HBO series thrives in Batman’s absence

Photo: Macall Polay / HBO

Batman does not appear in The Penguinand if you accept the show on its own terms, you won’t miss it. Not when Cristin Milioti, as organized crime heiress Sofia Falcone, does her best jaw-clenching O-Ren Ishii impersonation at the head of a table full of murderous criminals, intimidating and bending them to her will. And certainly not when Colin Farrell, from under a ton of prosthetics as the dogged henchman Oz Cobb, delivers an outrageous version of gabagool excellence: waggling his eyebrows in shock, staring at Kubrick with disgust, and pontificating on the ills of the upper classes as if he’s Frank Sobotka running for another union term. This is all praise, and on the basis of those two performances, The Penguin performs an exorcism that at first seemed impossible.

What series creator Lauren LeFranc achieves is a contradiction. By banishing Batman and his fantastical influence on Gotham The PenguinThe city’s criminal underworld feels more grounded in the mundane details of drug deals and power plays, in real matters of life and death. Frank Sinatra’s “Call Me Irresponsible” plays on the soundtrack, someone references Ginger Rogers’ tap dancing, and Rita Hayworth’s Gilda reruns on an old box-set TV, and there is no break in our suspension of disbelief. But somehow, within that earthly milieu, The Penguin Milioti and Farrell also do a big A-act — chewing scenery and growling over dialogue as if they’re quietly auditioning for a Martin Scorsese film. The tension in the show’s conflicting flavors of minimalism and maximalism makes The Penguin to continue slowly but surely, accelerating ever faster toward the final act, in which LeFranc demonstrates her deep understanding of her title character and her sheer self-confidence in denying the audience the horrible ending they might think they want.

We’re never really free of Bruce Wayne; Hollywood usually lets only a few years pass between attempts at the franchise. Only 13 months passed between Christian Bale’s version of the character The dark knight rises in 2012 and Ben Affleck was cast in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel follow-up in 2013. The same year that joker used the Waynes as representatives of the evil one percent, Robert Pattinson was cast as a younger gothic version of Gotham’s nocturnal prodigal son in Matt Reeves’s The Batmanof which The Penguin is a spin-off. There were 100 episodes of GothamAnd Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler aired for three seasons. Earlier this summer, Batman: Masked Crusader centered the title character in detective mode, investigating everything from jewel thefts and arson to energy vampires and ghosts. Gotham City has long been defined by the Bruce Wayne-Batman duality — and the man’s dead parents, and the burden of his wealth, and all his unresolved trauma. And while The Penguin definitely has some of those things, because you can’t set a story in Gotham without family problems, class divisions and opportunistic criminals, but it also feels very different from what’s come before, thanks to a series of smart choices in casting, script and design.

LeFranc’s unsentimental rejection of Batman makes it possible The Penguin to thrive in his absence, revealing new textures of a Gotham we thought we knew everything about. Without him, the show is grounded — to all the petty crime that takes place on Gotham’s streets and the way loss dictates our shifting barometers for good and evil — and the season finds weird and seething ways to explore that spectrum of morality. Oz Cobb and Sofia Falcone get to be evil in entertaining and watchable ways on their own, and many of the show’s character dynamics vibrate with a “chaos is a ladder” energy that evokes HBO’s peers Game of Thrones. The production and art design are at their most exciting when the series looks back to the mid-century pop culture and styling that shaped Oz and Sofia’s youth; certainly, it is Casino And Scar face pastiche, but her purple pinstripe suits and her plunging necklines and fur coats look great. And while the show’s pacing is uneven and its plot devices are generally familiar, especially when it pits Sofia, Oz, and various ethnically organized gangs against each other, the overall execution is thankfully more Gangs of London than The Continental.

The Penguin begins a week after the events of The Batman and offers a bit of an “earlier on” via the nightly news reports. Carmine Falcone (played in the film by John Turturro and recast in the series by Mark Strong), Gotham’s former patriarch of the criminal underworld and secret father of Selina Kyle/Catwoman, is revealed to be an informant who helped orchestrate the downfall of his rivals, the Maroni family, and is murdered. A terrorist plot masterminded by the Riddler has swept through Gotham City, inspiring Batman to more fully reveal himself to the public as he saves civilians and takes out the Riddler’s incel-centric followers. But even FEMA government assistance and Gotham’s unity-minded elected mayor can’t quell the feeling that Gotham is collapsing in on itself; when Falcone’s second-in-command, Oz, breaks into his boss’s old apartment to peer out of the giant windows to find it looking gray and grimy, as if a layer of soot and mold has settled over every available surface. It may not seem like much, but Oz – nicknamed the Penguin for his limp, but apparently also for his teardrop face and beaked, scarred face – sees an opportunity to take over.

