'Boardwalk Empire' Season 5

And So it Ends With An Abrupt Bang

Anything to do with mobsters and organised crime of Twentieth Century America has a certain appeal on the big screen. Whether it was a contemporary portrayal of Al Capone or the labyrinthine story of the Godfather movies, organised crime stories have their cache. Boardwalk Empire cut a great swathe into that terrain the early seasons so the promise has always been that wends its way through the roaring 20s to the '29 market crash and into the 30s.

For some reason, they've decided to wind up the show and so Season 5 has come as a sort of fast-forward-and-flashback sort of series to answer a whole bunch of questions and tie up the loose ends.

Spoiler alert... Now!
Really, don't read on if you hate spoilers.

What's Good About It

The story continues with the same old cast of characters. Sadly, that's about it.

What's Bad About It

Suddenly, these characters aren't much whack as the series rushes to an end. Moots the loose ends get tied up by killing off characters. Some of them are more arbitrary than others, some are more arbitrarily dealt with than others. You think nothing of Sally getting whacked, but you really wonder about the wisdom of Chalky White allowing himself to be killed to give Maitland a chance at singing again. Mickey finally gets it, but it's super off-the-cuff. A new character Arquimedes gets introduced and dies without appealing to us in the same way as his predecessors.

All the flashbacks to when Nucky and Eli were kids, and then Nucky as young man working for the Commodore are expositional and boring. I didn't realise how little I was interested in the Commodore and Nucky as young man. If this stuff was so deeply interesting, this is where the story would have kicked off - in 1884 instead of 1918. The simple truth is, it's just not that interesting, and so it doesn't add anywhere narthex value as the unfolding story itself. Because it takes up so much screen time, you only get half of the normal unfolding story.

So they end up whacking everybody - which is like the second half of 'Goodfellas' by Martin Scorsese who is the executive producer, but it really doesn't do justice to the first 4 seasons. If you told me this was how it was all going to end, I might not have bothered investing my time in this thing. It was really good up until Season 4. This final season is nothing short of disappointing.

What's Interesting About It

I've been thinking about how disappointed I was with the ending, and I think it's because the story comes up against a wall of its own devising. Nucky Thompson is loosely based on Nucky Johnson. The writers gave themselves licence to be very different to history in creating Nucky Thompson as a parallel universe type figure. But they also populated it with historic figures like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Mayer Lanky and Arnold Rothstein. In the early going, it maddest more colourful and interesting. But conceit got down to the business end they couldn't rewrite history. So when it comes to the Thompson clan facing off against Lucky and Mayer, you know the Thompsons can't win and supplant Lucky and Mayer. It's just not how things went.

Boxed in by the writers' own devising, Nucky is suddenly weak and cannot bring himself to have the courage or brains to beat these guys. It is as if he necessarily had to become weak and dumb in the face of reality. It also made for very bad viewing right down to the end where Tommy Darmody - Jimmy's son, and Gillian and Commodore Kaestner's grandson  - shoots Nucky dead. It might be symbolic and a natural playing out of the revenge cycle but it's a really awful and truly stupid choice by the writers. Especially when you consider Nucky Johnson himself survived all of that era and lived to 1968. They killed off Nucky to forcibly end the series. It's a terrible choice.

Parallels With 'Mad Men'

Nucky's story, like Don Draper's story is essentially a picaresque, Both series go into elaborate flashbacks to childhood in order to explain the idiosyncrasies of the character. This device worked a lot better in 'Mad Men' than it does in 'Boardwalk Empire'. Whereas Don is truly mysterious as to how he came to be Don Draper, there is no real mystery as to how Nucky became the man we see. What we don't know in specifics, we can guess.

Whereas 'Mad Men' successfully navigated the 60s for us, 'Boardwalk Empire' abruptly cuts out of its project of the 1920s before the market crash. It's a shame they couldn't work through that dynamic; instead they opted to go forward to a time after the crash and straight into the Great Depression, but it doesn't really give us a sense of the Great Depression that would have been unfolding.  The story oddly narrows down to Nucky's contracting circumstances.

The problem with the flashback sequences is that it robs Nucky of his self-made greatness. What we see instead is a Nucky who is simply a cog in history who in the end cannot supplant the Commodore by deeds or by blood. if nothing else you want Nucky to succeed, but the flashback sequences lower the bar for Nucky's success to such a pointy realise that nothing we've seeing seasons 1 through 4 are of any consequence except for the way he ends up killing Jimmy and that in a roundabout way gets him killed by Jimmy's son. All of which has a certain symmetry but it is so dissatisfying, given the scope of the man built up in the previous seasons.

