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Always There

by ALEX CARNEVALE 

The Red Road
creator Aaron Guzikowski

Jason Momoa's sexuality is like an extruding pimple on some poor sap's face. When he bends down to retrieve something from underneath a car, he always looks up, as though there were something above he wanted to view him as well as whatever was below. His sex is always there. Momoa's jawline is rearranged by a scraggly beard that constantly has to be reworked on set. There is a person whose job it is to only deal with Jason's facial hair. If something goes wrong with the facial hair, this person, whose name we can presume is named something like Anne, will be disemployed and have to do a much worse job, like be responsible for Channing Tatum's goatee or work construction.

The only person I've ever been attracted to as much as Jason Momoa is Robin Wright Penn. The year was 1998.

In his new show The Red Road, airing exclusively on the Sundance Channel, Momoa portrays a half-Indian ex-con named Philip Kopus making collections for his crooked white father (Tom Sizemore). In old age Sizemore looks an emaciated shell of his former self, yet he still clings to a certain firmness of spirit that matches Momoa's artful solidity.

After Philip gets out of prison, he spots a police officer with whom he matriculated from high school searching for a missing boy. He immediately knows the boy is dead and suspects the killer, resolving to protect this person from harm.

His high-school buddy, police officer Howard Jensen (NZ actor Martin Henderson) appears to be a repressed homosexual former football player. The man just wants to protect his two girls, both of whom are named Rachel for no reason I can fathom. Having white children appears to be a considerable responsibility, and when the older Rachel takes up with an adorable local member of the Rampough Indian tribe named Junior, Rachel' mother Jean (Julianne Nicholson) freaks out. In a fugue she takes her husband's gun to go find her daughter and accidentally (oops) runs over a local Indian boy.

The casting of Julianne Nicholson in this role is against type, and basically all wrong, which is the point. We cannot conceive of what interest Howard would have in this prissy woman, and indeed he sleeps in the guest room.

Putting Jason Momoa in a storyline where he has an adversarial, pseudosexual relationship with a police officer is certainly most thinking people's dream scenario, right up there with him playing Mr. Darcy opposite Selena Gomez. Momoa has the bad early George Clooney habit of looking up through his brow to deliver his line, which I believe Steven Soderbergh cured through shock therapy. It absolutely fucking ruined ER though, I can tell you that much.

Momoa's Philip calls up his cop classmate for a reunion. They meet at a goat farm in New Jersey; I guess there had to be one. The officer looks as out of place as Momoa, feeling out jitters while he holds the biggest gun he can find, cradled in his arms like a baby. At first Momoa stays in the car in order to give the officer command of the meeting. Before long, and when he feels it is safe, he steps out of the vehicle to hand the officer his own firearm, jostled as it had been from the man's wife SUV as she manslaughtered a boy.

The rest of The Red Road concerns the cover-up of these events. Several times, but not sequentially, Momoa will lift his shirt over his massive head for a pinup pose, and in the briefest of moments we can see the chance he had of being the one approaching Pemberley on horseback, instead of the ruffian-type roles he plays now.  Momoa was on that Stargate spinoff, and it was amazing. Khal Drogo was a crying little baby in comparison to this individual:

Even with his trademark scar, Momoa is always complete in himself. In contrast, the teenagers in love on The Red Road resemble each other too closely; we can suspect that Rachel and Junior may share the same father, or at least much of the same blood, and this more than anything else is the reason for their coming together. (We know that this sort of conglameration often happens when children are not told who their parents are, and recognize something of themselves in their cousins.)

Sherman Alexie is probably turning over in his bed, but there is a lot of unmined material here. The Red Road's Juliet/Rachel is not so fetching really, and Junior makes even worse decisions than Romeo, bringing his girl to places as dangerous to him as they are to her. Momoa is like a brazen Mercutio at times, and those moments where his absence of malice seems most obvious are when we permit ourselves to like the characters in The Red Road. It is the grace period we afford the people in our lives before, inevitably, they disappoint us.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

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