His attempt to transition from Falcone’s background fixer to head of the family that runs Gotham’s drug trade requires eliminating a number of adversaries. Next in line for the crown is Falcone’s playboy son, Alberto (Michael Zegen), who, despite being more Fredo Corleone than Michael, is backed by allies like family boss Johnny Vitti (Michael Kelly). The Maronis, whom Carmine betrayed, still pose a threat; though Sal (Clancy Brown) is in prison, his wife, Nadia (Shohreh Aghdashloo), is more than capable of ruling in his stead. (In one of the series’ most unexpected surprises, Nadia, like Aghdashloo himself, is Iranian, and Sal and Nadia speak as much Farsi as English.) Other ethnic lines have been drawn among Gotham’s gangs, each fighting for a slice of the pie that Carmine used to keep mostly for himself. But most ominous is Falcone’s daughter and Alberto’s sister, Sofia, released from Arkham Asylum after years inside and with deep resentments against Oz, her chauffeur. “I’ve been rehabilitated,” she says with a tight smile when she and Oz meet again, and Milioti’s talent as an actress is most evident in these economical moments, when she gives us a glimpse into a psyche that’s been torn apart.

The character of Sofia is one of the biggest departures from the comic book storylines loosely inspired by the series. The Penguinand her competition with Oz to rule Gotham’s underworld drives most of the tension, each throwing themselves into escalating violence to gain the upper hand over the other. Sometimes those escalations are when the series feels most routine in its cycle of plan-underhand-attack-repetition and most indebted to its credentials; I can’t complain about The Penguin imitate Gangs of New Yorkbut when it comes to The godfather, Promenade Empire was there first. (And was better composed; The Penguin (The film is flatly lit, and the action editing can be erratic.) But then Milioti makes a kind of sly but furious gesture to show us the depth of Sofia’s resentment toward her family, like filling a glass of wine to the brim as her male relatives look on in horror. Or Farrell’s Oz takes his assistant, Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), a teenager from the same Gotham slums where Oz grew up, out to dinner at a fancy French restaurant, leans in with interest as Victor talks about his now-deceased parents’ money problems, and then raises a toast in their honor. Those moments feel uniquely The Penguin‘s treatment of these characters, and they go a long way toward balancing out the series’ predictable storyline.

The word transformative comes dangerously close to acting cliché, but it doesn’t feel like enough to describe what Farrell does in The Penguin. The only recognizable thing about the actor are his eyes, and he uses them to sell the emotional arc of his entire performance. Oz was written to play on other people’s suspicions about him, and Farrell takes great pleasure in emphasizing his sleaze: He smiles so wide that his many gold teeth are visible, he sings his already affected “fuhgeddaboudit” voice a little higher when he’s anxious, and he never misses a joke about another man’s lack of masculinity. The character hits every viable Italian-American stereotype; our guy even lets loose a Joey Tribbiani-esque “How you doin’?” But one of the show’s smartest touches is how it reveals Oz’s identity as a malleable, willful performance, shaped by his relationship with his demanding mother and codified by years of trying to fit in with the Falcones. It’s a feat of chameleonic cunning, using the character’s smooth-talking style and use of biting humour to lull us into a kind of amused complacency, before delivering a twist that makes it abundantly clear that this is no antihero tale. The Penguin is a portrait of a villain, and Farrell’s sympathy is its most difficult secret weapon.

Both Milioti and Farrell play characters who slide into cartoons and caricatures, but they retain the sharp edges of humanity – jealousy and greed, grief and lust, self-loathing and boastfulness – that The Penguin simultaneously pulpy and plausible. And, more effectively than the films of Christopher Nolan or Todd Phillips, populist; like any worthwhile story about organized crime, The Penguin is really about what it takes to make it in America. What rules must you break to get ahead? What alliances, and whose labor, must be protected in a world where everyone eats each other? What are the costs of abandoning this system or trying to break the wheel? Milioti and Farrell get parallel talks on these questions, and The Penguin sometimes becomes repetitive in its treatment of the two as bizarre mirror versions of each other. If one has a vision of a worker-led future, the other must have one too; if one has an overbearing parent, the other must have one too; if one misses a lost sibling, the other must have one too. But that trait is forgivable when The Penguin gives its central duo plenty of room to grow, and the result is a spinoff that doesn’t need its cinematic predecessor to light up the night.