Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys are deadly frenemies in ‘The Beast in Me’
Matthew Rhys can, when he chooses, put a feline spin on his usually pleasant smile.
It’s unsettling. His lips stretch upward a touch too far; the effort to be social is visible. He gives the impression that he wants to please while working hard to suppress a second, more authentic, faintly predatory grin lurking under the obligatory one. The effect is marvelously sinister because of the slight mismatch between intent and execution. It served him very well on “The Americans,” where he played Phillip Jennings, the more Americanized (and conflicted) of two Russian spies impersonating an American couple raising a nice American family. The attempt at feigning normalcy is real, but one senses, beneath it, Rhys’ savage impatience at having to suffer fools while taking genuine, unfeigned pleasure in something else entirely — something he sees and we don’t.
That smile remains a fantastic weapon, and in Netflix’s new thriller “The Beast in Me,” Rhys uses it to maximal effect — particularly when his character is negging Claire Danes’ character, a famous writer named Agatha Wiggs. Informed that her current work in progress is a book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s friendship with Antonin Scalia, he dismisses it as a total snooze. No one wants a book about unlikely friendships, he tells her over a fancy lunch he genially bullied her into. “People just want gossip and carnage.” The shot tells. Wiggs has been struggling with her manuscript in the wake of her young son Cooper’s (Leonard Gerome) death four years earlier. She’s devastated, bored, angry and in dire need of a receptacle for all that chaotic energy.
Wiggs badly wants to hate Rhys’ character, a Robert Durst-type real estate mogul named Nile Jarvis whose wife mysteriously disappeared some years ago. When the show begins, he’s just moved in next door to Wiggs’ gorgeous but dilapidated house in Oyster Bay, New York. She had bought the place after winning a Pulitzer in hopes of making a stable and permanent home for Cooper with her wife (now ex) Shelley (Natalie Morales). Since Jarvis’ arrival, Wiggs’ days moldering in the house alone have been interrupted by his scary dogs, obnoxious alarms, security cameras and repeated requests that she sign off on his plan to make a jogging path through the woods.
Danes, who has long been celebrated for how expressively she cries, has a superpower just as paradoxical and compelling as Rhys’. Her mobile features, which can register dozens of emotions a minute, suggest a high level of sensitivity it would be easy to mistake for weakness — or transparency. It’s neither. That tremulous, ongoing wobble can exist only as a function of the (counterintuitively) stable core keeping it in check. Like Rhys’, Danes’ performance is interesting because it’s conflicted. What we witness, in so much of her acting, is a continual failure to dissolve: The suffering is trying to get out, even as it’s being (quite muscularly) suppressed.
The genius of “The Beast in Me” lies in how it recognizes a deep affinity between these two dramatic modes. The thriller develops into a nervy pas-de-deux between a reactive, still-grieving Wiggs and a grinning Jarvis, who poke at each other’s private tragedies with a mixture of candor, charm, cruelty and — above all — curiosity. Jarvis is fascinated by the rancor Wiggs bears toward the young man who hit her car, killing Cooper. Wiggs, who decides to make Jarvis her next project, wants to know all about his overbearing father, Martin (Jonathan Banks), and his obsession with making good on the Jarvis family’s biggest project, a Hudson Yards-type development in New York being thwarted by a Latina politician named Olivia Benitez (Aleyse Shannon).
They are open about how they wish to use each other. For Wiggs, bills are mounting. She’s in spiritual agony and existentially bored. She needs a new project to dig into — and something to think about besides her son. He needs someone with her authority and prestige to decisively scuttle the cloud of suspicion that’s plagued him ever since his wife died. When a rogue FBI agent (David Lyons) turns up to drunkenly warn Wiggs against getting too close to Jarvis, she starts actively investigating him — while fielding accusations from her ex that her judgment has been impaired ever since Cooper’s death. Meanwhile, the closer Wiggs gets to Jarvis, the weirder the things happening around her become. It doesn’t quite add up to gaslighting, but there’s a pleasurably Hitchcockian quality to their dynamic. The best thing about it is that no one is fully in control.
Because so many thrillers of this type double as sterile lifestyle porn (a.k.a. murdery Nancy Meyers), the setting is a particular pleasure. I could watch a dozen seasons set in Aggie Wiggs’ dirty, rundown, beautiful house. The wardrobe feels as uncurated as the plumbing. The doors are stained. The kitchen is blessedly unrenovated. Even the dog feels real.
The plot — and the show’s social and political world — is less original, less realistic and less clear. Well-rendered though the principals are, no one else’s motivations (or beliefs) make particular sense. While Nile’s marriage to his new wife, Nina (Brittany Snow), is nicely handled, the Jarvis dynasty’s broader family dynamics are more confusing than cathartic. The real estate subplot featuring an obvious Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stand-in feels both pointed and pointless. And while Wiggs’ grief is presented as extreme and somewhat disordered, her ex-wife’s attitude toward the loss — which I think we’re supposed to see as the healthy alternative — seems disconcertingly casual.
Thematically, the series gets disappointingly hokey when it leans too hard on the argument, which Jarvis explicitly makes more than once, that Wiggs and Jarvis are the same. (One particularly egregious shot superimposes their images, as if to drive the point home.) An absurdly literal scene in which Jarvis voraciously devours a chicken does Rhys, who can channel rapacious gusto just by rising from a chair, a disservice. And the show’s masterful understanding of what Danes and Rhys can do — and why their energies blend so well on-screen — gets blurry as the show winds down. Arguments about complicity feel forced, and while the show feints in the direction of Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer,” it never seriously interrogates the way authors can betray their subjects.
Still, it’s a very entertaining watch. Jarvis is probably right when he tells Wiggs why her book about the Supreme Court justices won’t sell. But — while he and Wiggs aren’t exactly Scalia and Ginsberg — the best part of “The Beast in Me” isn’t the gossip or the carnage; it’s the story about an unlikely friendship.
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“The Beast in Me”
8 episodes are available for streaming on Netflix