Last night I watched the first two episodes of Jeff Pope‘s Archie, a four-part Britbox miniseries about the inner turmoils and insecurities of Cary Grant. I’d read some weak reviews and didn’t expect much, and during the sit I was trying to imagine such a series looking or feeling more inauthentic.
You can really feel a certain communion —- vibes, textures, atmospheres — with ‘50s Italy in Michael Mann‘s Ferrari, for example. Archie rarely ventures beyond the banal and mundane and superficial.
Laura Aikman‘s Dyan Cannon aside, nobody even vaguely resembles the characters they’re playing. It’s almost all third-string. Pope makes no attempt to make the mid-20th Century dialogue sound like it was spoken back then — his script is riddled with 2023 slang expressions and attitudes, which is awful.
But it’s not altogether awful.
Pope’s view (shared by biographers) is basically that once Grant finally got going as a movie actor in the early 1930s, he faked it left and right and gradually came uo with the wryly debonair “Cary Grant” — an alternate personality that was mostly divorced from the anxious, insecure guy he actually was.
I like the fact that Archie adventurously time-jumps all over the place — British childhood, snowy-haired finale, 20something years, late middle age…here, there, everywhere.
The first-rate Jason Isaacs doesn’t begin to resemble Grant, but he does a half-decent job of inhabiting or recreating certain aspects of Grant’s charming but shifty nature. Most of the time you’re thinking “this is too low-budget, too sloppy and slipshod” but now and then it’s interesting.