Prime Suspect
Wren, Celia
ducting a phone interview with an American academic who delivers a ranting screed against American imperialism, Al Jazeera's chain-smoking senior producer, Samir Khader, blasts his inter-view...
...Such perplexed moments sound a human note missing from Moore's films...
...The moment is typical...
...Rushing describes feeling ill while watching the clip...
...A brilliant propagandist, he offers no glimpse of a world without war...
...Even the title of the series points to discomfiture: the saga is called Prime Suspect because in the pilot installment, and often throughout its sequels, the heroine's challenge is not to locate the culprit, whom she has already tentatively pinpointed, but to muster the legal proof necessary to reel him in (in episode 6, that mission even involved trekking to a war-crimes scene in Bosnia...
...one of Tennison's right-hand men gasps to another in episode 3 as the two of them, dressed in drag for an undercover operation, wrestle a murderous thug to the ground...
...You don't have to justify it...
...But in doing so, he'd miss what Noujaim catches—namely, Rushing's deep consternation when the U.S...
...He smiles, wanly, adding, "I have plans for my children...
...He's just a crazy activist...
...Commonweal 2 8 August 13, 2004...
...There is no doubt, for instance, what Moore would do to the Army spokesman, Josh Rushing, who is one of Noujaim's primary subjects: he would destroy him...
...Each episode glories in the procedure of the police station: the cluttered desks where harried detectives answer ringing phones, the bulletin boards covered with photos and diagrams, the claustrophobic offices where Tennison's superiors attempt to intimidate her, or plot their own promotions...
...ducting a phone interview with an American academic who delivers a ranting screed against American imperialism, Al Jazeera's chain-smoking senior producer, Samir Khader, blasts his inter-view director: "Where'd you get this guy...
...As a strong female struggling along in a man's world, Tennison appeals to feminist instincts, but she is not, to tell the truth, a wholly admirable per-son...
...er flaws, shrewdly and subtly highlighted by the pro-gram's smart scriptwriters, dovetail with Prime Suspect's pessimistic social vision, with its scrutiny of prostitution, cynical streetkids, pornography, pedophilia rings, and corruption in the police force...
...It makes me hate war," he says...
...You can crush every-one, I agree...
...Sur-rounded by police-department spies and kingmakers intent on power plays and cover-ups or else simply bent on thwarting a woman detective's career—Tennison and her helpers spend a good deal of energy in Sisyphean labors, and the rest of the time they battle a phenomenon that's a major tip-off to the fallenness of the world: aggravation...
...Once you are victorious, that's it...
...then goes on to admit that the next night, when the network showed wounded and dead Iraqis, he found himself less bothered—and is deeply troubled by the differencein his own reactions...
...Its preoccupation with objectivity places Control Room in profound contrast to Fahrenheit 9/11...
...To credit the performances and the complexity of the characterizations risks stating the obvious...
...As conceived by the writer Lynda La Plante, Prime Suspect teems with personalities so seemingly genuine that they appear to have waltzed in right off the street...
...There is one single thing that will be left," " he says...
...One eloquent and combative reporter, Hassan Ibrahim, loudly rejects the American condemnation of Al Jazeera for showing Iraqi civilians wounded in bombing attacks...
...Noujaim catches this ambivalence again and again, opening up wide realms of ambiguity where Moore habitually narrows to a hard point of certainty...
...Admittedly, the delights of the mystery format always revolve around the logistics of the chase, but Prime Suspect, more than most detective tales, broods on the frustration factor...
...government condemns Al Jazeera for broad-casting video of American soldiers' mutilated bodies...
...Or consider episode 3's portraits of Jason and Anthony, two fragile young men who were sexually abused as children: the contrast between the way these overgrown boys speak—one with barely controlled stoicism, his eyes downcast, his lips pursed, the other with a bold stare and an unhinged smirk—speaks volumes about psychological variety, and the different effect one experience can have on two individuals...
...You can defeat everybody, I agree...
...This is a series that descends from the tradition of hard-boiled detective novels, a genre that, as literary critic George Grella once observed, is "influenced by the Puritan imagination" and obsessed with "the pervasive blight of sin, a society fallen from grace, an endless struggle against evil...
...Shifting from tough-asnails denunciations of the cops to an eerie, pitiable breakdown in an interrogation room, the actress suggests how effectively humans can will themselves to overlook evil...
...While the rest of us think wistfully of that Blockbuster in the sky, stocked with episode after episode of Tennison capers, Mirren must surely be thinking that heaven can wait...
