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The bullet points for the final season of HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” are fairly straightforward: Siblings Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin Gemstone (Danny McBride, Edi Patterson, and Adam DeVine, respectively) are still squabbling about whose efforts at their family megachurch deserves the most attention; their father Eli (John Goodman, always wonderful), now sporting long hair and an even longer face, is wasting away in (a metaphorical) Margaritaville somewhere off the Florida coast, drinking and hooking up with women he doesn’t like on his boat.
Judy’s husband BJ (Tim Baltz) is taking pole dance classes, a pastime he enjoys so much that his bewildered wife, who spends most of her waking hours arguing with her brothers, asks, “Why do you need hobbies and shit?” And though Kelvin is now leading Prism, a queer-friendly ministry (their catchphrase is “Where diversity sparkles”) with his partner Keefe (Tony Cavalero, sweet and demented as ever), he still treats the latter as his valet, and is afraid of losing his ministry’s revenue if he reveals to the church at large that he’s gay. Complicating the pressure to come out are the regular bigoted insults of rival evangelical minister Vance Simkins (Stephen Dorff, a welcome returning guest from season three), who, like Kelvin, is nominated for a hilarious award called “Top Christ-Following Man.”
But the birthday celebration of their late mother Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles) turns the whole season on its head. Because the family never met a life event that couldn’t be monetized, the birthday is an excuse for a church telethon fundraiser, complete with backup dancers and the Gemstone siblings in jet packs, rising toward the church ceiling’s disco ball. Dragged back for this service by his children, Eli meets, after many years, singer Lori Milsap (Megan Mullaly, whose first few acting gigs included a 1983 McDonald’s commercial featuring John Goodman), Aimee-Leigh’s best friend and creative partner. So accustomed are we to Mullally portraying oblivious and/or vindictive nutters that her performance as Lori, a woman whose personality is rooted in kindness, warmth, and connecting with others through music, makes for a lovely, much-needed antithesis to the Gemstones’ general insanity. Seann William Scott plays Corey, Lori’s son with her ex-husband, a quiet, only child, happy to be reunited with the Gemstones, the siblings he’d always wished for.
I am forbidden from revealing this season’s most interesting plotlines, like the event that tests BJ and Judy’s marriage (and its bizarre remedy, outlandish to most but in keeping with the Gemstones’ baseline lunacy), the name or onscreen identity of the Oscar-nominated actor who reveals key aspects of the Gemstones’ history, nor the unexpected events of the last two episodes. But what I can tell you is that this season, more than any other, serves as a thesis statement for writer, director, producer, and creator Danny McBride’s view of American institutions.
In “Vice Principals,” McBride inspected the power-hungry everyday people who, unable to find other work, have turned to terrorizing children at school. “Eastbound and Down” probed the bleak nature of fame. But “The Righteous Gemstones” does something even more intriguing in analyzing the American church. It asks questions about the reaches of man’s close-mindedness, the expanse and limits of God’s forgiveness, and the odds of someone truly awful looking in the mirror and wondering if they could change. Dark subjects—the loss of a beloved parent/partner, unprocessed grief, workaholism, the impact of an abusive parent and an ugly divorce on a son in both childhood and adulthood, internalized homophobia, finding love later in life, and most importantly of all, insecurity—are given fresh contexts, exaggerated beyond the point most would consider rational on television. If a friend or relative came to you and revealed one or more of the aforementioned troubles, you’d likely express empathy, and maybe try to help or offer words of comfort. What, if anything, would you do for spoiled, hedonistic, crude evangelicals suffering from the same agonies?
There are multiple interpretations of McBride’s work. Yes, you can watch “The Righteous Gemstones” and think the titular family is worthy of being a source of comedy and nothing more. You can watch it and think McBride is proposing that a different, better kind of person should be in charge of mall-sized churches. You could watch it just for Richard Wright’s excellent production design and Christina Flannery’s dynamite costumes. But there’s no way you’ll not laugh. This is a series that features some of the best insults since “Veep” went off the air, and it’s not because the words themselves are particularly dense—it’s because the actors delivering them know when to pause, when to let loose, when to jerk their bodies forward to menace their target, when to reel back in shame. Patterson, in particular, does a near-flawless job as a woman who spews filth with breathless abandon to compensate for the hole in her heart.
The Uncle Baby Billy fan club need not fear. Walton Goggins is back in style, bedecked in garish silk suits and sunglasses that are wholly disproportionate to the size of his face. The success of Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers—a Biblical knowledge ripoff of “Family Feud”—has gone to his head, and terrified of what the age gap between him and his wife Tiffany (Valyn Hall) means for his mortality, Baby Billy pours his energy into coming up with more Christian TV/film programming, including a screenplay about the life of an adolescent Jesus of Nazareth, first titled “Teen Jesus”; unsatisfied, he renames it “Teenjus.” Fed up with the performances of his young lead actor, Baby Billy casts himself in the film, and the sight of Walton Goggins having a dance off with Roman guards is sheer comedic brilliance. But like any role inhabited by TV’s best complex actor, Goggins shades his performance with boorishness (yelling at his family’s German nanny), genuine fear of the day he is no longer able to provide, and melancholy.
There is no shortage of American television. There is, however, a shortage of wholly original American television. Danny McBride stands apart from the herd. Having left Los Angeles for Charleston, where he set up a sort of comedy commune with his wife and children, and the families of longtime collaborators like Jody Hill and David Gordon Green, McBride’s love of filmmaking is apparent in all that he does. His appetite for literature is clear in his richly textured view of American history, and how it leads to venal monsters attaining power; his consumption of reality television is evident in his observation of base human desires and actions. Plus, it’s a pleasure to see someone clearly pushing their studio’s buttons with budgetary and production demands; season three ended with a storm of locusts and monster trucks repeatedly crushing elaborate tableaux. Season four is by no means perfect. At various points the different branches of stories feel a bit disjointed, and it’s clear the shooting schedules of various cast members prevented them from being in scenes that feature an ensemble. But it doesn’t matter. “The Righteous Gemstones” is funny, wry, clever, disgusting, moving, shocking, and endearing in ways that are purely aspirational for most comedies on TV, and I’m sorry to say goodbye to it. To paraphrase Rick Blaine, we’ll always have “Misbehavin’.”
Whole season screened for review. Premieres Sunday, March 9th.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/eMNALuB
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