Patrick Melrose - Mother’s Milk
Okay, so I’ve been following the Patrick Melrose series as Benedict Cumberbatch careens drunkenly from one episode to the next. I have to say, I’m confused about WHY Mr. Cumberbatch was so taken with these books that he HAD to make this mini-series.
Okay. I just have to say something about some of these points, because I do think that several of the ideas it expresses and has elicited from commenters are missing at least part of the point here.
1. It’s a cultural thing. I’ve seen several people say things along the lines of “maybe you have to be British to understand (whatever), but….” To that, I have to say, YES, maybe you do. Maybe it bears remembering that, common language aside, this is actually a different culture, one which has been poignantly and rather dreadfully marked by class warfare. To understand it first means needing to get inside an understanding of that culture at a deeper level. A lot of pop culture things are extremely America-centric. This isn’t one of them. And that’s okay.
2. Morality is not the point of acting. I’ve seen several comments asking what the overall “message” or “point” of this story and/or character is, and in my view, that’s just not the right question to be asking. Not everything is about a moral point, or conveying a specific message. Acting is, simply point, the art form of telling a story by living it out. Does every story have a moral message? No. Some stories are just - stories. And that’s okay, too. It’s also okay not to like that story, but to not like it specifically because it doesn’t hammer home some sort of moral message isn’t really fair. In my view, that’s a rather specifically puritannical demand to be making of any art. It’s like asking what Monet’s Waterlilies “means”. It doesn’t “mean” anything: it’s just waterlilies. Patrick Melrose is just a story about a man. If anything, it’s about an author working out his own traumatic experiences and his rather tragic life choices through his own creation. Again, it’s fine not to like it, but to fault it for not existing specifically to teach a lesson of some sort is a flawed critique, in my view.
Actors choose to play characters generally because they find the character interesting, compelling, because it would challenge them to live another person (real or fictional)’s experience in ways that would stretch them. It’s not about teaching the audience something, necessarily. Some of Benedict’s projects have had a secondary point along those lines, such as shedding light on Alan Turing’s historical contributions and the injustice of the way his own country “thanked” him for it, and he spent a lot of time talking about that in the press junket for that film. But as an actor, that’s very likely not the first priority he had in mind when choosing the role. As a (former) opera singer, I always went for roles and characters that I found interesting, and they were most frequently not good people. (In opera, voice types and character types generally go together, and my type is generally strong, often destructive women - goddesses, valkyries, queens, nobility - women who self-destruct or are destroyed by others, etc). I chose them because playing that kind of thing is fun. It’s an outlet to live out something that hopefully you don’t do in your own life. Again, if there’s a life lesson for the audience to take away, that’s sort of a side bonus, not the main point.
As to Benedict himself, in choosing this role, I fully disagree with the comments I’ve seen that claim that he essentially is the same sort of class as Patrick Melrose. Patrick speaks with a different (higher class) accent than Benedict does, and his family’s finances are not comparable with the Carlton/Ventham household’s when Benedict was growing up. It’s true that he went to public (private, to North American ears) schools and such, but his parents are pretty frank about how they scrimped and saved to be able to send him to places like that. He may have become wealthy through his adult success, but he didn’t grow up in the same circles at all, and while it may look similar from the perspective of another culture, it’s not the same thing, and in the UK that still is a BIG difference. It’s definitely true that he was privileged, but these aren’t the same social strata.
