BOARDWALKING THE LINE

Our shoes let out a lot more about ourselves than we can possibly fathom. Apart from the sartorial dimension, they are often a barometer of the importance we attach to details. Going by such macroscopic standards, Enoch Thompson (played by Steve Buscemi) comes across as a meticulous influence in Boardwalk Empire. His control over the movers and power-wielders of New Jersey is, like the stitch work on his shoes, impeccable. As Treasurer of the District Council, Nucky (as he is called) holds the strings, however knotted they may be, and makes no bones about it – except to a certain widow called Mrs. Schroeder, while gleefully immersing the boardwalk into glut.

Deriving its plot from a book by the same name, Boardwalk treads where most TV shows always loathe going – the delectable wholesomeness of cinema. Every episode is a show reel in itself, often without the dangling bait of events that promise to be resolved after the interval, or the next time around. It manages to keep you hooked without having to resort to any of those banalities of keeping the audience on tenterhooks. Terence Winter’s screenplay is blatant in this regard, for it has the temerity to be semantically absolute in its 12 parts. Perhaps, the storyline is a little convoluted but then most games involving nepotism and brinksmanship tend to follow a congruent pattern. 

To call it film noir would be stretching the premise for the story eulogizes the timeline it is set in. It is 1920, the eve of Prohibition and a surging tide around the US to grant women the right to cast their vote. The intricate re-imagining of a pre-Depression, pre-Reagan and a pre-Martin Luther King life is hugely commendable, and undoubtedly one of the better examples in TV production. Whether it is the flagrant distribution of Klu Klux Klan pamphlets along the nook and corners of the Boardwalk or the portrayal of an ambitious African-American distiller of whisky who trades complicity to a wrongdoing for upward social mobility – the insights into the period are peerless. At a particular point in the tale, a Senator asks for Pimm’s Cup, a very popular alternative to champagne back in the 1920s. (Now of course, the brand manufactures vodka while having phased out other forms of liqueur) And Nucky, despite having planned his surprise birthday celebrations to the exact tone of the gasp at being caught unawares, fails to oblige.

Another anachronistic entity is the household of James (played by Michael Pitt), a Princeton-educated veteran of the First World War still struggling to make sense of the equilibrium in his surroundings, as he chaperones Nucky around. His mother, still in the threshold of her hormones, is a cabaret dancer who got impregnated at 13 by Nucky’s erstwhile mentor. Despite having a detached wife, James tries his level best to give his son a stable upbringing. He realizes that he is a mere foot soldier in Nucky’s murkier scheme of things, yet he continues more out a sense of desolation and filial obligation. The wife, as is revealed later, turns out to be a closet lesbian who finds herself and her paintings moored by the swagger-stricken tides of Atlantic City. Her philandering with a photographer’s wife and their edginess to sail away to Paris heralds the post-WW I global dynamics further when the French capital emerged as the emancipated beacon of all things liberal and nouveau, be it art, architecture or sexuality.

Carnal excesses, of course, abound in the silver-clad gatherings of the power-mongers, together with baroque tunes resonating from upheld turntables, punctuated by burlesque stage performers. It is in this background that witnesses are gunned down, cops are bribed and Christ-fearing Federal agents have their first swigs of whisky. Prohibition may have been imposed on the surface, but those with the means and the ends to pay more hardly find that an impediment. Nucky Thompson explores this anomaly and scrubs the golden vessel inside out. For a man of his calibre and rank, Nucky is much too reasonable, even compromising and rather keen to avoid bloodshed. His demarcation of personal probity and business begins to diminish with the growing charms of Mrs. Schroeder. This makes him prone to damage from his detractors and enemies – individuals who, Nucky very well knows, can be bought over with offerings straight after their respective hearts.

By the end of the season, Mrs. Schroeder (played by Kelly MacDonald) too winds up as one of those detractors who find his influence too tempting to resist, both for herself and her kids. She is introduced well, as one of those transposed characters whose sense of righteousness seems fated to wreck her heart. A member of the Female Temperance league, she ends up consorting with the kingpin of the city’s illicit liquor trade (Nucky). By choosing to remain his paramour, she becomes an accomplice in the objectification of her own kind, a cause that her own organization strongly seeks to do away with.

The humour seems prophetic most of the time, especially during political speeches which are characteristically loquacious, despite being peppered with hollow truisms. There is an instance where Nucky asks his Man Friday what ‘motherf****r’, one of the cult words of our age, means. Then there is of course the gravitational pull of the jaws when a stout, short chap removes his cap with a hint of derision, stretches out his hefty hand and introduces himself as Al Capone. This kind of attention to sculpting every detail is quintessentially Scorsese. And perhaps, it is this patchwork of precision that gives Boardwalk a distinctively cinematic tint. Even the opening credits roll, with the boisterous waves and the buoyant Canadian whisky bottles, is one of the most visually stimulating of its kind in contemporary TV (at par with Dexter and Weeds). Even there, it is Nucky’s pair of suede shoes that occupies the locus of interest, much like a prima donna at one of his casinos.

So far, so good. Let us hope it withstands the recurring curse of dull second seasons.