In an episode of the new HBO miniseries Task, Pennsylvania garbageman Robbie (Tom Pelphrey) briefly takes hostage one of the members of the law-enforcement task force that’s been chasing him for his side gig robbing drug stash houses. After getting to know his prisoner a bit, Robbie laments, “I’ve kidnapped the most depressing human.”
The thing is, there’s no shortage of Task characters who could make a claim for that title. Created by Brad Ingelsby, who already gave us the incredibly grim — if often excellent — 2021 Emmy winner Mare of Easttown, it’s another dark wallow full of sad characters with few prospects for emotional health, most of them assaulting the audience’s eardrums with the long-O sounds of the Delco accent. Like Mare, there are things to admire here, including the performances of Pelphrey, Mark Ruffalo, Emilia Jones, and others, plus a plot that grows more propulsive as the seven episodes move along. But it’s somehow even more dour than Mare, which at least offered occasional respites of lightness from some of its supporting characters (notably Jean Smart as Mare’s mom), as well as highly memeable glimpses of Kate Winslet going to town on hoagies. It wouldn’t be an Ingelsby show without at least one character enthusiastically devouring the local cuisine, but that job here falls to Martha Plimpton in a relatively small role as Kathleen, the FBI supervisor who sets up the task force that pursues Robbie and his partners.
Tom (Ruffalo), the leader of the task force and co-protagonist with Robbie, also downs a hoagie at one point. But it’s in no way charming, because he’s such a black hole of misery and grief that all light vanishes whenever it tries to get close to him. Like Mare, he has suffered a devastating family loss in the not-too-distant past, and like her has to wrestle with guilt over whether he failed to provide enough help to his emotionally troubled son. Once upon a time, he was a priest, who became an FBI agent almost by accident. But his recent Book of Job-like streak of bad luck has erased any belief he once had in God.
Ruffalo is one of the greatest actors of his generation, and has several opportunities to demonstrate that in Task, particularly in the final episode. But he and Ingelsby are a dangerous combination. Ingelsby scripts like Mare or the Ben Affleck alcoholism film The Way Back are fundamentally solemn, even if they offer hope for their characters near the end. And while Ruffalo has solid comedy chops (demonstrated throughout much of his time playing Bruce Banner in the MCU), he has a weakness for bleak material, like his Emmy-winning turn in HBO’s 2020 slog of a miniseries I Know This Much Is True. Put those two together, and it’s a feedback loop of gloominess, that turns the process of watching early episodes feel like trying to walk up a muddy hill in the middle of a downpour.
The setup for the story has an uncanny similarity with Apple’s recent Dope Thief miniseries that starred Brian Tyree Henry(*): Two buddies (in this case, Robbie and Cliff, played by Raúl Castillo) have an inside source feeding them info on stash houses they can rob, and a caper where they bring in a third man leaves an unexpected body count, plus a much bigger and more dangerous score than either partner was expecting.
(*) Dope Thief had its own issues, running out of narrative steam well before its finale. But at least it made room for weird humor and other surprises along the margins of its story.
But the focus here is split between what Robbie is doing — including asking his dead brother’s daughter Maeve (Emilia Jones from CODA) to raise the kids he had with his ex — and Tom reluctantly taking the lead on a task force that seems unlikely to accomplish much, given its scope and lack of institutional support. Tom’s three partners are Anthony (Fabien Frankel from House of the Dragon), Lizzie (Alison Oliver from Conversations with Friends), and Aleah (Thuso Mbedu from The Underground Railroad). All come with some baggage, though the only obvious problem at first is that Lizzie is wildly distracted while going through a divorce(*). Because Robbie’s crew is targeting other criminals — all of them members of a biker gang led by Jayson (Sam Keeley) and Perry (Jamie McShane) — their work is a relatively low priority for law enforcement at first. But when innocents get dragged into the mess Robbie has created, the task force becomes more important than any of its members appear ready to handle.
(*) All are also played by international actors having varying degrees of success at the different regional dialects they’re attempting. Even the great Winslet struggled to sound like she was from the area in Mare. Maybe Ingelsby can set his next crime story elsewhere, just to see if actors from Australia and Croatia can sound like they were born in Wisconsin?
Pelphry in Delco mode as Robbie.
Peter Kramer/HBO
The early episodes move very slowly. And because Tom is both reluctant to return to active duty and wrestling with family trauma, those chapters are carried largely by the charisma of Pelphrey, who’s been doing scene-stealing supporting work for years in shows like Ozark and here proves more than capable of taking the lead. Robbie tries to act like an eternal optimist despite a long streak of tragedy, but it’s clear that his rage is always lurking just below the surface, and lord help anyone near him whenever it gets out. Jones is terrific as a young woman forced to grow up much too soon, who is running out of patience having to constantly clean up her uncle’s many messes, and McShane pops off the screen in a smaller role as a character whose anger is even less controlled than Robbie’s.
Ingelsby takes his sweet time answering various questions introduced early on, like what exactly happened with Tom’s family, and who is feeding Robbie and Cliff intel on the gang’s drug trade. But the narrative isn’t complex enough to sustain seven episodes, and it’s not until all the storylines start to converge in the fifth hour that Task gains any real momentum.
That said, just as Mare came together satisfyingly in the end, the last three episodes of Task are very strong as both suspense and character studies. And in the finale, Mark Ruffalo has a scene in a courthouse that reminds you why he was compared to a young Brando in his breakout role in the 2000 gem You Can Count on Me, as one half of a pair of adult siblings who have never quite recovered from the childhood loss of both parents. When he’s locked in and the material is right, nobody’s better.
But You Can Count on Me, Zodiac, and many of the other projects Ruffalo has appeared in that feature sad backstories, or present-day darkness and violence, still come with at least a little tonal variation of the kind to which Ingelsby seems allergic. (Zodiac is among the most unnerving movies ever made, but it also has a running gag about Ruffalo’s character loving to eat animal crackers.) It’s possible to tell dark stories about people in terrible situations without making the audience feel like they’re being punished for even thinking about queuing up the episode. In both these HBO projects, Ingelsby and his collaborators do so many things well, it’s frustrating that they can’t ease up just a little on both their characters and the audience watching them.
Before an early heist, Robbie plays peaceful music in the car, explaining to one of his buddies that he finds it “transportative,” because it “takes you away from your reality, puts you in another.” Robbie dreams of living in places with white sand beaches, or perhaps a bucolic island in Canada, and the music takes him there. Task is transportative, too, but it will take many viewers to a less pleasant place than they may want to spend seven hours visiting.
Task premieres Sept. 7 on HBO and HBO Max, with episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all seven episodes.
Source link