3. About the story itself: I’m reading the novels right now, and while I find them bleak, I also find them completely compelling. The roving narrator irks me, but the prose is rather beautiful. Then again, I also adore dystopia, so bleak is not a strike against these novels for me. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but again, not being a fan of the genre or content is not a strike against the show’s quality. This is a general distinction that I find people, in the fandom and out, tend to fail to make. “You wrote this and I don’t like that kind of thing; therefore this is a bad quality story” is a flawed and unfair argument. Just to be clear, I’m not just talking about your post specifically, @alexxphoenix42; I’m also talking to and about a lot of the comments and asks I’ve been seeing in response to it. I agree that this is difficult material to watch. It’s meant to be: Edward St. Aubyn clearly had a really difficult, painful life, and one of the ways people deal with trauma like his are by trying to express it through art and writing and music. I find his expression of it painful, yet utterly compelling. It’s also a story about addictions and how incredibly difficult they are to overcome, especially when the underlying issues behind them haven’t been adequately dealt with. If we’re going to discuss morality, then I don’t think that they’ve glamorized Patrick’s behaviour in any way at all: if anything, I see them drawing incredibly clear parallels between the damage his father inflicted on him, and the damage his behaviour is inflicting on his own son. He’s definitely not coping with it well, and it’s painful to watch a man spiral out of control the way he was in this episode. He’s not meant to be an entirely sympathetic character: he’s meant to be a real person.
Just to summarize these very long comments (apologies!), I feel that the better questions to be asking of the series are more like this: is this character realistic? Is he being well portrayed? Is the story interesting? Is the cinematography good? Is the casting/acting good? Does it hold my attention? Does it make me feel something? Is it a good page-to-screen adaptation (if you’ve read the books)? @alexxphoenix42, I hope you don’t mind my comments? (You did invite other perspectives!) To sum up, I do very much think that it’s a well-made show, that the acting is brilliant, that the source material is compelling, and from an acting perspective I can absolutely see why Benedict might have wanted to play this character. But it’s not comfortable to watch, that’s for sure. I watch it to watch his range, and the story hooks me and pulls me into its despair. I can absolutely grant that it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea! I’m going to go and find something lighter to read before turning in, but I also can’t wait for the final installment. To each their own, of course, but there are my (five) cents! I’m very much open to discussing any of this with anyone, though it should be noted that I don’t accept anonymous asks and I will unhesitatingly ignore and delete mindless hate speech on the subject of Benedict. :)
Yes to all this, especially the first point made by @silentauroriamthereal: I too read many people saying that they struggle to understand the kind of society narrated in Patrick Melrose, and if you come from a different background I understand your struggle. I especially understand why someone who is from “The Land of opportunity” is confused by Patrick’s destructive behaviour and the waste of the opportunities he has had in life (but -spoiler-ish- wait for the last episode, At last). But, as an European, I am not and what’s is narrated on screen is perfectly understandable to me, I feel the tragedy of a man who fights all his life to get free from the chains of abuse of his crazy parents but in the end he traces their steps and fall in the same mistakes. I feel so strong that kind of tragedy. There’s an Italian novelist, Giovanni Verga, that has this same concept, that is, that the characters are trapped in a circle (of class, society, poverty) that they can’t break. It’s so famous that it has its own name, Verghian determinism (and you can find traces of the same philosophy in different authors, such as Kenzaburo Oe and his The silent cry). This is what we study at school, this is a part of the European culture and yes, I understand why you’re confused by it, but you have to understand that it’s not like that for everyone: the European reception of Patrick Melrose is enthusiast. And about the humour… yes, I also see it. I know that this probably makes a horrible person of me, but humour is not always laughing out aloud for a gag. Brit black humour is more like… idk… a man going to the funeral of his brother, he has a heart attack and he dies, too. It’s he sense of the grotesque that makes the situation funny to me. And Melrose is grotesque (I think that Ben is referring to this, talking about “terrible humour”). Is Patrick Melrose a positive, likeable character? I’d say no. But, is it a challenging character? Yes, he is. So I see why Ben was so eager to portray him. It’s not mandatory that every story or every character has a moral (positive or negative or whatever) simply because not always life has a moral. If an ordinary man crashes with his car against a tree and dies, there’s no moral in it, and yet you can write a book or make a movie about it. If there’s a movie about a serial killer that chops his victims with a chainsaw and buried them in the desert and he’s never discovered by police, there’s no moral behind it, the main character is a disgusting human being, but for an actor I think it could be a challenging character to play, and I imagine that an actor want this. And, if I may, even the constant search for morality, it’s a U.S. think. Mine it’s not a critic, I’m not saying that it’s a negative attitude, I’m just saying that not everyone feel the same need for it.
Wonderful and perfect additions. Thank you so much.