The Beast in Me

7

I’m trying to figure out what to call Claire Danes’ version of the scream queen. Because she has become the go-to actress for tortured, on-the-edge, ugly-crying roles. Emo empress? Grimacing grand duchess? Crazy countess? Okay, none of these quite have the same ring to them, but The Beast in Me once again leans into the Danes of it all. Her ability to contort and crinkle her face in ways that no other actor can (sometimes due to Botox, sometimes due to pure ego). Her chin quivers, her mouth turns into an ungodly squiggle, her eyes bug and roll. She’s been doing this act since Homeland, and has continued her woman-going-through-it roles in the past couple of years in Fleishman is in Trouble and Full Circle. And she brings her weird puffing-air-through-her-teeth acting tic that has been with her since Homeland. Ms. Hipster and I actually thought about making a drinking game out of it. Every time Danes does her exasperated air-puffing thing, drink! The liquor cabinet would have been bare after one season of this series, to be sure.

Now, this show isn’t all about Danes. It is a bit of a two-hander with Matthew Rhys. An actor that I’ve had mixed feelings about over the years. Something about his acting and his face kept me from continuing with The Americans. A show, by all accounts, I should love. But his weird teeth, wigs and delivery just made me uncomfortable in a way I can’t describe. I was much more comfortable with him in Perry Mason — which may be due to the fact he wore a hat the whole time and had some facial hair that distracted from those oversized veneers. In The Beast in Me he plays nepo-baby rich guy, Nile Jarvis, so his obvious plugs or wig (or whatever actors do to reconstitute their hairlines) and fake, toothy grin kind of fit the character and the evil artifice he engenders. His American accent is admittedly really decent considering how thick his Welsh accent is in real life. And he seems like a really nice guy (would Keri Russell put up with anything else!?) so he must be a decent actor to bring this absolutely creepy monster to life. And that’s the thing here: the acting across the board is top-notch. Your milage on Danes’ face-acting may vary — I get it — but this lane for her of tortured soul seems to really work for both her countenance and her acting style. The only question is if she, Claire Danes, is always acting, or if some of this sloppy, egoless emotional horror is just oozing out of her person.

Danes’ character, Aggie Wiggs, is an author. She wrote a very successful memoir about her upbringing with an awful father. Good times. It’s been a minute since that success, bills are piling up, and she’s blocked on her follow-up, which is a non-fiction book about the friendship between RBG and Scalia. Okay… Oh, she also has a dead son and an ex-wife, Shelley (Natalie Morales), who at one point is said to be a hobbyist painter and then later posed as more of a professional painter, maybe? Cut to, notorious real estate developer, Nile Jarvis, moves in next door. Jarvis has been accused in the tabloids of murdering his wife, who vanished and has not been heard from in some time. He’s since gotten remarried to Nina (Brittany Snow), who was formerly his now-missing wife’s assistant. Got that? Well, as should be evident to everyone who talks to him, Nile is a total creep. A belligerent asshole and bully who starts his whole relationship with Aggie trying to cajole her into signing a waiver to put a jogging path in the woods in their neighborhood (which she is opposed to). A weird entree, but I suppose there has to be some mechanism to get the two of them in contact and immediately at odds.

And here’s where things get a little weird. Stuck on her current project, way behind on delivering chapters and living in a large house with mounting bills and falling plaster, Aggie is essentially talked into abandoning her RGB book to write an authorized biography about Nile. By Nile. Now, why would a guy with a murder rumor hanging over his head agree to let someone into his life like that? A guy with a life-defining real estate project quickly going down the tubes. A guy with a family who operates more like mobsters than real estate moguls and clearly has some skeletons in their closets. A guys who is clearly being investigated by the FBI and would probably do better to just chill in his mansion with his young wife, run his business and stay out of the spotlight. And maybe it’s an ego thing or whatever, but it just makes no sense that he would do this. Or that anyone around him would let him. But without this conceit, we wouldn’t have a show. It’s also — based on my short time in publishing — completely unbelievable that Aggie’s editor and publisher would just let her scrap years of advances and missed deadlines to throw her active book in the trash for this new idea that she’s starting from scratch. With a notoriously unstable guy she just met. It’s silly. But this is where we’re at. And it goes exactly where you’d expect.

Because, of course, as Aggie starts to dig, she starts to think that Nile may have actually killed his wife. Yeah, no shit. Adding to her suspicion is one of the more confusing characters in recent memory, the drunken FBI agent, Brian Abbott (David Lyons). Dude just literally shows up at her door drunk in the middle of the night and tells her that Nile is dangerous. And then continues to just kind of go rogue and continue to investigate Nile in completely illegal and stupid ways. Which seems to be one of those cop outs that shows do where they have these characters who, as a function of their jobs, might have access to information that can move a mystery forward, but work completely outside of any kind of official channels. No boss ever asking where they’ve been. Nobody tracking their illegal network traffic at work. Nobody seemingly noticing their seriously sketchy, unbalanced behavior. I’ve never worked within the FBI, of course, but I imagine someone might take one look at this disheveled dude always skulking around, hungover and generally vanishing all day long to break and enter and put him on some sort of performance plan or something. Lots of burner phones and encrypted files that they yada-yada in ways I can’t even explain. But let’s just say that they are not technically sound. Meanwhile, the menace of Nile kind of hangs over this whole thing with the over-the-top menace of his own father played by thuggish real estate scion, Jonathan Banks, and his own uncle Rick (Tim Guinee), who is essentially his father’s enforcer/fixer a la Ray Donovan. Again, Nile walks in a room and it’s pretty obvious that he is a terrible person. There’s no charm. No nothing other than creepiness. So, why is anyone surprised that this dude Nile isn’t telling the truth about anything and is just a total psycho? Honestly, are these people in the same show I’m watching?

Needless to say, the tension builds as bodies vanish, Nile becomes increasingly unhinged and Dane’s face becomes increasingly contorted. The dead son. The ex-wife. The murderous neighbor, who she’s metaphorically in bed with and is reliant upon to keep her career going. The plumbing in her giant, old house going bad. It’s all very stressful. But, ultimately, Nile Jarvis is the center of all these peoples’ world and can’t be seperated from. Aggie is now tied to Nile because without him she has no book and no money. Without him, the parents of his missing ex-wife have no money (they’ve sunk all of their cash into his current, floundering development plan). A politician opposing his development plan, who needs money to continue to run her operation, has to make a deal with the devil. An FBI agent whose husband owes his freedom to the Jarvis family because of a coverup and is under their thrall because of it. Another spiraling FBI agent who has basically thrown away his sobriety and career to bust Nile Jarvis and without whom would have no purpose or reason to exist. So, they’re all tied to him and have every reason to not be, but can’t escape his orbit. All of this tension and all of these competing parties and, at the heart of it, this mystery of a missing wife. Which, as it turns out, isn’t so much of a mystery. Occam’s razor. The dude we watch beat at least one person to death during the course of the show and kidnap and torture another just might be the culprit. He is exactly what he was purported to be. And scene. Oh, also, if you’re going to just stand there and admit to all your crimes, probably make sure the person you’re confessing to isn’t recording you. That’s a cliched, rookie mistake, sir.