonist over fifteen years.

Prime Suspect is a set of nine separate stories over 25 hours. Jane Tennison’s career spans from Chief Detective Inspector to Superintendent to Chief Superintendent. The episodes were created between 1991 and 20O5, and Helen Mirren herself ages from 46 to 60 in the role.

The core of Prime Suspect is the character of Jane Tennison, forged by writer Lynda La Plante and Mirren. Jane is a driven woman, in a career that ranges from when women cops were unwelcome novelties to more politically correct times. In the entire span, Jane is, at best, barely tolerated.

Jane gives as well as she gets. She can force her superiors to promote her by using the same heavy-handed methods they use to suppress her.

Indeed, each Prime Suspect story has multiple threads of conflict. There is, of course, Jane against the criminal she is trying to catch. At the same time, Jane is being distracted and hampered by forces inside her own department. And Jane is in a constant battle to hold herself together amid overbearing stress.

Jane Tennison is a solitary figure, alone with her demons. She faces the daily challenges to her career survival and advancement with an ever-prickly demeanor.

Jane is a person of overwhelming ambition. In the very first season, it’s clear that she cannot advance by being pleasant and waiting her turn. She recognizes that sometimes she has to be unpleasant, and she will need to seize advancement at other’s expense; (in season 3, she receives a critical favor from a peer and then swipes his dream job).

Jane Tennison is also a fully sexual Woman of a Certain Age, but career rock stars like Jane can’t have it all. Her obsession with career leaves a trail of relationship carnage. At one point, Jane has fallen in love with the one man who gets her and adores her, but she has learned about herself and about life and…

And there’s always too much stress. Jane smokes too much and drinks too much. In Prime Suspect 3, her jaw is constantly pounding away on nicotine gum. In one later episode, she drops into her neighborhood market to buy four microwaveable frozen dinners and two fifths of whisky.

At first, Jane faces the most open and unapologetic misogyny, which evolves in later episodes into more veiled and insidious sexism. Being a flawed feminist hero is complicated. As the series evolves, Jane herself discriminates against a subordinate who is parenting. And she is betrayed by a female protege and, later, fights being forced out to pasture by a gender-integrated set of bosses.

Prime Suspect is always topical. Besides the ever-present sexism, the stories touch on race, abortion, postpartum depression, AIDS, sex work and pedophilia.

Most of the Prime Suspect plots are serial killer whodunits, and one story turns on whether she got it wrong in solving her breakthrough case. In one story, we know the culprit right away, but Jane is a race against the clock to prevent further victims.

In an astounding performance, Mirren grips us each time she fiercely deflects yet another indignity, as she waves her hand through her hair when she needs a reset from a setback and as her eyes reveal that she is connecting the dots. Her entire body coils in frustration and stiffens in insubordination. It’s a tour de force.

Between seasons of Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren was compiling an imposing body of work: The Madness of King George, Gosford Park and her Oscar-winning Elizabeth II in The Queen.

I believe that Mirren’s Jane ranks, with James Gandolfini’s run as Tony Soprano, as one of the greatest in episodic dramas. I’m guessing that Mirren was on screen for over twenty hours of Prime Suspect and that Gandolfini was on screen as Tony Sopranos for about 35 of The Sopranos‘ 86 hours. Of course, Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison is distinguished from most episodic protagonists by being female and by aging fifteen years.

Mirren is surrounded by two generations of the best British actors. For tomorrow, I’ve also written PRIME SUSPECT: the supporting performances.

This is one of the best and most entertaining episodic series ever on television. All seven series of Prime Suspect can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime).