The Good Nurse · Not Great, Bob!
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The crime
Charles Cullen, convicted of “being responsible for” the deaths of 29 people in his various nursing tenures, may actually have killed hundreds. He is, despite his best Mansonian disruptive efforts at sentencing, currently a guest of the New Jersey Department of Corrections, and per The Good Nurse’s end chyrons is not eligible for parole until 2403.
The story
The Good Nurse, which premiered on Netflix earlier this week, is really two stories trying, not entirely successfully, to hold hands. The first is that of Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), who’s just trying to hang on at her new-ish ICU night-shift gig with a secret cardiac ailment until her health insurance kicks in; she befriends Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne), then realizes thanks to a police investigation that he’s actually an angel of death, and has to manage her stress around that situation (since Cullen is the only person at work who knows about her whole heart deal).
The second story is about said investigation, steered by Detectives Braun (Noah Emmerich) and Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) against a headwind of their superiors’ indifference and hospital legal departments’ intransigence.
I won’t bury the lede further: it’s a good movie — not quite great despite excellent performances across the board (even the child actors ace it), but good, a compelling two hours and change, certainly worth your time this weekend. But it did leave me a little disappointed, and I do think it falls a little short of what it’s trying to do.
Director Tobias Lindholm, who helmed two episodes of Mindhunter in addition to the thought-provoking The Investigation, is a great choice for the material and a value-add in the genre generally. He doesn’t fetishize manners of death, and The Good Nurse is at its best when it’s process-y, whether about Amy’s nursing day-to-day or about the wheel-spinning frustration of police work. In the same way Lindholm radically de-centered the suspect in The Investigation, to the point of never depicting him, The Good Nurse understands the negative capability a true crime script has to confront in terms of the audience’s functional inability to “understand” sociopathy and serial murderers — and the jagged spaces left in their wake. Redmayne, though sometimes seeming to fall back on the blocking that helped him win an Oscar for The Theory of Everything, also understands that “now here/nowhere” aspect of his character. From the opening-credits code that hints at Cullen’s motive, Redmayne serves an affect that effectively rides the weird/relatable line.
The problem, such as it is, is that Lindholm and the actors have created such watchable worlds that you want to spend more time in each story, with Amy, with Braun and Baldwin, marinating in them doing what they do — Amy’s warm attempts to humanize families’ experiences in intensive care; Baldwin’s prickly resistance to resistance, and Braun’s evident but quickly squelched pleasure in putting two and two together when he hears the word “digoxin.”
But the story is structured as a thriller, and because there isn’t much suspense, because we know Amy’s unlikely to die and because we live in the world and have osmosed the ending to Cullen’s part of the plot, the parts of the script that try to raise our heart rates feel both leaden and off-brand. I wasn’t as put off by the pacing as Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com, who two-starred the film for being “too languid” and not dimensionalizing the characters, and I thought the acting did a better job at sketching in background/depth than Tallerico did. But we may have two angles on a single issue, namely a production needing to commit to a less plot-driven, more tone-poem idea of the story. No, there isn’t a hospital on earth this dimly lit or politely hushed, with this many conveniently mirrored surfaces to show us our villain’s two faces — but if this is what interests you, the storyteller, go a hundred with that and leave it out with the “protag comes home to find possibly lethal work spouse playing with her kids” bit.
Like I said, it’s good; it’s a pleasure to watch pros at work (hat tips also to Kim Dickens as a smugly gelid hospital risk manager, Alix West Lefler as Amy’s just-brattish-enough nine-year-old daughter, and of course my high-school co-star M. Diz as “Pocket Rocket”). And for our purposes here, it’s a pleasure to have the conversations Lindholm creates around the true-crime genre, suspense vs. testimony vs. elegy. If you don’t care for these thespians, you should skip it; otherwise, give it a try. — SDB
The Good Nurse is based on a book of the same name by Charles Graeber; while I don’t have that one in stock just now at Exhibit B., I DO have a crap-ton of OTHER properties tagged “as seen on TV” and “as seen in film” — and they’re 15% off through 10/29. The cart does the math, so if you’re looking to catch up on text versions of prestige streaming projects, why not save some money in the process?
Give a paid subscription a try too, if you haven’t already? Netflix and New Yorker subscriptions cost money; they’re worth it, but if we’re worth it, we could use your help. Just $5 a month!
Looks like today’s “leit”motif is #Jerseyamiritefolks. And look, I admit I’ll use just about any flimsy excuse to renew our acquaintance with the Mad Men gif above, but Senator Bob Menendez (D-God’s Little Acre) maybe needs to quit helping me out. Menendez, while not the most lethal individual with his surname ever to (further) pollute the Garden State with his misdeeds, is also not getting any better at committing said misdeeds (…allegedly). It seems like the senator just wriggled free of the last set of indictments, ably recapped by USA Today:
Menendez was accused of accepting bribes in the form of campaign contributions and luxury travel in exchange for using his office to promote Melgen's business and personal interests with officials of President Barack Obama's administration.
