I’ve loved Edgar Allen Poe ever since I was a kid. Lately, he’s gotten a little bit of a renaissance with the adaptation of The Lighthouse and being a main character in The Pale Blue Eyes. And Sylvester Stallone has even been working in recent years to get a biopic made. Actually, he’s been working off and on for main years longer than Poe was even alive.
Poe’s story were influential on American literature and just about everywhere else. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie must have been inspired by C. Augustine Dupin to create Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. But it’s been a while since we’ve seen adaptation of Poe’s works. Even the 2012 The Raven featuring John Cusack as Poe was more a fictionalized account of his last days.
Mike Flanagan, who some say did the impossible with his adaptation of Stephen King’s Gerald Game, is the creator, co-writer and co-director behind Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher, which is what Succession would’ve been like had Poe had written it in modern times. It focuses on a set of fraternal twins Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell) who are loosely inspired by the Sackler Family that owned and operated Purdue Pharma. But in this series, it’s Fortunato Pharmaceuticals and their drug is opiate-drug is Ligodine instead of Oxycotin.
With a non-linear plot that takes place over multiple timelines from the 1950s to present time, it gets lost amongst numerous characters, most are so unlikeable you wouldn’t want to spend eight minutes with them, nonetheless the eight episodes of the series which last well over eight hours. I didn’t realize until the seventh episode that Juno (Ruth Codd) was supposed to be Roderick’s younger wife. Apparently, he’s had six kids with multiple women. And the kids are so one-dimensional I really didn’t care for most of them.
Henry Thomas plays the eldest son, Frederick, and heir to the family fortune. Apparently, the company is facing a huge lawsuit in connection with the opioid crises. But it bounces around so much, it barely registers anywhere as a legal drama and doesn’t really matter. As for Thomas, he seems to have become one of the worst actors ever. For a young child who showed so much promise as a child, his acting has proven to have gotten worse as he gets older. Maybe it’s the material, but he’s hard to watch here. He appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and wasn’t too bad. But it seems with every passing year, it gets worse. Here he overacts badly.
Part of the series’ problem is its identity. Since it’s based on Poe’s works, there are horror elements to them but also dark comedy as well as family drama. Each episode has a connection to his famous works “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell Tale Heart,” and “The Masque of the Red Death” which is easily the best and most disturbing episode of the series for a climax I won’t mention. But it comes so early in the series that we’re left just groaning a little as the subsequent episodes just feel watching the band that performed after The Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
Worse, the most amusing and interesting Usher child is killed off in the third episode. Camille L’Espanaye (Katie Siegel, who is also Flanagan’s wife) is a controlling and sharp-tongued public relations whiz who can spin anything. But she is killed off and after her death, you realize that every episode is going to deal with the death of one of the Usher children. No spoiler alert needed. The episode begins with Roderick attending the funeral of Frederick and mentioning all his children are dead.
Most of its told in flashbacks as Roderick recounts his life story to Dupin (Carl Lumby) who is an assistant U.S. Attorney. While some might groan at the way it has Roderick recounting events to Dupin, this was actually a popular format for many written works from Poe’s era where one person recounts a story to another.
But the problem with this is that some of the flashbacks scenes stop the series at a crawl. It begins with a retelling of “The Premature Burial” where Eliza (Annabeth Gish) the very religious mother of Roderick and Madeline, is buried in the backyard following an illness when they’re teenagers. Then she rises from the dead. It’s freaky. But the scenes during the late 1970s where the twins are played by Zach Gilford and Willa Fitzgerald are so boring and slog along, it’s obvious they were broken up and spread over the eight episodes because no one would continue to watch it was told chronologically.
The scenes take too long as Roderick has to deal with a cocky and arrogant CEO of Fortunato named Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco) could have been easily summarized in a line of dialogue. It leads up to a reference to “The Cask of Amontillado” which isn’t really much of a pay-off. Throughout the series, there is a mysterious woman, Verna (Carla Gugino), whose name is an anagram of “raven” but she also functions as a supernatural entity connected to famous and powerful people throughout history that suffers family trauma. This goes a little too far with being topical but Gugino has a lot of fun playing this mysterious figure, you got to hand it to her. She does a great job and worth watching.
Both Greenwood and McConnell are great in the roles. Mark Hamill appears as their trust-worthy attorney and fixer Arthur Pym, a reference to Poe’s only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Hamill is great in the role with a gruff bulldog-like voice that it’s worth watching him in each scene. However, Lumbly and his younger Dupin actor Malcolm Goodwin can’t do much with the character, mostly because it’s so poorly written.
Part of the problem is that Flanagan seems to have made so many references to Poe’s stories and characters a little bit more editing would’ve made it better. Roderick’s granddaughter is named “Lenore” and his first wife is Annabel Lee (Katie Parker.) Roderick also recites several of Poe’s poems, or at least parts of them. This could have been more better and tighter as maybe four or five hours. And they should have been building up to the “Red Death” party reference and what happens rather than use it very early. The series just ends with a whimper with an anti-climatic ending.
Poe fans will probably watch it and it’s worth watching once. Yet I doubt many people will want to watch it again. I know I don’t.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 