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But if you have seen her on the Ricky Gervais show”Additional features”, you know Winslet is hilarious too and you may have wondered, like me, when she finally let her funny side out.
Get into “The regime,” HBO’s six-episode miniseries about the messy dictator of a collapsing Central European nation, rich in cobalt and sugar beets, and a long-awaited showcase for Winslet’s comedic chops.
The series follows Winslet as Chancellor Elena Vernham, a charismatic demagogue too busy fighting a largely made-up disease to address her nation’s (fictional) economic problems. Largely confined to the palace, she is attended to by her submissive husband, Nicky (Guillaume Gallienne), and a group of slanderous advisors who fearfully pander to her every whim. Her most recent delirium (a mold infestation that Elena believes is destroying her health) prompts her to summon a disgraced military officer, Corporal Herbert Zuback (Matthias Schoenaerts), to the palace to serve as her new moisture meter. Occupants of this thankless position must use a hygrometer to measures the humidity of each room you enter. Zuback, whose bloody work slaughtering some miners recently earned him the title “Butcher,” clearly suspects that he is about to be punished. He appears large, basic and bewildered as palace steward Agnes (Andrea Riseborough) leads him through a series of grand staircases packed with mold removal workers and explains his new duties for the chancellor and what is at stake if he leaves. wrong.
Winslet’s understanding of the character is immediate, idiosyncratic and complete. His way of walking, his way of speaking (with one corner of his mouth, to minimize pollution from other people’s air), his way of singing (off key, with pride). The chancellor’s first meeting with Zuback is also the show’s best and most compelling argument for how Elena could have come to power. She asks him what he knows, informs him that she deserves love, orders him to meet her in his dreams, and, at her next meeting, she questions him about what they did there. Pointless, erratic and convincing, Elena ends up totally captivating Zuback. And her devotion to his health (through some rather primitive home remedies) eventually makes him her confidant. She outdoes her husband and undermines her classist but otherwise unremarkable husband. advisors (including Pippa Haywood, who deserved more substantial things) and convinces Elena to pivot toward populist policies.
Things develop and evolve in quite a fun way, with Winslet and Schoenaerts’ chemistry escalating into codependent madness until the show becomes, at least for this viewer, too dark and transcendent to sustain the comedy at which it really excels.
“The Regime” has an impressive pedigree. Creator and showrunner Will Tracy, former editor-in-chief of “The Onion,” made “The Menu” and worked on “Succession.” Directors Jessica Hobbs (who directed episodes of “The Crown”) and Stephen Frears (who directed the 2006 film “The Queen” and the 2017 historical drama “Victoria and Abdul”) have demonstrated a long-standing interest in female rulers. feminine.
“The Regime” feels like a collective (and obscene) overcorrection of much of this earlier work. Take Winslet: after having portrayed all those intelligent, beleaguered and traumatized women (many of them American, with very idiosyncratic dialects and accents that she worked to get right), here she acts as a volatile, amoral demagogue. , wild and unhinged with an invented accent and a slight lisp.
As for Tracy, in addition to working on “Succession,” which was largely based on real-life circumstances (based on the Murdochs), He worked on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” a research-intensive show obsessed with real-world details.. One perceives, in “The Regime”, a creative mind that rebels against the limitations that any specific referent (or principle of reality) could impose. Tracy, whose hobby is investigating dictators, deliberately eliminated anything in the series that could be interpreted as a parallel to real-world events. Also discernible is a desire to turn up the volume on the absurd aspects of kleptocracy: to make a project that is all “Boar on the Floor” – The infamous, over-the-top “Succession” scene in which the patriarch makes his henchmen crawl and eat off the floor to prove his loyalty.
As for Hobbs and especially Frears: having spent countless hours on stories about demure and sadly respectable English queens who operate within strict and sometimes punitive constraints, perhaps it is a pleasure to direct a libidinal ruler who rules recklessly, from the it.
Understandable impulses, all of them, but they’re also reactive rather than generative, and probably produce something that might have been more rewarding to do than to see.
That said, the absurdity and excess of dictatorship is a rich topic! So is the slow devolution of power from an autocrat (usually a man) as he becomes soft, needy, and petulant within his bubble. You have to consider paranoia. The strange and embarrassing iconography (Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un sitting on horses). The codependency and resentment of several men who say yes. It’s really interesting to wonder what a female version of this would be like. “The Regime” suggests that she might be slightly obsessed with how often her name appears in American headlines. That she could order the preservation of her father’s corpse and conduct hostile interviews with him at regular intervals (and throw tantrums if he showed signs of decomposition). That she could steal her consigliere’s son, imprison her predecessor (Hugh Grant!), become infatuated with a Rasputin knockoff, and use the language of maternal seduction in her television speeches. She might wear tight dresses with military lapels, sing off-key, and, if the conditions are right, eat dirt.
These are strange and tantalizing details. But they don’t add up to anything like a political history, making any emerging criticism so broad that it collapses into a tautology. (Selfish leaders are selfish. Autocrats? Tyrannical!) Aside from Elena’s dealings with the Chinese and Americans, there is no real explanation for how she rules, specifically, her (surely a nightmare and at least semi-competent). . control systems outside the palace. There is also no clear sense of the opposing factions. Or the town.
In other words, as an ideological comment, the series ends up more harmed than enhanced by its fictional aspects. That doesn’t seem like what Tracy wanted. “It’s an imaginary country, but hopefully it feels like it’s taking place within a geopolitical reality that we would recognize, and that says something about how foreign policy works and how these regimes thrive and operate,” she said recently. The Hollywood Reporter. He also has described “The Regime” like a satire, a fairy tale and a love story. Those are not, at least in this program, supported modes.
That firm commitment to non-specificity, combined with the absurd excess that makes “The Regime” fun, produces a series so careful not to say anything in particular that it feels more like a cathartic exercise than a stand-alone story. Or as if someone told you her dream. One can agree – Yeah, that person you made up who did crazy things you made up sounds like a handful! And in fact, as a comedy, “The Regime” has a lot to offer. But satire is a fundamentally parasitic medium. More or less it requires a goal. By insisting on its independence from any real-world government, “The Regime” (as Elena Vernham) runs the risk of becoming so involved in making a spectacle that it ends up representing nothing.
The regime (six episodes) premieres March 3 on HBO.