This article contains spoilers for the final installment of the Barry series.
When “Barry” premiered, HBO’s dark comedy looked like a classic two-track TV series. There was a crime story, and there was a showbiz story. Its bizarre setting is inspired by Barry Berkman (star, co-producer and director Bill Hader), a traumatized ex-Marine turned hitman who began acting as a respite from a life-threatening job. Thing.
One pass in the series tallied up Barry’s dead body count in LA’s mob wars, multiple attempts at redemption, and a series of final jobs. Barry is a Hollywood celebrity who attends acting classes taught by prosciutto Gene Kusnoe (Henry Winkler) and dates talented but struggling classmate Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg). There was another way around the outside of the
But by the final season, which ended on Sunday, those two roads were merging like the highways of LA. The brutality of show business, the performativeness of murder, they’re all part of the same production in Barry.
Series like “The Sopranos,” in which mobsters evangelize “The Godfather,” have played with the idea of criminals mimicking Hollywood notions. But most such stories tend to be more comfortable on one side of the divide than the other. Christopher Moltisanti’s attempt to step in as writer for The Sopranos, for example, wasn’t the series’ best moment.
“Barry”, on the other hand, sees both worlds sharing compromises and delusions. Barry uses his experience as a killer to start his career as an actor. tell a story About Gene being a killer with dramatic improvisations. He will appear in the TV series Laws of Humanity, an odd role for a man who breaks the law and has little humanity left. And his criminal activities lead him to team up with a Chechen mobster Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan stealing the scene) who is modeled after a showman of sorts.
Meanwhile, Sally, herself a victim of abusive relationships and industry sexism, created a streaming series that reveals her own pernicious proclivities as the videos go viral. screaming meltdown her former assistant. If committing murder requires a certain diva-like self-centeredness, ‘Barry’ suggests that it also takes tremendous talent to fully commit to Hollywood.
Throughout the first three seasons, the show’s representation of violence and pop culture was effective, but often felt disconnected. They are perfectly united in the final season, starting with the premiere and Barry finally going to jail for murdering Gene’s girlfriend, a police officer who has figured out his criminal identity.
He’s been a celebrity in prison, and prison officials are baffled by the idea of him being on TV. “I know you’re being called bad,” a distraught security guard tells him. “But I’m sure he’s not a bad person.”
Of course, whatever his sad career, Barry is a villain. Even he knows it when his delusions become less. But what he does benefit from is the television myth of a flawed yet charming criminal.
Throughout its four seasons, Barry has often run the risk of being the subject of criticism for being a stylish anti-hero show that makes ultraviolence fun. It was good, almost too good.
Hader, who directed most of the series, including the entire final season, has an exceptional ability to portray mayhem for a comedy background, and perhaps his talent comes from that background. The violence of “Barry,” like any good comedy skit, is astounding in the sense that on-screen carnage is rare.
An absurdly powerful shootout starts out of nowhere and fails spectacularly. While most film and TV shootouts take the viewer by the hand and show them who did what to whom, in “Barry,” the combat continues while realizing that the point of confusion is that you can’t make sense of it all. The chaos unfolds on widescreen. Get the information you want right away.
The violence is even funny. It’s so funny that I didn’t see it, rather than saying ‘hahaha’. or Come on” Interesting. It is neither noble nor wonderful nor cool.
The Nether is Barry. He’s sympathetic and broken in a way, and is heavily exploited, especially by his handler Fuchs (Stephen Root), who has monetized his murderous talents. But he lacks something, which becomes apparent as he tries to make up for it. He sees redemption not as an internal struggle, but as a mechanical process: follow the procedure, make the payment, get the result. (That someone so emotionally unintuitive could be a working actor underscored the show’s criticism of Hollywood.)
After the impressive end of the first season, I wrote that it would have been a brave and satisfying act to end the series there. Most of the time I’m glad the show continued, but at times it felt like a trilogy with the finale split in half by the studio. (The third season finale, in which Gene uses his acting talents to lure Barry into a police trap, would also have been a great series ending.)
But in the final episode of “Barry,” the idea of what it takes to get salvation returns ingeniously. And the endgame, of course, begins with the movie.
In a mid-season time jump, Barry and Sarah live incognito with their young son in dusty Nowhereville, where they learn that a film project based on Barry’s story is in the works. This lures Jean out of her asylum. At first, the film studios resisted sensationalizing the case, but in the end they couldn’t resist the limelight. It also ends up bringing Barry back to LA and killing his old acting teacher. He is unsuccessful, but ends up claiming that Gene was falsely involved in the murder.
After several kidnappings and one more shootout, Barry once again seemed to escape the consequences, but Sally, who finally waved her resignation, could only hold herself accountable for her actions. Tell him you can’t take it back. But when he finally decided to do so, a teacher shot him dead.
Has Barry really changed for the better and for the better? we don’t know. He had taken the case before, but he went to find justification to withdraw it. Jean takes a perverse interest in him and murders him the moment she offers to turn himself in, eliminating one person who might have cleared Jean’s name in the process.
Instead, after another time leap, we see Barry’s son sneaking into a friend’s house to watch a movie. In the film, Barry is portrayed as a naive victim manipulated by cynical criminal mastermind Jean. Gene may have won the final battle, but he has lost his eternal fame.
As for Barry, if he wasn’t saved in reality, he was saved in fiction, in a lie made for Hollywood. It’s a perfect crime.
