‘American Gigolo’ review: Jon Bernthal is a bad date TV adaptation

Paul Schrader’s 1980 film American Gigolo, with the pulsating precision of Blondie’s music and her cool beauty, is a masterpiece of what would soon become the Reagan decade. Nearly 42 years later, the TV adaptation feels lost in time, searching for an alibi for its existence.

Starring Jon Berthal and with pilot written and directed by “Ray Donovan” David Hollander (who severed ties with Paramount TV Studios during production), “American Gigolo” is advanced, fringe rather than hot.

And Berthal appears at sea here, the unusual look of a star whose charisma is wrapped elsewhere so well. Julian Kaye — whose name was shared with the character Richard Gere in the movie Shredder — stems from a 15-year sentence that we’re told happened about a decade and a half ago, but nothing about Julian’s world feels today or on Earth. Julian, as we understand, was unjustly convicted. Sunday detective Rosie O’Donnell tries to solve the case of what really happened, while the cumulative attraction between Julian and Gretchen Mole Michele threatens Julian’s chances of finding a post-prison balance.

Perhaps due to Hollander’s dispatch (with Nikki Toscano eventually serving as a presenter), there seems to be little specific insight here. O’Donnell, for example, does well (and we’ve been lucky to see more recently), but it’s a poor match for the atomic and sombre energy that Berthal gives. The story—with flashbacks depicting Gabrielle Labelle as a younger version of Julian and Melora Walters as a mother—tends to confuse dark and insightful. And using “Call Me” as the lead single doesn’t sound like a shit than an attempt to relive the decadence of the ’80s, in the absence of any other controlling aesthetic.

But there is so much that can be done at this moment in time! In its first three episodes, this show’s analysis of its topic stops at acknowledging the existence of sex work, and thus the manipulation of its subjects’ bodies. (In this flat depiction of sex, at least, he recalls the cold-blooded thrillers of the “body double” era, perhaps by accident.) An honest look at the sex market has been done before. It’s worth noting that Starz’s “The Girlfriend Experience”, itself a remake of a movie, took on the story of a sex worker and her connections, but put that story in an entirely contemporary setting, one where digital surveillance and the stretch of broken attention presented the modern worker with surprisingly sticky new challenges. .

This “Gigolo” makes no such argument for his revival, or anything else. Her condition to herself is the promise of a sneak peek at Berthal’s torso—impressive enough, but heartbreaking when he’s stripped away from the actor’s usual brio. Here, he seems to be geared toward the sadness that the rest of the show makes up for, adding to the intensity of the duality and emptiness of the drama to make us feel something more than just some kind of separate lust. But, at least at the beginning of the show, the character was neither known nor had the accusation of not knowing. Unfortunately, it’s just a boring date.

The first episode of American Gigolo’s will begin airing Friday, September 9 and will air on Showtime at 9 p.m. ET on Sunday, September 11.



(Visited 48 times, 1 visits today)

Related posts