The Faces of the Saints
by ALEX CARNEVALE
Nurse Jackie
creators Liz Brixius, Evan Dunsky & Linda Wallem
Showtime, Mondays at 10 pm
The finest American theater is a niche experience most people will sample once or twice in their lives on a visit to New York, if at all. To attend The Book of Mormon you need to take out a mortgage and hold your paper tickets in a gold vault until showtime. Fortunately, all the pleasures of the stage are brought to life on weekly basis in the best acted show on television.
The casting on Nurse Jackie has ascended past good into the stratosphere. Not only is every character completely believable, the performances themselves are so classically perfect that it's difficult not to feel you're sitting in the dark, watching the facials of Laurence Olivier, or his lesbian-looking sister.
Edie Falco so seamlessly slipped into the role of the mob wife it's easy to forget that she's not a nurse named Jackie Peyton, either. Mrs. Peyton is addicted to painkillers, big blue ones, and she will do anything to get them. It is hard for most people to lie, but it is impossible to pretend to lie, which is what Falco accomplishes every week. Her face is an elastic jumble of concealments, so much so that it is worse when she tells someone the truth than when she is making things up, because we know the truth has far more consequences for her.
When she cheats on her husband with the hospital pharmacist, her orgasms are an enlightening anticipation of her deception. She screams because she is surprised to be feeling something, and not pretending to feel something. Everything is about the deception, for without this deception she cannot continue to exist, and the lie itself becomes as elemental to her being as the truth she is hiding. Every pleasure that comes along with the deception, like a reverse parasite, must either add to her hypocrisy or perish from its difference.
Jackie's husband Kevin confronted her once about her drug use (he found out by finding her pharmacy receipts in a secret PO Box at the end of last season), and has accepted her contention that she is trying to stay clean. He is the kind of person it is easy to deceive, who prefers a darker sort of partner because it stands in the place of his own hatred of himself.
Dominic Fumasa plays the role of Kevin, and it is a star-making performance. Like every Italian husband, he is sometimes frightening without meaning to be. His facial contortions are spasms of a deeper self, subsumed by his desire to care for his family. When the dad on The Wonder Years asks him whether he thinks he should take a break from his marriage, he laughs it off, because it would mean becoming himself for the first time. A man who does not know his own wife is a fucking time bomb.
Kevin did not confront Jackie alone. Jackie's closest friend at All Saints Hospital, Dr. O'Hara (Eve Best), also showed her concern over Jackie's over her drug use, albeit it at the insistence of Jackie's husband. Over time, she has regretted choosing her friend's health over her friendship. Pauline Kael analysed everyone by their appearances, which is something we all do, just not as openly and as often as she did in her reviews. I don't know what she thought she saw in them. Of Marlene Dietrich she once wrote
The contrast of her high, rounded forehead and Madonna-like face with her low, uncouth voice provides an extraordinary sexual charge; her torso is sturdier than in her later movies, and her upper arms look full and strong, yet her face seems more ethereal than perhaps at any other time.
I can't imagine anything that describes Eve Best better, although I'm not sure it ever described Marlene Dietrich all that well.
In a world of repressed adult sexuality, where men and women only hug each other in order to exchange drugs or money, Jackie's protege Zoey (the glowing Merritt Weaver) remains uncorrupted by what surrounds her. Weaver is a trained stage actress, and her buffet of reactions to the world around her comprises a litany of looks, glances, pre-suppositions, hints, taunts and teases.
When she blogs on her website, Nursing It Yo, a certain cast comes over her face, not unlike the pursed concentration of protobloggeurs Moe Tkacik or Tracie Egan in 2004. Weaver is startlingly beautiful, made more so because she is clearly the youngest person in the cast and the only one not guilty of one sin or another. The Nurse Jackie writers gave her a likeable EMT love interest which completely backfired, as no one wants to see Zoey with a schlubby EMT. Even Dr. Cullen himself may not, in fact, be good enough for a woman of her talents.
When the hospital drama died, it was resurrected and re-murdered by Shonda Rimes, who I prefer to call Rhonda Shimes. It is hard to imagine yet another show that takes place in a hospital could even be halfway decent, let alone this entertaining, without becoming wildly implausible. And in fact when Nurse Jackie focuses on the patients, the whole show falls apart and you expect Zach Braff to walk in on a cloud. A sick person has ceased to be interesting, but a sick person who treats another sick person is enough of twist to make us care about them both.
In case we forget what really makes good television, Nurse Jackie reminds us by using actors trained in the theater to bring the concept of dramatic irony back to life. The people in this milieu work as hard as they possibly can to get what they want, which was David Mamet's definition of good theater before he started throwing rocks at Palestinians in a reverse Edward Said-type situation.
In last week's episode, Jackie went to the home of her drug dealer against her better judgment. (She can't get it through legal-illegal channels since she dumped her bald pharmacist boyfriend.) Her dealer lives in a building with distinctly eerie gargoyles situated on top, and he emerged to meet Jackie outside. They stared at each other across the street. One of the statues broke off and shattered on the pavement, and her drug dealer stepped out to look where it had fallen from. He was struck by a bus and killed. Without so much as a gasp, Jackie wandered off from the scene. We recognized what she thought from the look on her classically trained face: it should have been her.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about the life and letters of the poet Anne Sexton.
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