TNT 2013
Director: Frank
Darabont (“The Walking Dead”)
Written by Darabont and
John Buntin.
Starring: Jon Berthal,
Milo Ventimiglia, Edward Burns, Alexa Davalos.
As a fan of noir, I was
really looking forward to Mob City. The trailers and the
advance flack made it sound like it could be the best crime drama since Private Eye (Andrew Yerkovich, 1987-1988) or Crime Story (Michael Mann,
1986) -- a sort of television version of L.A. Confidential, the dark and
steamy 1997 film directed by Curtis Hanson that starred Kevin Spacey, Russell
Crowe, Kim Basinger and Guy Pearce.
The program was supposed to be based on the non-fiction book
L.A.
Noir by John Buntin, an excellent primer on the development of the
underworld in Los Angeles in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, when racketeering was controlled by WASP opportunists and the city
was billed as a purely white haven for Easterners and Midwesterners eager to
escape the teeming ethnic enclaves of cities like Boston, New York and Chicago.
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L.A. Noir author John Buntin (courtesy of johnbuntin.com) |
The pre-release buzz was that Buntin had his fingerprints
all over the show. He is even credited as co-writer of the first six episodes.
To me, that was very good news indeed: Buntin’s book, which
was previously reviewed here, plays off the decades-long battle between Mickey
Cohen, who came to be the public face of L.A.-area gangsterism, and Los Angeles
Police Chief William Parker, who made his goal the elimination of all mob
activity in the city.
Not that Los Angeles was ever the crime-free paradise
conjured in the alcohol-fevered mind of Bill Parker or portrayed in
advertisements and magazine spreads by developers and promoters, or: the city
had more than its share of crime, much of it as highly organized as that
controlled by any Mob family in New York or Philadelphia.
The main difference between the City of the Angels and its
counterparts in the East and Midwest was that the rackets – gambling,
prostitution and drugs -- were all run by White Anglo Saxon Protestant
boosters. Parker was simply trying to
drive out the Jews and Italians so the old guard could resume control.
Parker brought a variety of methods to bear on this
campaign, not all of which – including wiretaps that showed mob attempts to
manipulate city elections and an underworld plan to divide the city up into
gang-controlled markets – were strictly legal. In response, Cohen suborned a
major part of the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s departments, using cops as
errand boys for his criminal enterprises, a protection service for his rackets
and a pipeline for information from City Hall.
I figured that with interesting villains like Cohen (Jeremy
Luke) and Bugsy Siegel (Edward Burns) and a flawed hero like Parker (Neal
McDonough), who was an alcoholic and suffered life-long marital problems, all
the program had to do was stay within the framework of Buntin’s book to be a
supremely entertaining drama.
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Edward Burns as gang boss Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (photo courtesy of Mob City/TNT |
Unfortunately, based on the two episodes that kicked off the
new program on December 4, Darabont, who co-authored most of the first season’s
scripts with Buntin, has no intention of sticking strictly to the facts. The first two hours of the program are
largely spent introducing a host of characters who appear to be mostly
fictional, and concentrate on a Los Angeles detective, Joe Teague (Jon
Bernthal), who appears to be working with Siegel’s organized crime group
through its crooked attorney, Ned Stax (Milo Ventimiglia.)
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LAPD Officer Joe Teague (right) chews the fat with Mob lawyer Milo Ventimiglia (courtesy Mob City/TNT) |
Teague is hired by a comedian with mob ties, Hecky Nash
(Simon Pegg in a special guest appearance), to provide protection for him in a
blackmail scheme. Nash has the negatives of photographs that are either
embarrassing or incriminating to somebody in Siegel’s organization. In a meeting attended by Teague and Nash, two
of Siegel’s goons, Ace Cooper (Yorgo Constantine) and Syd Rothman (Robert
Knepper) swap $50,000 for the negatives. After they leave, Nash is gunned down
by Teague for reasons that are not disclosed until the second episode.
The blackmail scheme puts Teague into contact with Jasmine
(Alexa Davalos) who is Hecky’s girlfriend – or was; this point is left
unresolved at the end of the second episode. She is a camera girl at Cohen’s
nightspot, the Clover Club, and snapped the photographs Nash used in his
extortion plot. She appears to have more pictures that will play a role in a
later episode of the program.
