There was a moment this episode where I think this whole season clicked for me; Frank Semyon comforts a young boy who’s lost his father. The boys dad was Stan, who happened to be a henchman for Frank. Telling the boy that pain can show you who you really are inside and it can help you grow, this gangster with a kind heart talks kind words to little lost boy. While the scene contained some more laughable dialogue, calling someone “solid gold” is always going to sound weird, it was Franks best scene yet and Vince Vaughn‘s best acting all season.
Frank begun as a joke this season, a silhouette of a character that just sprouted out nonsensical phrases that made no sense, but this episode he really grew on me; give me more of Frank acting like a real human being and not some hallmark card and I think I can come to like him.
Anyway, back to my point. When Frank tells the boy that pain reveals your true self, what Nic Pizzolatto has been trying to do made sense. I feel like at the beginning of the season all the characters were roughly drawn outlines of characters, with hardly any depth or detail filled in, but as we’ve progressed and seen them confront their own personal demons and pain, it’s unveiled their true self. Ray Velcoro was presented to us in the first episode as a tough, unstoppable force of rage who beats up fathers and reporters, only to have him gunned down in the second episode by a masked psycho with riot shells.
That knocked his confidence completely and made him evaluate just what the hell he’s doing. Likewise in this episode he finally figures out that he shouldn’t be around his son, who doesn’t really acknowledge him much anyway. Ray knows he’s poison, that all the pain and suffering he’s caused and had inflicted upon himself since his wife’s attack has messed him up too much, he’s a lost cause but his son isn’t. His pain and anger that stemmed from his wife’s attack pushed him towards the life he lives now; as Frank tells him at the beginning of the episode, it was already within him. Ray masquerades as a tough impenetrable wall but really he’s a melting pot of sadness and resentment.
Likewise, Paul pretends to be a family man, who does everything society expects of him; fights for his country, gets the girlfriend and raises a child when really we’ve seen that not only is he gay and trying to avoid confronting it but he’s most comfortable when back in ‘army mode’. His coolness and lack of shock during and after the Vinci massacre of episode four all but confirms this, as well as his and Rays assault during their raid on the party this episode. Watch Paul, he’s using army signals and moving around like he’s back fighting; he’s in his element. Frank pretends to be a hardcore gangster but his talk with Stans son reveals who he really is; a man desperate for a son, a man who loves his family over his work, a man not cut out to be a gangster.
Finally Ani; she’s been an enigma all season. We know she’s guarded and obviously broken from something that happened to her and the talk of her growing up in some hippie communion had only been briefly mentioned but enough to make us interested, we know she has relationship issues. Watch her as she practices her knife skills on a bunch of boards of wood that have crudely been put together to resemble a human; watch as she repeatedly aims for the genital area. While the conclusion and obvious answer to her pain could have been seen coming a million miles away, I still really liked how they revealed it and the effectiveness of it. Ani was taken advantage of by certain men in the communion, men who spoke to her childish innocence by talking about there being “unicorns in the forest” and leading her away.
What Ani went through when she was growing up has made her the woman she is today and while she puts on a front, for a couple of minutes Ani reverts back to that time in the communion when she was just a child and her innocence was destroyed. Rachel McAdams is great here, letting Ani’s paranoia overtake her as she remembers what happened. But Ani is a fighter, and before long she manages to get a grip on the situation again, what happened when she was younger has made her tougher, lonelier but more edged.
So everyone has had some tragic event that has brought them to where they are now, something that has changed who they were for better or worse. Someone like Frank doesn’t see it that way, he believes that these events are just mere shortcuts to people finding out who they really are. If at the beginning of the season these characters felt like boring cardboard cut out characters I think they were suppose to; they’re all pretending to be someone they aren’t, they’re all on autopilot and just coasting through their miserable life’s but we’ve slowly been learning about who they are and watching them confront that.
If the show felt like it was lacking anyone engaging that’s because the characters themselves were hiding away their true selves. With Ani’s revelation this episode we now know who they all are and what’s brought them here. This might not make up for a mediocre first couple of episodes but it sure makes me feel a lot better about where we’re heading. If anything the show is now comfortable with its characters and the cast it has; Vaughn has two great scenes this episode with the talk between him and the boy and his and Velcoros confrontation at the beginning of the episode.
“You might be one of the last friends I’ve got,” Frank mutters to Ray after their heated confrontation. These people, drawn together through murder and lies, really are the only thing even close to friends that each of them have. As they race off into the night, successful in their attempts to find the missing girl they’ve been looking for, the girl who just might solve the case they’ve been trying to crack, the case that’s forced them all to confront their true self; there’s hope. Hope they might just come out of this alive and better off. “Wouldn’t that be f**ked up?,” he replies.
