Television Review: Marvel scores another small-screen slam-dunk with “Jessica Jones”.
The element of noir that has informed the shadowy urban morality plays of “Batman” and “Daredevil” gets the full-focus treatment in “Jessica Jones,” the newest Marvel television property that once again proves that the lucrative comic brand is bolder and ballsier when it sticks to the small screen. And for those suffering from superhero fatigue, not to worry: “Jessica Jones” isn’t really your typical superhero origin story, not by a mile. In fact, this riveting, often bruising drama is so entrenched in the gritty reality of its modern-day Hell’s Kitchen milieu that it’s occasionally easy to forget that you’re ostensibly watching a show about a woman imbued with superpowers. The show transforms the survivor’s mentality into the ultimate super-strength and grapples head-on with dark and weighty thematic material like rape and PTSD. The result is perhaps the most emotionally grounded Marvel effort to date, and certainly one of the best.
“Jessica Jones” takes heavily from “Veronica Mars,” although it owes its mythology to “Alias” and its sleek mood of dread to the cinema of David Fincher. It’s a slower, less action-centric outing than Steven DeKnight and Drew Goddard’s terrific “Daredevil,” but ultimately just as rewarding. It’s also noir to the core: slinky, seductive jazz infuses every neon-drenched nocturnal rendezvous with an unshakable air of danger, and there’s enough bone-crunching violence, hard-boiled Chandlerian patter and rough, bedframe-shattering sex (no, really) for a dozen or so “Sin City” movies. Certainly there’s reasons so many people are binge-watching.
What makes “Jessica Jones” really special is its firm and specific focus on the female perspective. Our titular (anti)heroine displays a great many of the traits that allow her more “hardened” male counterparts to excel at their vocation — toughness, cunning, a notable lack of sentiment and attachments — but since Jessica is a woman fleeing from the rocky aftermath of an unspecified sexual trauma, her plight becomes more urgent and also more prescient then it would had a man played the part. In that regard, “Jessica Jones” becomes a visceral and surprisingly affecting survival story that charts one smart, self-destructive woman’s attempts to reclaim her confidence and dignity whilst breaking free from the influence of a hyper-controlling man from whose shadow she is emerging. It’s also, for whatever it’s worth, the first proto-feminist detective story, and it’s a neat bit of genre-reversal that I think we could afford to see more of (do you hear me, Nic Pizzolatto?).
Krysten Ritter plays our namesake heroine: a former New York City vigilante who retreated into the sordid business of private investigation after a personal tragedy threatened to derail her life completely off course. Jones likes to drink, (a lot) she likes snooping around in people’s dirty business (as long as it pays the bills) and she really likes the passionate, no-strings-attached sex she enjoys with dive bar proprietor and fellow superhero Luke Cage (Mike Colter). It’s refreshing to see a pop entertainment that is so frank in its depiction of sexuality — many Marvel properties feel comparatively sterile. One thing Jessica doesn’t particularly dig is the constant invasions of privacy that she suffers at the hands of creepy, deluded male stalkers who look at the tough and resourceful Jones and see only an ass attached to a nice pair of legs. The most insidious of these maurauding male devils comes is a cosmopolitan bogeyman named Kilgrave, played with hammy, entrancing evil by British character actor David Tennant. Also known ominously as “the Purple Man,” