'Sympathy for the Devil,' Lorrie Moore
This is our welcome to True Detective, season two. The funny sparks of life that lit things up between Hart and Cohle will be hard if not impossible to find here—bits of Chinatown, The Big Sleep, Twin Peaks, and other detective films will lumber in instead. Any humor will be in the hands of Vince Vaughn as a struggling casino owner named Frank and will probably be inadvertent. Vaughn, who like George Clooney radiates tidy, unsexy handsomeness—Vaughn’s delicately featured profile is similar to Julianne Moore’s—has difficulty melting into the fabric of this program, trouble blending with its look and tone and so stands out as very much himself, as in, what the heck is Vince Vaughn doing in this show? He has his mouth full spouting nonsense like “Sometimes your worst self is your best self.” Or, “It’s like blue balls but in the heart.” Or, “Never do anything out of hunger. Not even eating.” As well as other lines that, as The Atlantic has pointed out, sometimes sound as if they’d been Google-translated from Farsi.
Vaughn’s rushed delivery resembles that of the character he played in the romantic comedy Wedding Crashers. This same-in-every-film movie-star trait he also shares with George Clooney, though not with the utterly transformed Rachel McAdams (who was also in Wedding Crashers). In fact, party-crashing may be the real metaphor of this season of True Detective; the McAdams character, Ani, does in fact crash a party ostensibly for investigative purposes; she is there to rescue and be rescued, the meat of all cop dramas, as well as to recover an ugly childhood memory from dad’s dubious commune.
Early on may be too soon to say that Vaughn is miscast (though one wonders how the show might have been improved if Vaughn and Farrell each had the other’s role). Vaughn’s hypnotically askew performance grows on the viewer. Perhaps his performance will become legendary with time. (The city of Vinci is already practically named for him!) He plays Frank with inexpressive manipulativeness, a dapper low-level gangster who is also an outsider. His face has the stillness of a hit man’s but every once in a while fear darts across his empty eyes. Though the tallest in any room, Frank is in over his head, again a crasher, and at season’s end Vaughn begins to own the cartoonishness of his two-bit psychopath and bully, and his Proustian death trudge in the final episode could have been funny but strangely is what it’s supposed to be: a ghost story. We see him as perhaps the rivetingly rotted peg that has held the house together from the start. After all, this is the land of show business, of visions in the desert.
