The eye of the needle
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- June
- 24
I don’t know about you, but my experience of billionaires so far has been limited to Tony Stark (enchanting but admittedly fictional) and TV sightings of Mayor Mike Bloomberg (seemingly extremely capable although a tad crotchety.)
NBC is seeking to change all that with “The Philanthropist,” bowing at 10 tonight on Channel 4 locally, with the sensual James Purefoy (Mark Antony in HBO’s “Rome”) as the Tony Stark-like protagonist. As presented in the pilot, however, he’s more Tin Man than Iron Man.Like Tony Stark, Teddy Rist (Purefoy) is something of a jerk — a drunk womanizer giving to throwing his weight and his money around. (Rist is so powerful that he has Michelle Obama’s private number, forget the prez.)
Purefoy — who has played Beau Brummell as well as Mark Antony and was Reese Witherspoon’s good-time hubby in “Vanity Fair” — is very, very good at playing louche characters. An early scene of him on business in Nigeria, boozy and naked in bed with some fetching woman he only half-remembers is particularly realistic. It’s also intriguing since he wakes up to a storm and a room filled with water.
That scene plays like something out of a promising movie. But this is television, and just as nature abhors a vacuum, TV can’t stand an unlovable lead. So, of course, it turns out that Rist is a haunted, tragic figure, whose young son is dead and whose marriage is over. There’s nothing wrong with this as a plot device per se. (The death of a wife and baby drive Simon Baker in CBS’ hit “The Mentalist.’) But here it seems like a cheap tug at our heartstrings, in part because the pilot spends a lot of time telling us things, instead of showing them to us.
For instance, we learn that Rist’s business partner, fellow billionaire Philip Maidstone (Jesse L. Martin), and Maidstone’s wife, Olivia (Neve Campbell), who runs the company’s foundation, are concerned about Rist’s fragile emotional state. But Martin — who had chemistry with everyone in his previous incarnation as a knowing cop on “Law & Order” — and Purefoy never click as “best mates,” and Campbell is out of her depth as the kind of sophisticated New York society woman — think Annette de la Renta — who would head a charitable organization.
Indeed, so much information is crammed into the show’s setup that we also don’t quite believe Rist’s on-the-road-to-Damascus moment — an encounter with an orphaned Nigerian boy during the aforementioned storm that spurs him on a dangerous journey to deliver a vaccine supply to a cholera-ridden village.
It isn’t until the lowest point of the journey, with Rist lost, delirious and barefoot in the jungle, that he and we find our footing. And you begin to think, This could work. Purefoy might just pull this off.
Let’s hope the show calms down and allows the characters to unfold. Otherwise, the pilot reminds me of Jesus’ saying that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
Depicting a rich man is no easier.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 6:00 am by Georgette Gouveia.
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Great blog. Do you know of any relevant NLP forums or discussion groups?