...Surely the only person who can't de-light in the success of Prime Suspect—that parable about daily frustration—is Mirren herself, who has acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company and appeared in numerous films, but who is now most closely linked in the public mind with a television cop show...
...Since its obsession runs on this track, Prime Suspect dwells more on process than result, more on the symptoms of the fallen state than on the possibility of solving crime and putting the blighted world to rights...
...Justice and the law do not go hand in hand, and the former must often wait on the latter, sometimes in-definitely...
...or the way it takes twenty minutes to clean the spam out of your e-mail in-box after a weekend...
...or of a fairness that, in his view, we cannot afford...
...I have absolute confidence in the American Constitution...
...Yet seconds later, asked by a despairing colleague, Who is going to stop the Americans?, Ibrahim answers: "The United States is going to stop the United States...
...In comparison, the American reporters Noujaim surveys seem guilty of lazy dependence on Pentagon spinners, and some-times of outright cheerleading...
...Do you have any handcuffs...
...Michael Moore, on the other hand—whose production company is tellingly called Dog Eat Dog Films—fights fire with fire...
...Victory, and that's it...
...History is written by the victors—they have the final control room—and all you can do in the face of this reality, Jehane's film implies, is to assert an idea and a model of fairness, however doomed...
...And I have absolute confidence in the ability of the American people...
...There was an unhappy period in my past—occasioned by my first full-time job after graduate school—when episodes of Prime Suspect provided my only respite from a sea of misery...
...It's aggravation that motivates Tennison's signature tic: running her fingers exasperatedly through her short, faded blonde hair...
...Fortunately, my life has improved radically since then (a wonderful invention, time...
...Noujaim does people the honor of exploring their conflicting allegiances—and their mixed motives...
...From the opening scenes, when we listen in on Al Jazeera staffers discussing the merits of eliminating Saddam, we find ourselves in the presence of something Michael Moore never provides: a substantial clash of opinions...
...People like victory...
...This past April, PBS ponied up a sixth installment, and now the increasingly talked-about cable channel BBC America is re-broadcasting most of the series, starting August 9, as part of its Mystery Mondays lineup...
...Take such subsidiary characters as the pilot's Moyra Henson, a reputed serial killer's wife played by the creepily pixie-faced Zoe Wanamaker...
...Take a wild guess...
...Here on earth, the chronCommonweal 2 7 August 13, 2004 ides of London detective Jane Tennison have numbered all too few: in the decade after its 1992 premiere in England and later America, the series clocked a mere five episodes, following Detective Chief Inspector Tennison's nerve-wracking murder investigations and her excruciating run-ins with misogynistic col-leagues...
...of a disinterested view or conflicted mind...
...But don't ask us to love it as well...
...Sometimes in Control Room the clash takes place within a single person...
...but I still find Tennison's exploits utterly absorbing, and to judge by the more than four-teen international television awards the program has received, I am far from alone...
...After all, who could demand more from a television mystery war fairly...
...or the way the office fax machine insists on running out of toner...
...And then there's Mirren, who ranges through bravado, vulnerability, annoyance, aggressiveness, and a spectrum of other humors on a second-by-secondbasis, capturing the hardboiled Tennison's moods and energies with pitch-perfect mannerisms—like her manic, bellicose gum-chewing at a point in the saga when her character has given up smoking...
...It's all the more easy to identify with Tennison, in other words, because her story exemplifies the vexations of day-to-day life and work: the way, when-ever you've gone undercover in drag, you always find you need the handcuffs you left in your trousers—well, more realistically for most of us, the way you reach the bus stop just after the bus has left...
...The whole series is also available on DVD...
...than this steely British police procedural, shot with a lightning-rod attentiveness to detail and atmosphere and show-casing one of our era's great actresses, Helen Mirren...
...You are the most powerful nation on earth, I agree...
...Uncompromising, self-centered, sometimes rude, she can evince a complete disregard for other people's feelings, on one occasion ruining her frail elderly father's birthday party when it happens to coincide with her own appearance on a TV newscast...
...In the documentary's closing scene, a soft unexpected rain falls over the media outpost in the desert as Khader ponders the futility of trying to cover Celia Wren BLOODHOUND Helen Mirren in 'Prime Suspect' n the great video store in heaven, the shelf of Prime Suspect episodes is infinitely long...
...After listing his many reservations about the American system in general and news organizations in particular, Al Jazeera producer Khader draws deeply on his cigarette and says: "But between us, if I get offered a job at Fox, I will take it...
...snaps the second cop, dressed,like his mate, in a slinky drag-queen out-fit equipped with neither holsters nor pockets...
Vol. 131 • August 2004 • No. 14
