Enlighten Up

Jonathan Demme has served as director on episodes of two TV series this fall. A Gifted Man, which lists him as one of the executive producers, is typical of recent Demme: smooth, glossy, insultingly contrived, and overflowing with good intentions and kind vibes. If you tried eating popcorn with it, it would taste like granola. Enlightened, Mike White's HBO vehicle for Laura Dern, is more like early Demme, the stuff he was doing in the '80s that made me want to take a bullet for him, and Demme's recent episode, "Sandy", was a standout chapter in the series so far. Dern's character, a former drug user and unstable basket case who is now trying not to just to put her life back together but to become a "good person" and useful member of society, got a visit from a friend she made in group therapy while she was in rehab (Robin Wright). Dern's character is also trying to find a place in her life for her ex-husband (Luke Wilson), without directly addressing the fact that she still has feelings for him, and when Wright stays over at Wilson's, all this stuff comes bubbling up that she can't deal with gracefully.

What links this episode, and Mike White's work in general, with Demme films such as Melvin and Howard and Something Wild, is its genuine interest in people who are far outside the mainstream of American life, and its ability to see the comedy in their lives without holding them up to ridicule. (Economically speaking, people like Melvin Dummar are closer to the mainstream of American life than they were when Demme made a movie about Dummar's life, not to mention when Dummar was living it. Dern's character works at a big company, but after her public meltdown, she's been shifted to an underground lair that's basically a holding pen for people the company doesn't want seen on the premises but who it isn't sure it can fire with impunity.) I'm a fan of White's, though I confess that his compassion for the weird, self-serving characters in his scripts for Chuck & Buck (starring White himself) and The Good Girl (both directed by Miguel Arteta) seemed so unusual when I first saw them that I wasn't sure the movies weren't really condescending towards them; it wasn't until White directed his own script for Year of the Dog (starring Molly Shannon, in the performance of her life, as a lonely corporate drone whose life is gradually changed, upended, and finally redeemed by her feeling for animals) that I fully got on his wavelength.

White provides his lead performers (who have mostly been actresses, when they haven't been himself or Jack Black) with tremendous opportunities, and he and Laura Dern are made for each other. But despite some great reviews, Enlightened has apparently turned out to be a hard sell; the crowd at Entertainment Weekly has practically started taking up a collection so it can keep its heat turned on through the winter. It's about my favorite half-hour of TV these days, and I regard it not just as a great show in its own right but as a welcome antidote to all the King of Comedy/Burn After Reading-style sludgefests out there that amount to creating a character or group of characters as stupid and repugnant as possible, for no apparent reason except that they're easy to both create and jeer at, as if the world were so lacking in people you can easily feel superior to that there were an urgent need to make some up. This has not been my experience.