Truths that are not told

This article is published in issue 2-3 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 19, 2021

I like to think of it as that old Hebrew saying: everyone has one big secret that they try to keep their whole life. Most fail, some do: catastrophes are expected in both cases.

Mysteries violated and mysteries defended, this is it The Undoing – The Untold Truths, the television series created by David Kelley which will be broadcast in Italy from 8 January on Sky Atlantic and which has disturbed the word masterpiece.

As far as I am concerned, there is a very simple comparison: if during the vision I get off the sofa due to excess tension, continuing to look at the screen while standing or sitting on the ground, then something big is boiling in the pot. It had happened with the first two seasons of Homeland, with the latest of Breaking Bad, lately with Succession, here we go again with this story interpreted by Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and our Matilda De Angelis, orchestrated by Susanne Bier.
We must be careful to tell The Undoing: we are facing a television series that is not a thriller, not even a mystery, rather the photograph of a balance between human beings. It can be anticipated that the characters of Kidman and Grant love each other, a certain form of love to put your hand on fire, and that the girl played by De Angelis creeps exactly where the bond seems indissoluble. Infidelity? It’s an outdated question, and it goes much further because New York gets bored with the obvious.
This is about unsuspectedness, that is, people we swear we know and who instead dig holes in other directions. Hugh Grant, for example, who plays a pediatric oncologist with good alibis. Or Kidman herself, a psychotherapist, who investigates violations in the couples of others. Seeing them, everything seems under control, apart from one evening, when a young woman is in the elevator with Kidman: they hardly know each other, but it is by going down to the ground floor of a Manhattan skyscraper that our psychotherapist notices a leak. It is an unmotivated and stubborn scent, like when we perceive a dark design but we don’t have the guts to be aware of it. Yet she is there, on the edge of her soul, and begins to torment her until she finds reason that very night, when the young woman will give away the nightmare.

Nicole Kidman’s estrangement in that elevator recalls a story across the Alps in which a man pretended to be a doctor without ever having been one, getting away with it until a dramatic ending. His name is Jean-Claude Romand and it is to him that Emmanuel Carrère dedicated one of his most famous works, The opponent. When questioning the community around Romand, a neighbor said he never had reason to believe in the doctor’s double life, or probably did. What was the clue? No one in truth, just a hint that annoyed him: gentillesse, that always cordial way of being. Even the young woman in the elevator turns to Nicole Kidman about her courtesy: she declares it in her eyes, “You are a kind woman,” giving off the sense of compassion with which one treats the naive.
Deceptions. Omens. But The Undoing it is also a fresco on money, more precisely on that class in which the private driver or an apartment in Manhattan with more than three bedrooms falls. False certainties enjoy lurking in ease, as if opulence saves energy to be countered elsewhere: how much thrill in living a destiny that is not ours, wearing the forbidden clothes. So one’s skin is no longer enough and for the first time a television series hosts at the same time the Edmond Dantès of Count of Montecristo, to seek another self in revenge, and Raskol’nikov’s Crime and Punishment, wanting to be reborn in the abyss, and finally her, the Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s novel, with her demanding one foot in the hearth and one in adventure: for all of them the mistake is to think that they are driven by the hunger for revenge, of subversion, of escape. It’s the opposite: they all want to multiply the ordinary. Having double hearts.

The double heart, here is the thrilling engine of this six-part film dedicated to hidden truths. In some it beats clear: it is the father of Nicole Kidman’s character, a magnificent Donald Sutherland, who finds himself holding the strings while the tragedy unfolds. In the middle of the story there is a scene in which he goes to talk to the rector because they want to remove his nephew from the school that Sutherland himself has financed. Our Donald is sitting in the armchair and listening to the reasons for the decision. We hear that it is for the good of the nephew, for the good of the community, for common sense that must prevail. He nods, then takes the floor and reminds the rector who is in front of him: “I am an old-fashioned cocksucker.” That is: don’t you dare, because my nature – and that of our world – is revenge.
Dog eat dog. Cain kills Cain. Did Abel ever exist? It is an improper question because in New York there is no light without darkness, and vice versa, but Americans are among the few left who dare well to purity in their film characters. This candor resists in the son of the Kidman-Grant couple: he is just over ten years old and discovers what duplicity is from parents. He is upset, until he becomes addicted to the theater of evil. He is the son of those parents. It still is. And he doesn’t repudiate them, as if to say: perhaps the same china will also touch me.
Maybe it will be up to us too.

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