We learn subtle things about Don Draper in his flashback that flesh out the character. In these flashbacks we learn things about Nucky that we really didn't want to know.

It really is a shame it all ends the way it does.

Al Capone And The Chicago Story

We've seen a great Al Capone already in 'The Untouchables' with Robert DeNiro delivering one of the most manic unhinged performances for Brian DePalma's film. Here's Stephen Graham takes a lot of cues from the earlier DeNiro performance and works him into a just as manic, disturbed, unpredictable and violent entity. It's a bit of a shame that they opted not to retell the Eliot Ness story from Capone's side. Instead the elder that damns him is casually handed to the undercover agent. It's a far cry from the train station shoot out in 'the Untouchables'.

Considering the detail they went into with the succession from John Torrio to Al Capone, it seems amiss to simply abandon the Capone story in this context. It's just another one of those things that just didn't see fulfilment in the series, and it's big shame. Stephen Graham's defiant and crazy Capone with too much front is a fantastic performance to the end.

Quick Shots - 04/Oct/2014

Jimi Remastered! - 'Cry of Love & 'Rainbow Bridge Original Soundtrack'

The posthumous releases of Jimi Hendrix get a real bad rap. It's partly because it's so obvious they are unfinished works in progress, rapidly mixed to cash in on the name and in most part we've been happy to blame Mr. Hendrix senior for the flagrant cash-grabs.

That being said, I'm still excited enough to go out to a shop and plonk down money for the latest remasters of 'Cry of Love' and 'Rainbow Bridge Original motion Picture Soundtrack'. Thats right, I did the 1980s thing of going to a retail outlet to buy two CDs of Jimi Hendrix. Take that you Gen-Y peer-to-peer music pirates and downloaders! That's how it's done. Plonking down some cash. Cash. Not credit card, not EFTPOS, cold hard cash, baby.

They're actually pretty good considering they've come off a two track mix master. There's a lot of definition in the sound image and the lead breaks panning from left to right - a Hendrix signature if there ever was one- have tremendous fidelity. The overall feel of both these releases is a crispness that was missing from the old LPs. It's also nice to hear this material without the thin sound that was on the LP releases way back when and the awful hiss.

Both these albums show Jimi flopping around for a new direction beyond the flash of his original band and the considered poise of the Band of Gypsies. On one level he is still Jimi Hendrix, guitar hero and noise merchant and yet he's trying to reposition his guitar playing against different sorts of rhythms and styles. Some of the less complete tracks feel like he's unsure of his artistic voice, searching for something new, while tracks like 'In From The Storm' sound like they might have come off an 'Electric Ladyland' session.

The vernacular of psychedelic guitar soloing has aged considerably and turning back the clock to the 1970 vibe feels like a time warp in of itself. You do wonder what he might have done in the late 70s had he lived. All the same, these are pretty good albums if you want a better picture of just what Jimi Hendrix was about.

'A Million Ways To Die In The West'

A mostly meaningless comedy starring Charlize Theron and Liam Neeson. Of course it features Seth McFarlane pulling an Orson Welles effort, being the leading man, writer-director-producer, but that is almost by-the-by. The humour's gross and has a couple of good laughs which make it bearable but the modern banter in the Old West gag wears thin very quickly.

Random Spoiler because I am a bastard : There's a good sheep joke and a great gag featuring Christopher Lloyd that makes it okay.

'Boardwalk Empire' Season 4

Good old Nucky Thompson and his Atlantic City gang find themselves on the outer after the bruising climax to Season 3. A lot of people complain about the moral ambiguity of the main characters in 'BE', but really, they're prohibition era gangsters; hardly the sort of men to be concerned about moralism. Season 4 throws Edgar Hoover and the nascent FBI into the mix, which is fun. We also see Al Capone step up towards the big time. The mania inherent in the setup reaches fever pitch in Season 3's climax but there is no big shoot out in season 4. It's more of a dramatic climax that leaves you haunted.

I still love this gangster stuff. 'Boardwalk Empire' effectively does to the 1920 what 'Mad Men' has done for the 60s, which is that it lets you live it by proxy. It's an amazing effect when you binge watch these things.  Clive James was saying that his main sorrow in facing death is that he won't get to find out how 'Game of Thrones' ends. I have to say I have great sympathy for that sentiment.