Julia Roberts' column: the stylish mystery of Amazon

The best way to test a director is to give them a scene where two people are chatting in a room. We have trained a generation of technocratic filmmakers, who are adept at selling expensive sets and accounting for viscosity. Consider, like Damien Chazelle First man, the mounting of the battery is meticulous, the camera so fluid that it is biological, an undulating soundtrack that deserves to be called "audioscape". This is the definition of "meticulous" and it is located in a meticulous version of the 1960s where no one ever says anything interesting. In the meantime, there have never been so many authors with so many profound ideas about how to make the fight appear real cool. But capturing the fine arts of conversation requires more tips, or the kind of skills that we should not have to consider the old fashioned way.

Before working on Amazon Prime Back home, Sam Esmail created Mr. Robot, and transformed the drama of the American network into a showcase of its stylistic evolution. He made 25 of his 32 episodes. The series had ups and downs, secret parents, a solid karaoke. But to watch Esmail develop his sensibility was one of the great cinephiliary joys of this televised decade. Last year he had a captivating hour of action in real time, a stealth mode adventure through an apocalyptic office building shot in a single captivating take.

Back home is something else. The series is buzzing with paranoia and thrills, with a RobotThere is mistrust of almost everything. His first season has ten episodes and Esmail leads each one of them. But the material, adapted by the creators Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz from their own successful podcast, is essentially a sequence of face-to-face conversations, with different questioners asking different questions to people who did not want to give away their stories. answers. (Full disclosure: I've worked with Horowitz over the last decade at McSweeney's Publishing, but if you consider there might be a bias, I'll admit that I did not know he would have created a successful podcast.) Back home It's a mystery that it's almost impossible to argue without spoiling the fun. And Esmail finds visual strategies that direct you to a perpetual discomfort. The dialogue takes place in strange close-ups, sometimes with aerial views of God. A job interview is filmed as a satanic inquisition. Every time two people talk to each other, one person is lying, and that's an optimistic guess.

The series begins with the veteran of the army, Walter Cruz (Stephan James), who enters the office of Heidi Bergman (Julia Roberts), a counselor who works for Homecoming, a company dedicated to helping soldiers rehabilitate to their traumatic experiences. They talk about Walter's days at war. Their conversation is medicinal, perhaps. Or maybe not. The Homecoming facility is brand new, an office complex turned into a rehab dormitory. Craig (Alex Karpovsky), colleague of Heidi, organizes the improvisation games of the soldiers. Heidi's boss, Colin (Bobby Cannavale), calls him every hour to ask for elusive data. Esmail films their interlocutors on a split screen, their voices in audio fuzz, as if we were listening to a recording of their conversation. (Who else is listening?)

Something very strange is happening. Or rather, "What was happening." The first episode tells us another scenario, a dark future for Heidi's career prospects. Now she's a waitress in a crabhouse-like restaurant next to the world's busiest marina.

In Homecoming, Heidi is presented as a white-collar executive citizen, his own OCD office. How could she end up pouring coffee into her hometown? This is a question that Thomas Carrasco (Shea Whigham), an employee of the Ministry of Defense, may want to ask him. Carrasco comes to the dinner during an official inquiry into the homecoming, dropping the name "Walter Cruz". Heidi pushes him away. (What is she hiding, who is she hiding from?) In the present moment, the picture format is changing from the rectangular widescreen to the Academy. The drama motivates the gadget: the screen squeezes Heidi like a wall that closes.

The main title here is that Roberts does a television show, although "What is television?" And "What happened to the movies?" Are questions that must torment any movie star hit by fame before cinematographic universes and True detective. Initially, Roberts actually has the least brilliant role Back home. Cannavale makes an exuberant huckster, the kind of guy who sells stolen watches or secured debt. James (soon visible in the buzzy If Beale Street could speak) made Walter our entry point every time he's talkative, talkative in a sad way, telling great stories about strange days in war zones.

Whigham is one of the best TV performances of the year. He has been a great supportive actor in a bit of everything, the Marvel Universe and the Furious universe, hard enough to play some kind of police in Fargo and Narcos, awesome enough to play the most handsome guy from Deputy Directors. Some elements of the sinuous plot turn almost Back home in the long-awaited Shea Whigham starring vehicle, although a wonder of his performance is how calm he is, how obviously he creates confusion and obsession as a clerk.

Roberts is more like Back home deepens our understanding of Heidi's curious position. It's almost a double role, with a lot of ambiguity seemsis marking it with every movement. Heidi passed seems to unveil the mysterious plot of his company. Future heidi seems to hide from the riddles that we can not quite understand. (The two Heidis are wearing the same awful wig, with a deep fringe that seems geared toward normalizing the power of Roberts' stars.) Behind his cool exterior, Heidi is desperate, a lucky last guy who feels almost abandoned by the world. Roberts catches strange expectations of hope and malevolence, and even this strange dissonance does not look like what later episodes ask him to do. This is her most interesting role in a long time, her devastation has been quieter than anything she has played since 2004 Closer.

It's one of those shows where you immediately realize that a lot of truth is being withheld. It's also the kind of show where, once all the questions have been resolved, some truths are more convincing than others. But Back home finds a good balance between character deepening and double inversion cliffhangers changes. Along with the growing paranoia, there are playful changes of tone, flirting, smart song choices, humorous birds. We are miles away from the sadness of the latest mysteries of television such as HBO's Sharp objects or the most German of Netflix Dark. And every Back home The episode lasts about half an hour, a performance without carbs that is particularly rewarding after recent trends in streaming.

Amazon has already ordered a second season. I mean as a huge compliment that after watching the final of the season, I have absolutely no idea what Season 2 might look like. Some of the later turns of the plot feel unnatural, narrative dominoes collapse with too easy simplicity. There is an important revelation that requires a character to randomly spot another character in a window overlooking a yard. But there is also a serious objective here. The Horowitz and Bloomberg stories echo the wrath of public and private sector malfeasance, the satirical fear of our dystopian present, and the unmistakable sadness of how society treats our emotionally wounded warriors. I guess all or part of that was present in the original podcast, which I did not listen to.

What I know is that Esmail collaborated with the creators to recreate their audio adventure in visual pleasure, filled with intelligent performance and persistent discomfort. For all his camera angles Hitchcock-y and Lost-y double flip of the plot, Back home is a freakout too human. One of the scariest pictures I've seen on television this year is just a late-season portrait of James's smiling face. A-

The first full season of Back home launches November 2 on Amazon Prime.