The last time that Brad Inglesby wrote a mini-series for HBO, it was the highly acclaimed and award-winning “Mare of Easttown.” He returns to HBO, and those wonderful Philly accents, this September with the intense “Task,” a project that’s very different in tone but also plays with buried secrets and resentments, filtered through a remarkable ensemble. As “Mare” was to “Gone Baby Gone,” this is to “The Town,” a project with less mystery but more firepower. The plotting here isn’t quite as tight as “Easttown”—a few twists in the second half of the season feel designed more for storytelling than growing organically from the well-defined characters—but this is still high-caliber drama that boils down to how a good man, a flawed man, and a truly evil man forever warp each other’s lives.
The good man is Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), a widower who spends his days recruiting people for the FBI and his weekends bird watching. He has a teenage daughter named Emily (Silvia Diconicio) that he’s trying his best to raise, but they share a truly unfathomable existence related to Tom’s incarcerated son that won’t be spoiled here, other than to say it allows Ruffalo to subtly play so many conflicting emotions. Tom is a rich, complex character, a former priest who has now been presented with an almost impossible test of forgiveness. Ruffalo plays his grief as a weight on his shoulders, one that only lifts when he’s either too drunk to walk upstairs or working a case. It’s his subtlest and best work in years.
He gets the opportunity to focus on something other than drinking when his boss (a cleverly icy Martha Plimpton) taps Tom to lead a task force that includes a trio of young agents: the awkward Lizzie (Alison Oliver), confident Grasso (Fabien Frankel), and steely Aleah (Thuso Mbedu). Their job is to figure out who the masked men are that have been ripping off drug houses in the Philly suburbs before they start an all-out turf war. These guys case out places run by dealers and violently rob them, causing rival gangs to increase the danger to the entire community as they seek their own form of justice.
The flawed man is the leader of the breaking bad guys, another haunted soul named Robbie (Tom Pelphrey of “Ozark”). We learn in the premiere that Robbie’s wife has taken off, leaving him to care for their two kids in the home of his niece Maeve (Emilia Jones of “CODA”) after Tom’s brother was murdered. Yes, this is one of those shows in which the major players all have deep wells of grief that have curdled in such a way that they’re leading them into increasingly bad decisions. Robbie and his garbage man mates Cliff (Raul Castillo) and Peaches (Owen Teague) are just bad guys robbing worse guys, both for profit and a bit of vengeance. What could go wrong?
Of course, the premiere ends with one of Robbie’s operations going very sideways, setting in motion a series of events that can only lead to more violence and death. Pelphrey captures the arc of a man who knows he’s sinking into quicksand even as he tries to get to shore, scrambling through a series of decisions where the only options are bad and worse. It’s a performance that will draw comparisons to his similarly doomed character on “Ozark.” Still, it’s another stunner from this truly great performer, someone who pushes aside chances at melodrama to play truth. Ruffalo also goes subtler than he sometimes does, and the two give the show an interesting yin/yang as a pair of scarred men trying their best to heal.
The third point in the triangle belongs to Jamie McShane, a great character actor who delivers his best work here as Perry, the leader of the motorcycle gang whose drugs are being stolen. McShane is cold as ice, the vicious counter to the warmth of the other two male leads. Expertly directed, he also makes astute decisions as an actor, knowing there’s more menace in a silent glare than a loud proclamation.
Not every character is quite as richly drawn as the three leads—for example, Jones serves as an interesting emotional counter to Pelphrey early but disappears when the crowded plotting runs out of room for her. There’s also a convenient nature to some of the writing that gets more prevalent as the series goes on. In many ways, the premiere is the best episode, a richly drawn introduction to fascinating characters before the demands of the action/thriller genre take hold.
And yet enough of the foundation laid by that first episode remains intact throughout to keep things interesting. “Task” is about people who let emotion overtake logic and even self-preservation. It may not produce the same fervor as “Mare” by virtue of not having a mystery waiting to be solved in the final episode, but it’s a reminder of how well HBO can do this kind of thing when a perfectly cast ensemble is invigorated by the craft and the writing around them.
Whole mini-series screened for review. Premieres on HBO on September 7th.
