#63 A Melancholy of Mine Own
29/04/21 10:06
In the New York Times, recently, there was an article about ‘languishing’. You probably read it and thought ‘yeah, that’s me.’ It’s the state between contentment and depression, a sort of blah middle ground where you’re neither flourishing nor at rock bottom, and apparently, there are a lot of us there. I guess you could think of it as a kind of mental just-about-managing, in that you can get out of bed in the morning, but there’s no skipping involved, and you may well take refuge in a glass of wine at the end of the day to blunt the ennui. Sound familiar? In that case, I’d advise you not to watch Mare of Easttown, because it brings a truly languishing energy to the whodunnit, and might tip you towards a less manageable disposition, causing you to retreat under the duvet until it’s all gone away.
I didn’t want to watch it anyway – the evening we were due to view, Marian Keyes announced on Twitter that it was the most depressing thing she’d ever seen, and my dad texted me to say ‘it’s good, but it’s not for me.’ I liked the idea of watching another episode of This Is My House and letting my brain dribble gently out of my drooling mouth. But my husband loves noir – Scandi-noir, Icelandic-noir, now Pennsylvanian-noir – and insisted on giving it a go. ‘It’s got Kate Winslet in it,’ he said, as if that made everything better. But she’s such an illustrious thespian, these days, that I knew she’d have glammed right down and gone all Mike Leigh to demonstrate her acting chops. I was right – her roots are at least four inches long and she wears shapeless plaid shirts to show she doesn’t give a shit. Don’t go expecting Marianne Dashwood, although both of them do sprain their ankle. But while Kate’s Marianne reclines fetchingly on a chaise longue, Kate’s Mare limps around irritably, cuffing and cussing.
Yes, her name is Mare. What kind of a name is Mare? It’s not helped by the fact that in the Delco accent it sounds like it could be ‘Mayor’, which left me confused about her role in Easttown. Plus all the other characters say it all the time: ‘Come here, Mare.’ ‘What’s that you’re doing, Mare?’ ‘We’ve had an intruder, Mare. Mare, his face is like a ferret.’ Why do they all keep saying her weird name, over and over again? It’s a total ‘mare.
Anyway, to be clear, Kate plays Detective Mare Sheehan, a smalltown cop who’s vaguely disgruntled by the stultifying demands of her job, and moderately irritated by her ex-husband marrying someone else. The people of Easttown are all pretty languishy – there’s a teen mom with a drunk, angry dad, and a useless baby-daddy who has a gleefully threatening new girlfriend. Jean Smart plays Mare’s pinched, disapproving mother Helen while Guy Pierce is visiting professor Richard Ryan who hooks up with Mare even though she’s not that bothered. Bubbling under – and bothering her - is the still-unsolved case of missing girl Katie Bailey whose cancer-stricken mother Dawn is a thorn in Mare’s flank. There’s a sort of grey colour-wash over everything, like the sun doesn’t quite reach Easttown and you know it’s all about to get darker. Every Saturday, we watch Death in Paradise, a gloriously colourful cream-puff of a show, but this is more Death in – not quite Hell, but a kind of limp, disaffected Limbo.
Don’t get me wrong – this series is really, really good – subtle, layered and real. Kate Winslet is excellent, with a wry, dry delivery that conveys the weariness of a woman not quite at the end of her rope, but whose tether is certainly fraying. But am I really going to sit through another six episodes of this when I could be watching Stacey Dooley tell four people who claim they own the same barn to ‘fake yourself at home’? With my current meh-malaise, I feel like I should be doing some self-care in the form of frothy, comforting entertainment – reading Georgette Heyers, House Beautiful magazine, and tucking into the fluffiest hot water bottle of cosy murders.
So, like Marian Keyes, ‘I’m afeerd I’m out.’
I didn’t want to watch it anyway – the evening we were due to view, Marian Keyes announced on Twitter that it was the most depressing thing she’d ever seen, and my dad texted me to say ‘it’s good, but it’s not for me.’ I liked the idea of watching another episode of This Is My House and letting my brain dribble gently out of my drooling mouth. But my husband loves noir – Scandi-noir, Icelandic-noir, now Pennsylvanian-noir – and insisted on giving it a go. ‘It’s got Kate Winslet in it,’ he said, as if that made everything better. But she’s such an illustrious thespian, these days, that I knew she’d have glammed right down and gone all Mike Leigh to demonstrate her acting chops. I was right – her roots are at least four inches long and she wears shapeless plaid shirts to show she doesn’t give a shit. Don’t go expecting Marianne Dashwood, although both of them do sprain their ankle. But while Kate’s Marianne reclines fetchingly on a chaise longue, Kate’s Mare limps around irritably, cuffing and cussing.
Yes, her name is Mare. What kind of a name is Mare? It’s not helped by the fact that in the Delco accent it sounds like it could be ‘Mayor’, which left me confused about her role in Easttown. Plus all the other characters say it all the time: ‘Come here, Mare.’ ‘What’s that you’re doing, Mare?’ ‘We’ve had an intruder, Mare. Mare, his face is like a ferret.’ Why do they all keep saying her weird name, over and over again? It’s a total ‘mare.
Anyway, to be clear, Kate plays Detective Mare Sheehan, a smalltown cop who’s vaguely disgruntled by the stultifying demands of her job, and moderately irritated by her ex-husband marrying someone else. The people of Easttown are all pretty languishy – there’s a teen mom with a drunk, angry dad, and a useless baby-daddy who has a gleefully threatening new girlfriend. Jean Smart plays Mare’s pinched, disapproving mother Helen while Guy Pierce is visiting professor Richard Ryan who hooks up with Mare even though she’s not that bothered. Bubbling under – and bothering her - is the still-unsolved case of missing girl Katie Bailey whose cancer-stricken mother Dawn is a thorn in Mare’s flank. There’s a sort of grey colour-wash over everything, like the sun doesn’t quite reach Easttown and you know it’s all about to get darker. Every Saturday, we watch Death in Paradise, a gloriously colourful cream-puff of a show, but this is more Death in – not quite Hell, but a kind of limp, disaffected Limbo.
Don’t get me wrong – this series is really, really good – subtle, layered and real. Kate Winslet is excellent, with a wry, dry delivery that conveys the weariness of a woman not quite at the end of her rope, but whose tether is certainly fraying. But am I really going to sit through another six episodes of this when I could be watching Stacey Dooley tell four people who claim they own the same barn to ‘fake yourself at home’? With my current meh-malaise, I feel like I should be doing some self-care in the form of frothy, comforting entertainment – reading Georgette Heyers, House Beautiful magazine, and tucking into the fluffiest hot water bottle of cosy murders.
So, like Marian Keyes, ‘I’m afeerd I’m out.’
- Mare of Easttown, 7 episodes, HBO
- Death in Paradise, 10 series, BBC iPlayer
- This is My House, 6 episodes, BBC One
