Damaged
-
- September
- 26
How much do we love damaged men?
Wait, that didn’t quite come out right. There are, of course, women like Dr. Cameron who hope to save the misanthropic Dr. Houses of the world and in so doing, save themselves. More likely, audiences are attracted to brittle characters whose wounds — like that of the legendary Fisher King —fascinate because they cannot be healed.
Damian Lewis’ Charlie Crews — who makes his first bid for our sympathies at 10 tonight in NBC’s new drama “Life” — is the latest candidate for a latter-day Fisher King.
Like that shattered figure — as well as Dr. House over on Fox — police Det. Crews has terrible physical wounds that hint at larger psychic ones. We are told, more than once, that many of his bones were broken en route to his surviving 12 years of imprisonment for a murder he didn’t commit.
Now freed, he has his old job back, a ton of money —$50 million to be exact — and a really big house with no furnishings, because when your world is a prison cell, you yearn for a lot of space.
Crews also acquires an equally fragile partner (Sarah Shahi) and a financial planner (Adam Arkin) who did time for insider trading.
Perhaps not the best person to manage your money. But then Crews is a fruit-chomping, Zen-spouting, husband-of-his-ex-wife-harassing mass of social inappropriateness. (You already figured out that he’s secretly investigating who set him up, right?)
Lewis — whose taut mouth, framed by parenthetical lines, is every bit as eloquent as House’s furrowed brow — is the man for the job, having played the quintessential American hero in HBO’s “Band of Brothers” and the quintessential tragically contained Brit in PBS’ “The Forsyte Saga.” So far, though, his Crews is a work in progress.
Crews’ chinks, like his associates’ kinks, feel imposed. The genius of House is that his misanthropy has an integrity.
In other words, his damaged soul is no literary device but something all his own.
Photo of Damian Lewis courtesy of NBC/Universal.Â
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 4:42 pm by Georgette Gouveia.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Share and Enjoy: del.icio.us Digg Reddit Google StumbleUpon Technorati Yahoo! | 
Print
| 
Email
Nice site. I enjoyed Life, Crews is more Monk than House. His lawyer will develop quickly into a major character.