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OT: "Justified," "Ozark" "Fargo" and Your Basic Hillbilly Family Mafia Template

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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So I have access to streaming services now, and when I'm not tripping down memory lane watching a quick Peter Gunn or two(love that Mancini theme song), I'm sampling cable series of today and yesteryear. I've been able to binge somewhat -- but not a whole lot. I try to stick to season runs of 10 episodes or so. This allowed me to finish "Big Little Lies" with ease, and a couple of unconnected seasons of "Fargo."

Right now, I'm juggling the "old"(The Americans), with the new (Billy Bob Thornton in Goliath) and a couple of series that ended up reflecting each other and contrasting with each other. A brief take on both:

"Justified" is a series that ran in the early 2010's. Based on a short story by Elmore Leonard. Starring Timothy Olyphant, who had just a few years earlier finished a run on the great HBO Western series "Deadwood." In both "Deadwood" and "Justified," Olyphant is the lawman, the good guy in a town of bad guys, able to forge uneasy alliances with one particular bad guy(Ian McShane's town boss in Deadwood; Walton Goggins backwoods one-man mob war in Justified.)

Olyphant's "Deadwood" good guy is of the 1800s and pretty humorless and unbending about the law. Olyphant's "Justified" good guy is of today and pretty wry and sometimes bending about the law(though generally a Pure man with regard both to lawbreakers and female seducers of his body that they can't have.)

I've found myself partial to Timothy Olyphant on "Justified" because I've started watching "Ozark," a "Breaking Bad" wannabe series in which Jason Bateman "plays it straight" as a Chicago husband and father whose work with a Mexican drug cartel forces him to take his family to Ozark tourist country and...survive.

In Season One, Bateman's survival skills have led to the ruination or death of a number of people, most of whom didn't deserve to be ruined or killed. And yet we are asked to root for Bateman and his decidedly unsympathetic family members(wife Laura Linney, a snotty teenage daughter, and a death-obsessed pre-teen son) even as its his fault why he's had to come to the Ozarks in the first place(his partner skimmed cartel money; the cartel kingpin has killed that partner and others, and demands that Bateman launder money for the cartel in small town backwater America.)

"Ozark" is the latest series that is basically "What the Sopranos wrought." Bad guys not so much as good guys, but as protagonists against WORSE guys. The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones(I would gather), Sons of Anarchy, Animal Kingdom. And the problem is, its pretty damn hard to root for bad guys (Tony Soprano got away with it because he was funny, he killed worse guys, and I was sure he'd get caught or killed at the end. Wrong.)

Anyway, since I was binging Ozark and Justified at the same time, I found myself occasionally craving a dose of Timothy Olyphant's principled, Stetson wearing lawman with a penchant for challenging bad guys to showdowns and shooting them dead(only if they shoot first, of course.) Meanwhile, Jason Bateman(whose tiny frame and deadpan handsomeness was born for comedy, not noir) is ruining lives and getting people killed, over on HIS show.

But this: On recommendation, I sampled and finished first "Justified Season Two", in which Big Margo Martindale gave a performance of precision slovenliness mixed with Corleone business smarts as "Mags," a Harlan County gang boss whose three sons are the first team of her killers. (Mags has other henchmen, too.)

I found Mags to be a much more detailed and involving "Mother Gang Boss" than Jean Smart had been in Fargo Season Two(also lording over some gangster sons) as yet ANOTHER backcountry villainess, and what do you know, Margo Martindale got an Emmy for her work on Justified. (And another one for her work on The Americans. Margo gets around.)

Meanwhile: back at the grim and demoralizing Ozark, Jason Bateman in trying to launder money for a Mexican cartel runs afoul of yet ANOTHER hillbilly crime family that is run without kids by a husband and wife team of cracker barrel hillbillies who hate being called rednecks(I mean HATE it.) Here, the husband is pretty much in the leadership role, but his wife proves to be a homicidal loose cannon(shades of Mrs. Bates) who keeps killing people without her husband's permission, most of the time.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

So: From Fargo Season Two to Justified Season Two to Ozark Season One -- TV writers do seem to be getting inspiration from one another. But it has been ever thus: imitation is the sincerest form of television.

The movie "Fargo" would seem to be AN influence, here, if not THE influence. But more on point of recent vintage is the Movie that Made J-Law a Star: Winter's Bone. This was the movie that took a look at the downlow impoverished lifestyle of Appalachia and found a kind of homegrown organized crime there. Thegaunt men AND the wrinkled middle-aged women of Winter's Bone were dangerous people(to tough and brave young J-Law) and the look and feel of Winter's Bone is definitely there in both Justified and Ozark (if not Fargo, which is set farther north in snow country.)