The advocacy included trying to get visas so foreign girlfriends of Melgen, a married eye doctor from Florida, could visit him; challenging Medicare officials about a regulation tied to allegations Melgen overbilled the government by $9 million; and seeking to get the government to put pressure on the Dominican government about a contract to screen outbound cargo held by a company Melgen owned.
Flawlessly on-brand tawdriness for my home state — it’s always goofy small-time stuff like this, stuff the perps (often correctly!) hope is too tiresomely baroque for reporters to pursue; see also: McGreevey, Jim — but now New York’s Southern District is apparently looking at him for something else. Nobody reporting on the initial signal flare from Semafor got any further as far as the specifics of the current inquiry, and while there is a certain resigned amusement to be had for this “Palace” grad in the unspoken “…must be Thursday” appended to every hed with the word “again” in it, this is of interest for a few reasons, starting with the timing, which is classic “goddammit, Democrats” October-surprise shit.
There’s also Semafor reporter Kadia Goba’s take, appended to the initial piece but not widely picked up that I could see. Nor was Goba’s note that the “broad outlines” of the current case follow the prior one, just with different key players. None of this is especially interesting genre reading on its face, but the larger point IMO is that, when it comes to New Jersey corruption cases, most outlets do content themselves with a #Jerseyamiritefolks hed or lede and a quick write-around — because it is Jersey, and because the alleged malfeasance is too granular and junior-varsity to try to clickbait.
But per Goba, that may miss the story:
Federal prosecutors rarely lose at trial, so it’s notable to see the Department of Justice return to Menendez after its humiliating public failure to convict him.
Public corruption cases also present special obstacles since a 2016 decision in which the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, and ruled that prosecutors must find explicit evidence that gifts or donations were tied to official actions.
But there are also internal Justice Department divisions at play. In 2015, charges against Menendez were brought by the Public Integrity Section in Washington after a U.S Attorney in New Jersey handed the case off.
It’s not the story itself; it’s how it gets reported (or doesn’t), particularly in a national-news climate where every other story seems bigger and more emergent.
And finally, when it’s time to cast American Crime Story: Not Great, Bob!, who’s going to play our boy?
A pair of rimless specs and a short course on jughandles and I think Tuco will settle in just fine.
I’d also cast Richard Masur as former Governor Jon Corzine, but let me just climb out of this Google-hole before it gets too dark to see. — SDB
Eve’s right behind me with a fistful of sage and a Swiffer Wet-Jet, but before she gets here, let’s cross the Hudson and round up some New-York-story longreads for your afternoon. — SDB
“Lee Zeldin’s ad shows a man’s final moments. His family wants it removed.” [Gothamist] // A deeper dive into the legit ghastly political advertising from both sides, whose desperation to perform “tough on crime” is well out of hand. (I’ve missed having baseball on this week, but not those vile Citizens For Xenophobia ads that kept airing on FS1.)
“THE MANHATTAN WELL MYSTERY: ON AMERICA'S FIRST MEDIA CIRCUS AROUND A MURDER CASE” [CrimeReads] // An excerpt from Sam Roberts’s The New Yorkers (which seems like it might be a Gotham-centric Raw Deal?), this one about the murder of Elma Sands at the end of the 18th century. (Hamilton fans probably need no introduction to the case.)
The trial of Levi Weeks. “In His Podcast, Andrew Cuomo Seeks Absolution Without Apology” [New York Times] // Ginia Bellafante’s piece has a pH of about 1.3: “The particular media format he has chosen, one that prizes inquiry and favors those with a gift for talking to people rather than at them, is not his natural métier.” That’s brisk, baby!
“A Mobster Dodged Hit After Hit. His Son Finally Got Him.” [NYT] // I kept humming the Benny Hill music while reading the first few grafs of this account of an intra-familial Bonanno beef and its protracted conclusion.
“New York Post says its site was hacked after posting offensive tweets” [TechCrunch] // …“Hacked.” Uh huh. “It’s believed the New York Post’s content management system, used for publishing stories and articles, may have been breached.” By…a Murdoch? …Okay, jokes aside, the articles and tweets in question went beyond “offensive” (i.e., calling for the assassination of public figures, to the point where TechCrunch declined to reproduce them in their coverage) and a similar thing happened to Fast Company a few weeks ago, but that my first reaction was “how could anyone tell?” is — sing it if you know the words — not great.
Tomorrow on Best Evidence: There’s a joke here about a witch’s broom and the budget-doc sweep, but I can’t get at it, so: something-something “tricks AND treats” it is!
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