Mare of Easttown

June 13, 2021 by Amy Welborn

I watched most of this. That to say, contrary to the plan I mentioned last week, I did go back and take in the rest of the episodes, but I did some skipping. I’d already read the synopsis, so I knew what was coming, but I still wanted to see the details of how the plot points evolved and how they were performed.

So, background: Mare of Easttown is this month’s flavor-of-the-week-prestige-drama. On HBOMax and starring Kate Winslet as a small town Pennsylvania police detective, it’s highly praised for its groundedness, its sense of place, the performances, of course, and in Catholic circles, for lightly worn Catholic culture and themes. I mean, the last episode is called “Sacrament,” so sure.

I found it…okay. I also thought it was maybe one episode and at least one plot point too long.

Thematically, Mare is about a couple of things: the burdens of the past and the intricate ties of the present.

Mare labors under the weight of two elements of the past – one far distant, and one recent. First is her role in a high school championship basketball game twenty-five years previously, and second is her adult son’s drug use and suicide just a couple of years ago.

Both incidents – one generally seen as “positive” and the other decidedly negative – have the power to have power over us in the present. And that power is a negative, we see, for fixating on either one distances us from the present moment. Yes, they have an impact – we are in part the sum total of our pasts – but when the expectations, the image and the questions and grief overwhelm us, the overwhelm and overshadow the present as well, blinding us to what needs to be attended to today.

(It’s not that Mare herself thinks at all about the high school achievement – it’s the community which attaches importance to it which she finds annoying and limiting.)

But there was a problem, I felt – I think part of the point was supposed to be that Mare’s unresolved grief over her son’s suicide was making her difficult to deal with, irascible and generally touchy. While Winslet is good in the role, it does end up being a one-note performance of dead eyes and pursed lips, with her supposed frazzled relations at home played mostly for humor (Jean Smart again! Who is great as Mare’s mother. Cocktail-mixing cousin priest Dan!) and, during the course of the series, the character becoming the object of desire of not one, but two male characters which dilutes the theme of “Mare is a grouchy mess.”

Further – and this is related to the next point – we don’t have any sense that Mare’s state is really and truly impacting her work – I think it would have been stronger if that had been so, if the problems in solving the case had been more explicitly related to Mare’s issues and what I’m going to talk about next – community and family ties.

So those ties of the present. Mare’s strength is in exploring the intimate relations of this small community, in which almost everyone seems to be related to someone else, in some way and they’re all related to each other spiritually, since they’re all apparently Catholic – two scenes take place during Mass, and almost every character’s present in the pews.

It’s about those ties – how they strengthen us, but also how they tempt us away from doing the right thing, as we seek to protect ourselves and our families from consequences. It’s about how those ties of loyalty can ironically blind us to what’s happening right in our own homes.

All of that is interesting to contemplate, but I felt it would have been far more effective with fewer plot digressions – yes there’s a mystery here and that’s part of the entertainment, but it does lose focus, with a major “twist” in episode 5 that resets the investigation, and ends up seeming like a red herring. Your mileage may vary, but that was my take.

Anyway, I’ll wrap this up with a few bullet points:

Great performances all around, of course. Particularly striking was Julianne Nicholson, who plays Lori, one of Mare’s old teammates and wife/mother of one of the intertwined families. She’s physically distinct – tall, rangy, freckled – and compelling any time she’s on screen.
Now a couple of caveats: Sorry, but I felt a very strong and creepy male gaze at times. Yes, the plot is about missing and murdered teen girls (a wearisome trope in and of itself, both on film and in fiction), but nonetheless the nude shots of a dead body and of a girl prostituting herself comprised the only nudity in the series and as such struck me as exploitive, especially since we’re talking about teens, as does the scene of Mare’s high school senior lesbian daughter making out with another girl – the whole plot point being absolutely unnecessary. The highlighting of the sexuality and bodies of teen girls in this way was problematic.
Finally, the Catholic part. I’ll look at two aspects of it: the concrete, specific Catholic culture aspects, and then the broader themes.
First – we have two clerical characters here. One, Mare’s cousin, the parish pastor Father Dan, and secondly, a “Deacon Mark.” First, I have to give the series props in that the issues related to Deacon Mark – possibly boundary crossing with teens, the church’s dealing with that, and then his potential involvement in Erin’s murder – are well and accurately handled to a point. But….why is he a deacon? And in what sense? It’s very strange. He’s a “deacon” who’s transferred between parishes. He’s also around thirty years old. (actor James McCardle is 32 as of today, according to the Wiki). Is he a transitional deacon on the way to priesthood? No mention of this, and he seems to have been a deacon for a while. A permanent deacon? Far younger than the average, and far more integrated into church hierarchy than permanent deacons are in most dioceses. His plotline doesn’t reflect either reality – as in, for example – you had problems in the past and wow, if you’re involved in this, well you’ll never be ordained, buddy, and you probably shouldn’t anyway . I have no idea why they didn’t just make the character a priest.
And yes, the last episode is called “Sacrament” – and there’s a crucial scene during Mass in which the need for forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation is articulated, a moment that inspires Mare to take those steps – those necessary steps she needs to for healing. That was nice to see, although it was a totally Jesus-free moment, I’ll say – with all of the emphasis on specificity in accent, location and local color, it wouldn’t hurt for to have the words of this preaching character add to that accuracy and specificity by actually incorporating spirituality into his words rather than leaving them at the level of aspirational self-help.
It has to be said, though, that in an earlier scene, Deacon Mark does bring Christ explicitly into his conversation when, being interrogated, he defends his outreach by saying that he’s fight a battle against “human weakness, loneliness, doubt, hatred…” and when he ministers, “It’s Christ himself working through me. I’m his vessel.” At that point, though, we don’t know if he’s using this language as cover – as abusers do – or if he really means it. Which is fine and adds a healthy aspect of tension to the moment. But it would have been good to see such directness in that final, life-adjusting homily, as well.
So here’s my point on that last point: If you’re going to make authenticity of place and character a bedrock of your film, don’t let the commitment fail when it comes to religion.

The series has some elements in common with the British series Happy Valley – weary, middle-aged female law enforcer caring for a grandson after tragic loss of a child – but, as you can read here, I thought Happy Valley was much better.

Finally: have Rolling Rock sales increased lately? Because that message was certainly implanted in my brain over those hours: Thirsty? Hot? Need to relax? Here you go…..