Boardwalk Empire

In another example of how cable television is slowly but surely becoming the best place for grown-up entertainment (I'm talking to you, Hollywood), consider Boardwalk Empire, which is now in its third season. As usual, being a person without HBO, I'm catching up with it on DVD, and have recently concluded watching the first season.

Boardwalk Empire is another look at organized crime, which Americans are endlessly fascinated with. This time the focus is on Atlantic City in 1920, when the county treasurer, Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, has his own personal empire. He gets kickbacks from every business in town, and as the series begins, on the last day before the advent of prohibition, he realizes that illegal booze will make him ever richer. It's kind of a sad irony that the noble attempt to clean the country up by denying it liquor ended up creating the monster of organized crime.

The show also is something of a Baby Gangsters, as real-life characters such as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer Lansky appear. Thompson is based on Enoch Johnson, a real-life corrupt politician who is slightly fictionalized, but the effect is the same. He is dapper, witty, and corrupt to his bones.

Over the course of the show, Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi, will undergo all sorts of trials, such as a war with Italians, who are in cahoots with New York gambler Arnold Rothstein (chillingly played by Michael Stuhlbarg). He will also have an interesting shift in his love life, as he dumps vacuous showgirl Paz de la Huerta and takes up with a righteous Irish widow (Kelly Macdonald), who is a widow because Thompson had her husband killed. Macdonald's characterization is fascinating because, though a woman who believes in temperance, she is able to look the other way in being Thompson's kept woman, knowing full well he does business with bootleggers. She's a woman who is looking at the bottom line, not unlike the men she scorns.

There are two other major threads. One is Thompson's protege, Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), who Thompson has been looking out for all his life, back from the war ready to be the second in command. But Pitt makes an unwise choice and becomes wanted, and hightails it to Chicago, where he runs with Capone. The other is the law--Michael Shannon, gloriously wound as tight as a drum as Agent Van Alden of the prohibition squad. Shannon, who never plays normal guys, really gets a juicy role here, as Van Alden worships the law, thinking of it as godly pursuit, but is also a seriously twisted individual, who instead of masturbating like a person, beats himself with a knotted belt to curb his lust.

As is possible with long-form television like this, there are novelistic flourishes to the story and characters. We learn various things over time, such as who Pitt's father is, or why his mother is Gretchen Mol, who is hardly older than he is. Thompson's reach is powerful, as it is shown that it is he that ensures Warren Harding gets the Republican nomination (the series ends with his election) and this probably isn't too far off the mark, as it was Harding's nomination that inspired the phrase "smoke-filled room."

The show is full of wonderful period details, no more so than the Boardwalk itself, with all the delights along the way, including a place that displaced babies in incubators for people to gawk at like zoo animals, and a nightclub where performers like Eddie Cantor and Hardeen (Houdini's brother) take the stage. The costumes are wonderful, as well, as you can't help but feel a little impressed by a man in a Homburg.

Martin Scorsese was an executive producer (as was Mark Wahlberg) and directed the pilot episode. There are some of Scorsese's touches, like many moving camera shots, and one wonders if it was his decision to go anachronistic with the theme music--electric guitars!

The whole series is held together by Buscemi, who is such an interesting actor. At first I thought he seemed too contemporary, but over the course of the series that lessened. Before I watched the show I expected him to be some psychopath out of The Sopranos, but Buscemi's basic persona is the same--in fact, he repeats one of my favorite lines of his as the completely different character in Ghost World--a sarcastic, "That the spirit." Buscemi is a man who is so homely that he's handsome, sort of like Humphrey Bogart, so you can believe that women would be attracted to him, but mostly for his power.

There are many great scenes in the series. Shannon at a baptism will make your eyes pop, and another where a prostitute gets her face slashed. There are many interesting minor characters, such as Harding's mistress Nan Britton, naively thinking she'll be first lady, and Richard Harrow, a World War I vet who has been disfigured and wears a primitive mask, and also happens to be a stone-dead killer. But the highlight has to be Buscemi's telling the story of how his baby son and wife died. Watching that scene is like getting a lesson in restrained but powerful acting.