Movie gaslight 2022 series#
The series is based on the Leon Neyfakh-hosted podcast “Slow Burn,” which attempted to situate the Watergate story for contemporary listeners. The particularities of the way Nixonian paranoia played itself out over the national landscape defy easy comparison, and yet the show makes frequent, flat gestures towards the modern day. (Starz has requested that journalists avoid disclosing various pieces of historical fact to preserve the show’s suspense suffice it to say that Martha receives the brunt of presidential power in order to keep her silent.) Sean Penn gets off less easily, swaddled in and inhibited by the waxwork prosthetics that seem to crop up somewhere in every true-life dramatization these days.īut in keeping Nixon offscreen, the show also lets itself off the hook. As Martha, she’s appealingly flawed, a chatterbox who can’t help herself, motivated less by love of country than by a self-interest that seems shrewd until it doesn’t. Even Julia Roberts would be no match for that. Nixon has a sort of potent anti-charisma, combined with a world-historically rich psychological complex, that makes any project with him appearing onscreen about him. “Gaslit” makes some clever choices - among them to not depict the president at all, at least in its first seven episodes. He stands by while Martha is aggressively directed by Nixonian forces away from revealing what she knows. All that’s left for John and Martha to do is torment one another – she taking her revenge by disclosing what she knows of the administration’s crimes to friends in the media, he by, well, gaslighting her, if that’s the term. “Gaslit,” which takes a broad view of the political players in the Watergate scandal but keeps returning to the Mitchells, depicts a marriage that has already come apart. Martha, the real-life wife of Richard Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, is depicted by Roberts as at once puckishly witty and as not immune to dramatizing her already dramatic circumstances. Which is not to say that Martha Mitchell, the character Julia Roberts plays here, doesn’t have a keen understanding of just what she’s up against. But its contemporary usage, as a slang term with a meaning that has drifted closer to simply “lying,” might not be how a woman in the 1970s would understand a case of marital dishonesty. Sure, to “gaslight,” as a verb, has its origins in the 1944 film (and its earlier stage source material), all about a woman whose husband, insistent on his falsehoods, leads her to question her sanity. The first problem for Starz’s new series “ Gaslit” may be in its title.
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