In ‘Bloodline’, Ben Mendelsohn Finally Gets An American Role That’s Worthy Of Him
The new Netflix original premiered at Berlin Film Festival, and it's great.
Ben Mendelsohn has been popping up in Hollywood fare ever since Animal Kingdom lit a rocket under his career in 2010, but his screen-time tends to be tantalisingly brief – see the glorified cameos of The Dark Knight Rises or The Place Beyond the Pines.
In 2015 that seems set to change, with a lead role in Mississippi Grind, directed by Half Nelson’s Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, and – especially – Bloodline, the new Netflix show landing in March, which premiered its first two episodes at Berlin Film Festival earlier this week.
Mendelsohn stars alongside Kyle Chandler, Sissy Spacek, Sam Shepard, Chloe Sevigny, Linda Cardellini and Jacinda Barrett. It’s set in the Florida Keys; the land of gators, mangroves and libidinous murder mysteries, a la Elmore Leonard or, er, Wild Things.
Mendelsohn plays Danny, eldest son and black sheep of the wealthy Rayburn clan, who run a beachside resort. Chandler is the second brother and local sheriff (at this point casting Chandler as anything other than a stoic authority figure would be an act of courageous avant-gardism). Mendo is introduced with his mouth hanging open, fast asleep on a Greyhound. He’s returning home for his parents’ anniversary, at which old grievances inevitably surface.
So far, so biblical; a kind of sun-soaked sequel to The Indian Runner, Sean Penn’s directorial debut, in which David Morse tries to corral his wayward younger brother, played by Viggo Mortensen. Bloodline explores the same theme: the line beyond which loyalty to family simply gives way.
Danny is the perfect role for Mendelsohn’s heavy-lidded, shaggy-stray insouciance. He’s as quicksilver as his brother is solid. Chandler is in every respect a throwback, contained and dignified. But as good as he and the entire, forbiddingly stacked cast is, it’s Mendelsohn’s show. The prodigal son is the role he was born for, as he already demonstrated in Rachel Ward’s Beautiful Kate.
Mendelsohn is unique in modern movies in being able to play not only a puppyish charmer and a man ready to explode on a dime, but both simultaneously. Shot through with that crinkled sideways grin, it’s as if he’s in on a joke that the other characters — and the audience — aren’t privy to.
Bloodline is as slickly packaged as we’ve come to expect from TV, with swooping helicopter shots gliding over swamps and the sort of grand widescreen panoramas that were once the exclusive purview of cinema. But it’s also admirably ragged, most notably in its fragmentation of time. The first episode is bookended by Chandler’s voiceover (which you can hear in the trailer, in which the disastrous consequences of Danny’s return are foreshadowed), and the first episode ends with a narrative gambit, in the form of a flash forward, so bold as to be breathtaking. It might take a season to catch up to that fateful point, or five – and guessing will be half the fun.
Created by Todd A. Kessler, Daniel Zelman and Glenn Kessler, the team behind Damages, this is a show about brothers, fathers and sons, and if there’s a weakness to its first two episodes it’s that the female characters never quite gain a foothold. The show’s other Aussie, Jacinda Barrett, plays Chandler’s wife, while Linda Cardellini plays the lone Rayburn sister. Only Chloe Sevigny, wearing denim overalls over a bikini and throwing rocks at a hung-over Mendelsohn (with whom she clearly has a past) registers strongly.
Bloodline’s interest in family is one that’s been largely abandoned by Hollywood movies, now dominated by Oscar chasers and franchise guff. Sissy Spacek’s presence as the matriarch recalls In The Bedroom, another flint-hearted portrait of shifting filial allegiances, and a film that seems from another, more humanist era of mainstream filmmaking. Uncritical hagiography reigns on the big screen (at least at this time of year) while shows like The Americans and now Bloodline play out intimate epics of the hearth and home, devoid of either excessive piety or superheroics.
Mendelsohn, meanwhile, has become a walking paradox. He’s a character actor with his own recognisable persona, and one of this show’s chief pleasures is seeing him have the time to chomp into its outer edges. He even gets to squeeze in another crazy sex anecdote, a successor to the one he tells Scoot McNairy in Killing Them Softly. This time, he tells Chandler’s wife about the date who insisted he whack her, and who almost broke his nose in trying to elicit a punch. “I dated her for a few months”, Danny muses, “but it didn’t work out”.
This is going to be a treat.
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All 13 episodes of Bloodline will launch on Netflix in late March.
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Harry Windsor is a freelancer from Sydney. He has written for The Hollywood Reporter, The Age and Overland, and tweets from @PalaceSt