Summing up:

What I like:

Timothy Olyphant drawing down on the bad guys and winning on "Justified"(it does my heart good.) Visually, he's like a mix between Clint Eastwood and Dobie Gillis.

Margo Martindale's multi-layered take on Mags the Crime Boss in Justified Season II. She outsmarts business rivals, she dances a jig, she sings a country song. She loves her sons but is not above having one destroy the hand of another with a hammer to enforce family law. And she poisons people with her moonshine(telling one victim, "Its too late. It was in the glass, not the jar.....oh, no, honey ,I'm sorry --here comes the worst part....")

The idea, in "Ozark," that Jason Bateman is caught in a deep squeeze between equally brutal Mexico cartel gangsters and Ozark hillbilly gangsters(who make the logical remark, "It seems like its been nothing but trouble for us since you and your family came down here.")

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

There's a great scene in "Ozark," by the way, when a suave and charming family man of a cartel boss(Esai Morales) calmly waits and waits and waits for Bateman to accept the job as "cartel accountant." On the very MOMENT that Bateman finally says yes, the charming cartel boss has ANOTHER accountant in the same room dragged in front of Bateman. In front of Bateman and his partner, the other man's throat is slashed and his eyes are removed "to be saved for a rainy day." I liked the point: like a lot of employers, the cartel guy made no attempt to run Bateman's life UNTIL he agreed to the job. Once agreement was in, the execution was performed of another "non-performer." And thus, from Minute One of being on the job for the cartel, Bateman knows the lives of himself, his wife and his children are "on the line."

BTW , watching the throat-slashing and eye removal scene in Ozark reminds me, yet again, that what was once ultra-violent in Psycho 1960 is, today...literally nothing. We've come a long dark way.

More of what like:

On Ozark, the veteran actor Harris Yulin(so great as a crooked cop in Scarface and as a crooked lawyer in Training Day) as an old, dying man who allows Bateman's family to buy his home...as long as he can live there too until he dies. Yulin brightens every scene as the only real hero of the story thus far.

On Justified, Nick Searcy as Olyphant's tough but warm father-figure boss.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Some of what I don't like:

Walton Goggins on Justified. He got a lot of ink for that series, but I don't think he has quite the flash for the part of the sympathetic baddie. He has a weird, intense look; hard to warm up to him. No matter: his work here got Goggins' roles in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. Justified is from a short story by QT fave Elmore Leonard. (And Timothy Olyphant got cast in the new QT movie about Hollywood. I guess QT likes Justified.) I recently saw Goggins' menace rather mocked and wasted as a harmless bad guy in "Ant Man and the Wasp." I'm kind of waiting for Goggins career to "kick in better."

The very unsympathetic family on Ozark. Bateman isn't playing too well as a bad guy, and Laura Linney's flibbergibbet routine(see: Love Actually) is offputting. Not to mention Dem Two Kids. Honestly, right now I'm rooting for the hillbillies OR the cartel to kill all four of them. Won't happen. In fact, for Ozark to justify(heh) a five year run, I'm figuring that Bateman and Linney(and maybe the kids) will have to become stone killers and ruthless drug gang bosses, in the Breaking Bad tradition.

But not yet.

Still...and this is putting me at a bit of odds with my "watching companion," I am beginning to wonder just how much I can take of bad guys getting away with it. Especially at the expense of some good guys. This has happened on Justified, Ozark and Fargo, though Fargo had some good guys, too. The Americans is in the same place -- I can't much root for these murderous Soviet embeds..but I will watch them(Margo Martindale won an Emmy for THAT show , too.)

I was reminded, watching these backwater crime shows, of the charming simplicity of "Charley Varrick" all these years ago(1973.) Walter Matthau(deadpan charming) as a backwater bad guy who outsmarts worse guys and wins, all in less than two hours. Money laundering enters in, too. No binging, no streaming.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Maybe I'll have more to say about these TV choices as time rolls on, but maybe not. I guess I'm slowly moving movies out the door to make room for in-home streaming of entertainment more aimed to the adult thriller-lover's mind. I want to watch all the seasons(and other bad guys) of Justified, and I'll likely commit to The Americans and Ozark as best i can. Might take months.

Meanwhile, I've got another season of "good guy" Billy Bob Thornton to watch on Goliath.

And, always, Psycho to talk about here.