In Which The Affair Remains Ongoing For This Man

What You Know

by ELEANOR MORROW

The Affair
creators Sarah Treem and Hagai Levi
Showtime

This summer in the Hamptons (think of how many sentences begin this way), two British actors were dining among Americans. In their native countries Damian Lewis and Dominic West can eat in relative peace. In a brunch spot that is known for attracting real actors and Real Housewives, the two mercilessly mocked an ongoing series of photograph seekers. I can't blame them for becoming annoyed at the depravity of an American cultural class which admires them as performers, but hopefully not as people. Don't be too critical of these heady auteurs: the Eton-educated Lewis and West pursue a hard but meaningful policy. They are bad men on the screen, and Stanislavsky demands they be just as disturbed on vacation.

It just got worse and worse for Dominic West's loathsome author, Noah Solloway, on The Affair. It wasn't fully clear how sinister he was until that definitive moment in the Hamptons. Noah is the kind of person who can do ten good things for one bad reason. Last season on The Affair, which is without doubt the most sexually enlightened series ever broadcast on pay cable, he had reached the heights of the literary world, and begun setting up a new life with his lover, Alison (Ruth Wilson). By the end of the season, he was about to do a three-year jaunt in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

During this phenomenal second season, which you should really go back and watch, the center of the show moved to his ex-wife Helen (Maura Tierney). In her vibrant youth, Tierney was a magnetic actress, too vulnerable to be the girl-next-door and too reserved to elicit anything but our admiring sympathy. She has carried this precious balance into middle age. One episode had her on drugs for the duration, and it was so gripping I squeezed all the juice out of an orange I was casually holding.

Divorce proceedings had begun for Helen and Noah, but there seemed to be a possibile reconcilation of sorts when he went to Fishkill Correctional Facility for a crime that she ostensibly committed — running over the brother of Pacey (Joshua Jackson) one foggy night. Three years seemed a bit much for this crime, but I suppose there was negligence involved. In any case, the third season of The Affair has Noah in a full beard, on parole, teaching at a New Jersey college.

Everyone he meets in this new life knows about his past because they read his book. Noah Solloway is the kind of author who writes only from his own experience. This is a necessity, since he only gathers flashes of what other people feel as it relates to himself, and cannot assemble these insights into a larger whole. This is Noah's crippling flaw, and boy does the guy pay for it.

On campus, he meets a comparative literature professor (Irene Jacob) who looks at him the way I look at a croissant. It feels like The Affair creator Sarah Treem could not wait to get Noah Solloway on a college campus, because from Noah's amusing scene meeting with his parole officer in his own classroom, to the traditional parody of a horrid writing workshop, Noah seems satisfyingly out of place among all these normals. Only he could turn the wackiness of higher education into something reassuring.

Treem sets up an exciting enough cliffhanger for the end of the first episode. When The Affair gives us the usual satisfactions of its noir concept, we are pleased enough. Treem is the kind of writer who is good at everything she does, it is only a matter of what she chooses to do.

The Affair's subject matter is so wide-ranging from episode-to-episode that when it finally coheres as a whole, the entire stunning achievement comes suddenly into view. The more imminent pleasures of this New York-based series are to be found in Noah's misanthropic little phone calls to Alison, his chopped but respectful way of speaking to his ex-wife, in the fashion he begs a liquor store owner for forgiveness. Even the most powerful can be reduced to desperation in only an instant.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which James Franco Purple Nurpled His Way Into Her Heart

Robert Pattinson of Arabia

by DICK CHENEY

Queen of the Desert
dir. Werner Herzog
128 minutes

"I get very lonely," James Franco explains early on in Queen of the Desert. Then there is this odd scene where Nicole Kidman towers over her cousin (Holly Earl) like a giant. One of the weirdest scenes in movies follows; it is how you know this is a Werner Herzog production. Nicole manhandles the poor woman and kisses her on the forehead like she is a little baby.

The film launches into Nicole's voiceover of a letter to her father. She explains to him that James Franco is always there when you want him, and never when you don't. If only that were true.

As he enters middle age Franco has adopted this muted seriousness that is completely amusing but also transparent. It screams, "I am acting! Isn't this vaguely reminsicent of Robert Mitchum or something, I don't know LOL!"

That night Franco performs a magic trick for Nicole. For some reason as he is doing this, he starts whispering. It is daytime we see James next, and he is still talking in a soft tone of voice. You get the sense that Nicole shares a lot of qualities with his mother.

This all takes place in the desert. James kisses her in the desert outside Tehran. She tastes like dandelions and sour milk, in the desert.

Eventually he asks her to marry him, upsetting her family greatly, presumably because they don't view James Franco as being particularly reliable. Queen of the Desert has a roundly mediocre score accompanying these events, but what makes it truly intolerable is just how much of it there is. "I am in love with your smile," James explains, and then like ten minutes later he throws himself off a cliff.

Nicole takes this about as well as you would expect. She replaces James Franco with Damian Lewis, who is a major upgrade in pretty much every way. Unlike the vast majority of men, Lewis appears a lot more youthful when he has facial hair. One man wants to look old and looks too young. One man wants to look young and looks young.

Damian Lewis' eyes are soulful, maybe too soulful? He should just do his character from Billions in every movie, since Queen of the Desert can't possibly take its story the least bit seriously. Herzog's gift is turning reality into a surreal fantasy, but there is nothing interesting in the story of Gertrude Bell that he really understands, so it is all just molting, begging and staring.

