@captzaff007
Not more than a month or so after the well received sequel to the fun, clever, buoyant Knives Out premiered, writer/director Rian Johnson has planted his feet firmly in the genre in which he made his debut film, Brick, so many years ago. Mystery is this man’s forte, and he, along with star Natasha Lyonne, are now bringing viewers weekly mystery yarns in Paramount+ with Poker Face…
The Brooklyn Alamo Drafthouse hosted an early sneak peek of the premiere episode, with star Lyonne (Charlie Cale), and costars Benjamin Bratt (Cliff LeGrand), and Dascha Polanco (Natalie) in attendance for a bit of Q and A afterwards. The premiere episode (which, along with the following 3 episodes, aired on Paramount+ this past Thursday, January 26) starts off with a murder in Las Vegas, and introduces us to Cale, a casino waitress with a knack of reading people and knowing, without fail, when a person is lying. The premiere episode delves into Charlie stumbling into solving this opening murder — which turns very personal for her — before hitting the road and starting life on the lam, where the rest of this season finds her. Adrian Brody makes an interesting turn as the sleazy Sterling Frost, Jr, a casino magnate with something to prove for himself, and whose bodyguard, Bratt’s Clifff, spends the following episodes tracking down Cale.
Lyonne is absolutely perfect as Charlie Cale. Something about her raspy voice, downing Coors tall-boys, and being barely one step ahead of her pursuers works like gangbusters for her. It’s easy for the audience to believe she’d be the sort of person to run card sharks dry, as well as sleep in her car (why yes, her car IS a 1971 Mustang). Lyonne has always been strongest playing the down-to-earth, dishevelled, furmpy, yet incredibly intelligent sort of character, and Charlie Cale is tailored perfectly for her. Even when she doesn’t audibly call out “bullshit”, her expression is constantly worn as someone who knows when someone is bullshitting her, but smart enough not to let on just yet.
In the Q and A after, Lyonne admitted that while her “Orange Is The New Black” costar Polanco was one the shortlist for Natalie (a character who is the inciting incident), the fact that they’d never really played off each other on the former show was a shortcoming she’d hope to remedy. Bratt, for his part, had to be sold on the sort of physical, intimidating role that Cliff wound up becoming, not really taking the part until after some lobbying by Lyonne. And speaking of Lyonne, her namedropping of famous cinematic (and pulp) sleuths made clear that she’d done her homework, and knew how to make the character of Cale work.
More than anything else, Poker Face invoked the best elements of Peter Falk’s classic, Columbo. A slummy-looking gumshoe who always played much slower than he actually was, and with a steady diet of chewed up cigarettes (replaced with Cale’s tallboys here), Columbo was never one to pass up a clue, often meandering into revealing a crucial bit of evidence directly to his suspects, who can then do little other than look sheepishly as the police come in to arrest them. That style of mystery-solving — the “how-catch-’em” — is brilliantly reproduced here: each episode opens with a murder, with all the suspects introduced, and the guilty party already known to the audience. The fun in the show is figuring out how the crime gets solved, not in finding out who actually committed it.
Johnson and Lyonne prove a strong team, and then look and feel of the show is down-to-earth Americana. As Cale drives through the Southwest, meandering the backroads, she seems to find herself in one mess or another, just stumbling into some murder mystery, and casually involving herself long enough to get the guilty party to admit their crime (advertently, or not), and be back on her way before the she runs into the cops…or Cliff.
Fun, funny, and with plenty of interesting characters (and actors! Stephanie Hsu! Lik Rel Howery! Tim Blake Nelson!) Poker Face is a great addition to our streaming diet, and a light, refreshing aperitif to shake off the heavy seriousness of HBO’s The Last Of Us (we KNOW you’re watching it too, alright?!).
4/5 Coors Tall Boys
-J.L. Caraballo