Reel Life: A gripping murder mystery

For the past few weeks, secluded in our homes, with OTT shows as our only respite, a bunch of us are having what can be best called a Kate Winslet moment. She has been at the centre of the best there is to view currently.

There is her stoic yet searing performance as the British paleontologist Mary Anning in Ammonite, on the one hand. And then she is equally spellbinding as the small-town detective Mare Sheehan investigating the murder of a young single mother Erin McMenamin in the ongoing HBO mini-series Mare Of Easttown streaming in India on Disney+Hotstar.

At the end of its sixth episode, the cliffhanger of a series has left the audience guessing feverishly about a family reunion and a photograph, while the mystery is still a long way to be solved in the last and seventh instalment that drops on May 31.

Suspects, clues, red herrings, twists and turns and relentless tension, Mare Of Easttown has all that is needed for an edge of the seat thriller. It keeps you guessing at every move ahead in the plot. But what it has the most is a heightened sense of life—individuals, relationships, friendships, family and above all community—all in an unmitigated turmoil.

Everyone is on the brink of a precipice, as though waiting for things to fall apart and crumble. Everyone is a potential suspect and criminal in the bleak small-town America that is brimming over with gloom and doom. A sepulchral air hangs heavy in the shadowy, dreary neighborhood that is as much a character in its own right.

Something is rotten in Easttown. Here marriages are hanging by a thread, secrets and lies underline the family dynamics and parents and children have a lot to face up to and reconcile with. It’s fascinating to see how the entire series builds on the question of paternity and fatherhood but the most steadfast presence is actually that of several mother figures—a young single mother is dead, while her best friend confides a deep dread about her killing to her own mother. Then you have yet another mother desperately looking out for her missing daughter, who the cops have been unable to trace for a long while and almost given up on.

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In Easttown grandmothers are proxy mothers to their grandkids who have been abandoned—by choice or due to the force of circumstance—by their moms who are often lax and delinquent.

Mare is one such mother trying to reconcile with loss of a loved one, yet attached to the memory of the moment that dealt her a severe blow. As her psychiatrist puts it, she is hiding behind the grief of others instead of processing and resolving her own.

In many ways Mare is like Mary of Ammonite in that there’s something incredibly ossified about both her professional and personal life. As though both are stuck in time and space. And in both her performances, Kate Winslet does the utmost as a performer--she entirely gives up on the vanity of a superstar, deglamorizes to immerse herself in the character and literally lives it inside out.

Stubby, drab, clad in baggy clothes, sloppy hair, a limp and a cast, an awkward gait and a haggard air about her—Winslet personifies the shabbiness of someone in shambles. Weary, listless, drooping and declining—a reel persona that is throbbing and pulsating like a real person. Winslet makes you feel Mare’s suffocation as well as her salvation.

Winslet told the Collider entertainment website that at 45 she is “pleased and also proud that it’s my right to just look like shit on screen now … I don’t have the face or the body that I had 20 years ago, and that’s really OK.”