Lewis doesn't do much more than stroke Nicole's hair. He says he wants to be with her, but he tells her his wife would commit suicide if he ever left. Gertrude seems sad but maybe not as depressed as she might otherwise have been. She was guilty of love once, but never again.

Queen of the Desert doesn't get good until we come to the most amusing casting of time: Robert Pattinson as T.E. Lawrence. Since Lawrence was gay or asexual, his charisma with Nicole is not much at all. "I'm not sure the right man for you has been born yet," he tells her, in an accent so bad it would be laughable if Pattinson did not have look of a sad, wounded puppy on his face. You want to slap the shit out of it.

"I'm under you of course," Lawrence tells Nicole, even though this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, she doesn't even speak the language and she is absolutely boy-crazy, how would she even have time for diplomatic relations. The score changes to from ten percent cultural appropriation to one hundred percent; all the Arab characters stand around in worship of Nicole Kidman. "You were great in Far and Away!" they scream over the din of their camels.

Lawrence has his picture taken with some really adorable lion cubs and Winston Churchill. It is made evident that the reason all these people are in the middle east is because they find England absolutely stifling. The last line of Queen of the Desert is an Arab king saying, "You know, she really is the unofficial Queen of the Desert" and then some text comes on the screen, like there is more information that will supplement our understanding of where Nicole Kidman is in her life now. We know everything we need to by that time.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of his writing in these pages here.

"Breathing Spell" - Some Go Haunting (mp3)

In Which We Short The Long Gain And Make Billions

The Evolutionary Spirit

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Billions
creators Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin

The current U.S. Attorney in New York has an amazing story. Preet Bharara was born in India to a Sikh father and Hindu mother. He grew up in New Jersey with an outstanding sense of moral purpose and total lack of fear. His record prosecuting Wall Street only recently suffering a few setbacks. His story is entirely unlike the narrative told in Billions, a new series airing on Showtime, but I mean who cares if reality says a white man from a rich Long Island family isn't the most powerful and important lawyer in New York City. Let's cast Paul Giamatti.

Bharara's brother sold his diaper company to Amazon for half a billion and his mother called Sanjay Gupta's mother to gloat. These are still privileged people but since the story doesn't fit in to the tremendous whitewashing evident on Billions, it's besides the point.

Bobby Axelrod (Homeland's Damian Lewis) is up to something. He manages a hedge fund where most of the staff died on 9/11. He replaced them with younger, cheaper talent. It is intimated that he may have had foreknowledge of the attacks, since he was out of his office that day. In the first scene Billions shows between Giamatti and Lewis, both are screaming at each other in faux New York accents, "Fuck you!"

Is this how people think New Yorkers actually behave? The Sopranos disgusted Camille Paglia, because it was nothing like the tri-state area Italians that she knew. Adam McKay attempted a more down-to-earth (I can't say realistic) version of the movement of billions of dollars that surrounded the popping of the real estate bubble. Steve Carell was very good in The Big Short, which was not really about movers and shakers, but just people baffled by the state America was in.

The Big Short did not really make that much money at the box office. I recommend watching it, but honestly there is not a whole lot there. It's a bunch of witty repartee pasted over what is generally a dull story. The movie is so soft on the Wall Street bailout it practically repudiates its own message. You get the sense that Michael Lewis, and maybe even a lot of the people in the movie who shorted the real estate market, did not really understand the financial industry either. Lewis' protagonists come across as naive hypocrites. Did they think they were working for Habitat for Humanity?

I can't decide if Billions actually means to be taken seriously. It opens with Giamatti's wife (a deliriously opaque Maggie Siff) smacking her husband around and putting out a cigarette on his chest. Neither parent gives two shits about their children, which means it is very hard to sympathize with them. Giamatti is better at a character capable of self-deprecation; this blunt, conniving know-it-all does not particularly suit him and the show's writing turns him into a foul-mouthed missile.

You actually find yourself rooting instead for Axelrod. Despite the fact that he employs Giamatti's wife at his company as a staff psychologist, the attorney general still wants to "take him down" — on what evidence and for what reasons we have no earthly idea. Axelrod at least transcends the fuck-you New Yawk caricature with which he is saddled.

In order to avoid litigation, Axelrod employs many people working around the clock in his interest. Billions has cast a bunch of famous character actors to surround its two stars. Taken as a group, their presence is entirely distracting, since not a single one of them is playing against type. You have the secret service agent from House of Cards, the manager of the prison in Oz, Malin Akerman, The Yellow King, Kingpin's assistant, Gale from Breaking Bad. That is just to start, and it makes Billions feel like a collection of cameos rather than intense performances.

The financial talk in Billions is about a hundred times worse. This side of the story is all made up, so it is impossible to suspend our disbelief that any of it is important. Besides, Damian Lewis' Bobby Axelrod character already has more money than entire nations. There is nothing that could happen to him that would make a similar person blink an eye, so what are we watching this show for?

The frustrating thing is that there is a story to be told about the highest levels. Preet Bharara and the president who appointed him both have completely different motivations than any of the people on Billions. There must be a psychology of a hedge fund manager that is worth exploring, too, but existing as it is you are on the silly side of Wall Street, Billions is basically nothing more than a Manhattan telenovela.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Wishes" - Keith Zariello (mp3)