The baggage of a trendy New York Metropolis boy of fourteen has been despatched to the flawed vacation spot. The airline might as effectively have run off with one in every of his limbs. Within the pilot of Luca Guadagnino’s HBO drama, “We Are Who We Are,” Fraser Wilson, performed by Jack Dylan Grazer, is already jumpy, in designer leopard-print fleece shorts, however now his conduct builds to a tantrum in an Italian airport, as he combs his painted nails by a lock of bleached hair. His mom, Sarah (Chloë Sevigny), and her spouse, Maggie (Alice Braga), are vaguely embarrassed however unfazed. Sarah, figuring out her son, nurses him with the nip of alcohol he calls for. “Thanks, Mommy,” he says.
Ought to we be disturbed? A viewer would possibly prepared herself for a examine of the out-of-control American male. Fraser, withdrawn and pouty, strikes with an exaggerated bodily unease. There’s something unnerving about him, the way in which he digs his soiled fingers right into a cake given to his household as a welcome to their new Italian dwelling, and leans towards a wall at his new highschool, mouth half open, surreptitiously photographing one other pupil. The item of his curiosity, Caitlin Poythress (Jordan Kristine Seamón), shoots him a figuring out look—and, in that teasing second, the true topic of “We Are Who We Are” comes into focus.
Guadagnino’s affecting adaptation of André Aciman’s homosexual coming-of-age love story, “Call Me by Your Name,” made him an unlikely favourite amongst American teenagers, and his first foray into tv revisits equally languorous terrain. Like Timothée Chalamet’s Elio, Fraser is filmed with an elegiac appreciation for his youthful, gangly limbs and pale pores and skin. Guadagnino, a location fetishist, has set “We Are Who We Are” on a U.S. Military base in Chioggia, the place Sarah has been named commander. It’s each America and never. The yr is 2016; at instances, we glimpse, on tv screens in cafeterias and dwelling rooms, information experiences of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the marketing campaign path. However the first 4 episodes of the collection show an nearly swaggering lack of curiosity in army politics. As an alternative, the sun-drenched grounds of the bottom—a zone directly foreboding, charmed, and buzzing with intercourse—are a metaphor for the predicament of the American teen-agers who reside there with their dad and mom.
The present is thinly plotted. Gulfs of silence open between characters, punctuated by clipped, sweetly evasive dialogue; an excessive amount of chatter would spoil the environment of discovery and experimentation. The opening episodes are a garland of quick ballets during which the younger actors plunge into the ocean, strap themselves into harnesses for a verboten activate the bottom’s zip line, and embellish each other with paintball weapons. A scene in a discoteca remembers the same melancholic night time in “Name Me by Your Title.” The eye to younger our bodies feels nearly harmful; the matriarchal presence of Chloë Sevigny, who made her début in Larry Clark’s unsettling 1995 movie, “Children,” is becoming. In a single sequence, Caitlin quietly reads a guide whereas, within the background, we hear a gaggle of troopers laughingly talk about what appears to have been a gang rape.
Guadagnino’s luxurious tastes fold naturally into the obsessions of Fraser, who, removed from dwelling, doubles down on his identification as an aesthete. When his misplaced baggage lastly arrives, he screws up his face in frantic pleasure on the sight of his garments. The classical-inspired rating, by Dev Hynes, rustling with wind devices and synth, is so hip that it hurts. In a single scene, which roils with tender, unstated kink, a younger soldier on the base library commends Fraser for selecting a group of poetry by Ocean Vuong.
Fraser finds a kindred spirit in Caitlin, who, after asking whether or not he had a girlfriend again in New York, instantly calls him out on his lie. She has her personal secret. Grazer and Seamón are beautiful to look at as their characters enter what appears to be a platonic relationship premised on their mild recognition of one another’s nascent queerness. The terrain of the present expands, within the second episode, to rethink Fraser’s first days on the bottom from the angle of Caitlin, the daughter of Richard (Scott Mescudi, a.okay.a. Child Cudi), a brooding army man, and Jenny (Religion Alabi), a Nigerian-American who eases her homesickness by watching Chicago climate experiences. Caitlin frequents a bar on the town, the place she hides her lengthy hair underneath a cap and deepens her voice. Fraser tends to her self-discovery, sending her packages of males’s garments. When he tells her what “transgender” means, she is at first confused after which awed. The opposite youngsters, unable to understand the intimacy between the 2, dismiss them as lovers.
The writing of this relationship is spare however assured; in contrast, the secondary story traces are typically attenuated. As a commander, Sarah is enigmatic, charismatic, and a bit clean; as a mom, she is needy and desirous. At one level, Fraser slaps her; one other time, after she by accident cuts herself whereas opening a transferring field, he tends to her wound by sucking on it. What are we to make of this Freudian depth? Race performs a job within the collection, too, albeit a well-recognized one. I felt queasy concerning the characterizations of Richard and his son, Danny (Spence Moore II), as repressed and indignant.
The fourth episode, a contemporary twist on an age-old wartime plot, options an unexpectedly transferring bacchanal. The strapping teen-ager Craig (Corey Knight), Danny’s greatest good friend, has not too long ago joined the Military. On the final day earlier than his deployment, he impulsively asks a neighborhood Italian lady, Valentina (Beatrice Barichella), to marry him, and she or he accepts. Fraser delights in dressing the boys in keeping with the marriage’s theme, though he pretends to be aggravated: “How do you count on me to drag off this stage of Hawaiian-ness on such quick discover?” A minister on the base conducts the nuptials, earlier than the youngsters break into the villa of a wealthy Russian on the town, wrecking the place and, underneath purple lights, drunkenly grinding on each other. It’s a transportive panorama of sexual exploration, frank however not caustic, voyeuristic however not leering, harmless and provocative. “Yo, I don’t even know how you can dance to this, man,” Danny murmurs, as Frank Ocean’s “Nikes” performs. “Hey,” Craig says, encouraging his good friend. “That is my marriage ceremony.” Danny heeds him; in any case, his good friend might be gone within the morning.
One other interval piece débuting this month is, in contrast, a regurgitation of an American nightmare. In Showtime’s two-part collection “The Comey Rule,” primarily based on the previous F.B.I. director James Comey’s 2018 memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” and written and directed by Billy Ray, loyalty is a part of the issue. The present is an ornate desk learn of the guide. It follows Comey as he belatedly realizes the ramifications of his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and makes an attempt to do his job underneath the brand new President, who, over a shrimp dinner on the White Home, within the collection’ climactic scene, calls for, sure, his loyalty.
The chief irritant of the present is the knee-jerk splicing of the dramatic motion with cable-news footage documenting Comey’s no-good, very unhealthy time within the Administration. (As Stephen Colbert says in a single clip, “I simply don’t know what to consider James Comey. First, he looks as if the nice man, then he looks as if the unhealthy man.”) The approach, apparently meant to convey the present’s constancy to actual life, finally ends up feeling like a failure of creativeness. Quite than letting free a bit, crafting an unique psychological portrait of this inscrutable, high-ranking functionary, Ray provides us a collection of labored impressions. There’s Jeff Daniels as Comey, a true-blue bureaucrat who would by no means consider skipping the road on the workplace cafeteria, and who says issues to his spouse like “Tracy, I wished to cease the unhealthy guys”; Kingsley Ben-Adir’s robotic Barack Obama; and Holly Hunter’s erect Sally Yates, Food regimen Coke in hand. The record goes, nearly interminably, on. Brendan Gleeson’s completely ridiculous Donald Trump, carried out down an octave, is arguably the strongest efficiency for being much less oppressively correct. Even when Comey stars in his personal drama, he’s outdone. ♦
