A few months ago Sky has undertaken a worthy operation to recover HBO titles that are a few years old but beautiful and still unpublished in Italy. After Barry, which has been talked about in these pages, the miniseries has arrived John Adams (from 2008, with a fantastic Paul Giamatti) and will soon arrive too Luck, an excellent but unfortunate series by David Milch with Dustin Hoffman, which ended in 2012 after only one season.
From 12 May instead there is Enlightened, a dramedy which in 2011 was at the top of all lists of the best of the year, had an even more popular second season than the first, but was then canceled due to low ratings.
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Laura Dern
Laura Dern, co-creator with Mike White (writer of School of Rock), plays the protagonist Amy, a woman in her forties who tries to rebuild a career in the multinational where she worked for 15 years, after having a psychological breakdown in the office and spending a few months in a rehabilitation center in Hawaii, from which she is turned into a stereotype new age. Amy is a wonderful character: obsessed with self-help books, full of optimism and determined to change the world, in reality she is very fragile, self-centered, manipulative and often completely unable to understand others. Her attempts to improve herself and others, however, are so genuine as to make her irresistible and moving. Dern is at his best here: he manages to lend his tall, slender body to a clumsy mask, with hunched shoulders, awkward in managing his presence in space.
Enlightened anticipated a large number of dramedy successive ones that remain on the borderline between the comic and the tragic, and manage to speak delicately about human weaknesses, mental illness and inner dramas, putting the melodrama to mute and often even making people laugh. The preventive closure sentenced it to oblivion, but seeing it again today it has lost none of its expressive power. Let us allow ourselves the pleasure, from time to time, to get out of the uninterrupted flow of news to recover some pearls of the past years.
Enlightened – The new me, Mike White e Laura Dern, Sky Atlantic and NOW, from 12 May