There is plenty of gun play and violence in the first
two-hour chunk of the show, but at the end of the second episode, surprisingly
little has actually happened. Part of this is the fault of demon backstory –
introducing the main characters takes time that could have been used to flesh
out the various people who populate the cast or advance the plot.
The slow pace is only part of the problem. In addition, the
characters around whom the plot revolves are as lifeless as the zombies in
Darabont’s other hit TV show, The Walking Dead.
Some of them are fictitious, like Teague, Nash, Jasmine and
Syd Rothman, who appears to be an amalgam of Harry “Hooky” Rothman, an actual
Cohen lieutenant, and some unnamed member of Siegel’s “Murder Incorporated”
gang from New York. Others, like Cohen, Siegel and Parker, are actual
historical figures who have been dressed up a bit for the show.
There are lots of pained looks, sneers and bittersweet smiles from these characters, but there seems to be little inside them. This is
supposed to be set in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, but the witty dialogue you
would find in a Philip Marlowe story is largely absent here.
Occasionally a character gets off a good line, such as Jasmine’s
response when police investigating his death tell her they are surprised she doesn’t seem
to be more distraught. “Maybe you should put him in a coffin and wheel him in here
so I can throw myself on it and cry over him,” she replies coldly. “Would that
play better for you?”
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Jasmine waits for Hecky Nash at her apartment (Mob City/TNT) |
But for the most part, the lines are as flat and
one-dimensional as the characters. Just before trading the negatives for cash,
Nash tells Teague: “This city. So damn beautiful. But only from a distance. Up
close, it's all gutter.”
Here’s a man engaging in a criminal act – extortion – and he
is complaining about how rotten Los Angeles is under its glitzy surface. It’s
an ironic thought, but it isn’t delivered with a hint of irony. Instead it is
put over in a dull and declarative fashion that makes the character, an
associate of criminals, sound like a prude. Here it really isn’t the writing
that sabotages the program – it is the witless direction. Someone besides
Darabont might have been able to get Pegg to read the lines in a way that at
least made him sound aware that his character was contributing to the moral
decay he decries, but Darabont apparently hadn’t the vision or the chops to
shade the character this way. He’s spent too much time with the walking dead, I
guess.
The consequence is, Nash sounds unhip and whiney, like
someone who legitimately believes their problems are caused by somebody
else. Why bother to get a guest star of
Pegg’s caliber if you are going to throw him or her away on a part so badly
drawn?
Despite the weak characterizations and the do-nothing
storyline boasted by the show’s first two hours, there is plenty to look at and listen to in Mob
City.
The program is beautifully filmed in a way that takes
advantage of a wealth of period detail: the hand-painted neckties are as garish
and unsophisticated as the ones that hung in my dad’s closet; the cars are
beautiful and don’t have a scratch to mar their period paint jobs; the alpha males have just enough five
o’clock shadow to look tough and mean, and the streets are constantly slicked
with rain – so much so that by the end of the second episode, the viewer begins
to wonder why Los Angeles is located in the middle of the desert instead of a
tropical jungle.
The show also makes splendid use of neon tube art. Almost
every scene seems to occur at night, and every frame of film is illuminated by
the colorful signs of night clubs or dazzling reflections in pools of still
rainwater.
Another terrific touch is the soundtrack, which includes
such period jazz standards as “Night in Tunisia” and “You Don’t Know What Love
Is.” It is worth watching the program for the visuals and the tunes alone.
But its good looks and attractive music aside, Mob
City is no replacement for Private Eye, which managed stylish
visuals and a solid period soundtrack, but managed to weave them together with
intriguing plots, nicely drawn characters and witty dialogue worthy of a
Chandler or his successors, Ross MacDonald or James Ellroy.
Crack L.A. Confidential, The
Big Nowhere or The Zebra-Striped Hearse if you are
looking to kill a couple hours with stylish and satisfying noir; you will find
them a lot more interesting and fun than Mob City.
Or just pick up a copy of Buntin’s book. Not only is it
better than the TV series it inspired, you learn some actual recent history
while you are reading it.
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