Apart from the beautiful horses, racing can be an ugly business, and because of the beautiful horses no sport is more heartbreaking. So be warned: HBO's addictive new drama, set at and around the Santa Anita racetrack near Los Angeles, is designed to pull you into this tortured world and hold you there until you see the light. It's hard to look away.
Enlarge Image
Dennis Farina and Dustin Hoffman in 'Luck.'
The cast is large and the show drops us into the stream of each character's life without much explanation. Go with the flow until it begins to make sense. It will.
One main story revolves around "Ace" Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), a crime boss just out of prison; his chauffeur of many talents, Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina); and the Irish-bred horse Ace has stabled at the track with trainer Turo Escalante (John Ortiz).
Luck
Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO
Ace is bent on revenge against former associates, and his plan includes an investment in the track. The rest is left murky, however, so that when Ace hires the young financial whiz Nathan Israel (Patrick J. Adams), we cannot! anticip ate the young man's real purpose in the story. Ditto the shy woman (Joan Allen) looking to start a center where prison inmates help rehabilitate sick or injured horses. Is that all she is?
The other central character in "Luck" is trainer-owner and breeder Walter Smith (Nick Nolte), who has poured all his hope and plenty of fear into a big, fast colt who is linked to Smith's clouded past. This is a great role for Mr. Nolte, who gets to put a different spin on a character he portrayed in the movie "Affliction" and show us a battered man whose soul and capacity for love, or at least kindness, are still intact.
But the glory of "Luck" is that almost everyone in it has dramatic appeal. Usually, this is because we can see into their hearts. Take the novice jockey Leon. Played by Tom Payne, he's a gentle innocent whose happiness only requires the opportunity to ride. Yet nature has given him a body that is bigger than it should be. The agony of his weight-loss running sessions in the California sun is so pitiable that it plays like tragedy.
On the upside is cheerful Rosie (Kerry Condon), an Irish workout rider who has a magical rapport with horses but is still struggling to get mounts as a race jockey. Her grace even in disappointment is more touching because her competition for a coveted job is Ronnie (real star jockey Gary Stevens), an alcoholic and drug-snorting former champ now trying to make a comeback.
Racing is still a man's world, and track veterinarian Jo (Jill Hennessy) must be strong to stay honest in a business where a lot of people will do anything for an edge. Her job also means delivering bad news, a constant reality in thoroughbred racing, about a horse's health. Jo is so tough, in fact, that when she does cry, we can hardly watch. And then there is jockeys-agent Joey, played to perfection by Richard Kind as a Pagliacci whose depression makes him seem pathetic but also sinister.
One of the series' most remarkable achievements comes with the four characters who fu! nction a s racing's typical degenerate gamblers. Four men who live for the track, for the bet, and without hope of escape from the degrading boom and mostly bust nature of their addiction. At first, they appear in broad outline: the bitter and mean wheelchair-bound Marcus; the excitable and slow-witted Renzo; the ambitious and frustrated Lonnie; and the formerly handsome Jerry (Jason Gedrick), a masterful handicapper whose gambling addiction is terrible to behold.
As "Luck" progresses, however, this bedraggled gang, almost Shakespearean in its dramatic form and function, reveals a key to the entire series. The revelation begins when the men, watching a race, see an unfamiliar horse gallop to the finish with the strides and speed of a true champion. Such an animal is the miracle, the holy grail of the sport. All at once, the hard-core gamblers smile, their ravaged faces transformed by the joy of the moment. Watching a thing of beauty, able to appreciate its majesty, they themselves look beautiful.
There are many more moments of humanity discovered or restored in "Luck." The most bizarre incident involves a suicide attempt gone wrong that rekindles a lust for life in a person who barely seemed worth saving. In another instance, a man compelled to commit murder signals regret with a redemptive flicker of his eyes.
There is much in this series that is gorgeous, like the sight of steam rising from a horse's back while it is being soaped and washed after an early morning workout. There is a lot that is not pretty. After one scene of stunning violence, the possibility of more can't be forgotten.
Strong writing and acting ensure that we soon become so sensitive to the characters that we feel for them the way they feel for their horses. This is a predictably searing experience in a venue like racing, where big dreams must usually be followed by crushing disappointment. When Nick Nolte's character is watching his beloved colt run, Mr. Nolte's body rises and sinks with the rhythm of its hoofbeats, a! nd we ar e moved by the sight but filled with worry.
Yet most everybody keeps going. They rise every morning and, as one gamblers says, "step up to the plate" in the hope that one day will be better than the last. That is what "Luck" is really about. When all is said and done, the series is an invitation to play the game of life.
***
Enlarge Image
Sorority officers Devan, Arianna, Amelia, Dominique and Hannah in 'Sorority Girls.
Sorority Girls
Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on TLC
Take five perky and pink-clad sorority sisters from America (think "Legally Blonde"). Send them to England to recruit members of the first-ever sorority in the U.K. from among the denizens of a grimy industrial city and.... "Sorority Girls" is what reality television was made for. The setting helped guarantee a number of applicants with inelegant accents, heavy makeup and hard-drinking habits. Leeds is a site of the proverbial 19th-century dark, satanic mills of "Chariots of Fire" fame.
As rush interviews begin, the Americans can barely conceal their horror, for instance when a prosp! ective n ew member of Sigma Gamma turns out to be a human pin cushion, with piercings on one hip, two nipples and various other parts. But they give other applicants high marks for trying: "Normally I'm not a fan of someone's bra showing," one American sister says. "But hers was cute and it did match her shirt."
No comments:
Post a Comment