Gypsy girl entering Coen territory – Weekend
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Detective High is airing on Apple TV+, starring the brilliant Patricia Arquette as the woman who creates chaos.
It’s Patricia Arquette’s time on television: at the age of 50, she looks more energetic than in her youth, and chooses only trump roles. In the prison thriller Escape from Dannemora (2018), she played a security guard who, out of great and pure love, helped a prisoner to escape – crying was born in everyone who saw it. In an office thriller “Separation” (2022) Arquette appeared as the demonic boss of a downtrodden clerk who watches over him day and night, and in Pretense (2019) as an obsessed mother with Munchausen syndrome. But the powerful charisma of the actress strove to splash out beyond the role of gloomy aunts and demanded a frantic dance, a real gypsy with an exit – and it happened in Apple’s new existential thriller Detective High.
Peggy Newman (Arquette) was a drug dealer who didn’t hesitate to try the product until she became addicted. Then there was a police raid with SWAT, and Peggy and her husband were taken right to the mansion with a pool on Thanksgiving Day. After being released ten years later, Peggy embarked on the path of methadone healing and took a job at a theme park where non-professional actors like her, with unprecedented enthusiasm, portray the life of the Wild West every day. While Peggy gleefully swings on a chandelier in a cardboard saloon scenery, lifts her skirts in a cancan, fires fake pistols and smashes beer bottles on the heads of costumed cowboys, her husband Danny (Matt Dillon) is still hanging on the bunk – and will not give her a divorce. A turning point in Peggy’s life comes when her brother and sister, tired of her hectic life, try to evict her from the house after the death of her mother – Peggy still cannot support the house, because she does not have a “decent job”.
Well, Peggy will instantly find this job, appearing in the office of a seedy private detective on the verge of ruin (Brad Garrett) and, with her characteristic unbreakable impudence, crammed into his “partners”. She will immediately come up with the first thing for herself: she will go to the local dude (Rupert Friend) who dumped her friend, and finds that this crazy type, a former TV host who went crazy on the air, went into nirvana under the name Guru Bob, and his house full of fake art. In Peggy’s restless mind, a scheme will immediately ripen on how to make money on this, and the story will wrap up. Each time acting with the best of intentions, Peggy will invent one scam after another until she drags into her dubious adventures everyone around whom she wanted to help improve her life.
The series by seasoned Hollywood writers Nancy Fichman, Cathy Ford, and Jennifer Hopp is a California film noir that has entered Coen Brothers territory. Only instead of a broken drinking detective under the scorching California sun, a burnt, but in some ways terribly naive and not too lucky aunt rushes about. This is a very Russian series – Patricia Arquette here is the spitting image of Nonna Mordyukova from Rodney: she is ready to roll up her sleeves, fix everything and save everyone to the best of her ability – only she does it with varying degrees of success. During her eventful life, she has acquired a lot of wise attitudes, which she treats in between to all who are ready to listen to her: “Deceive your pain – this is the key to life. Take two pills at once!”, “Do not absorb all the smells of what is cooked with you in the same pot” or sacramental: “Most people really can’t do it.” A similar character was recently played by Natasha Lyonne in the series Pokerface, a female detective with a brilliant intuition who puts the world in its place. But if she structured the surrounding chaos and tried to curb it, then our Peggy creates it and runs with him in a race – she has “Ride of the Valkyries” on the call, and she herself is like a mad Valkyrie out of control: dance, mother-in-law, dance ! Only Peggy dances to Wagner – according to the plot, she is well versed in his work, idolizes the opera “Tristan and Isolde”, so “Liebestod” legally sounds behind the scenes. In the meantime, the plot makes such absurd squiggles that even the Coens back away in bewilderment – in their coordinate system the world is still stable and does not get out from under their feet, it’s the stupid heroes themselves that spoil everything. It’s not the same here: “Detective High” is a series of a new time, when things that seemed unshakable turned out to be on the verge of collapse (“Everything around is stupid!” Guru Bob claims), the connection between cause and effect has been broken and what is happening is beyond understanding. And only the heroine Arquette is consonant with this broken connection of times, she synchronized with chaos instead of resisting it – and we are fascinated watching this. By the way, in the finale, Peggy will repeat the trajectory of the heroine of another Russian film performed by Lyubov Orlova: “Digi-digi-doo, I’ll go out of the cannon into the sky!”
Look: Apple TV+
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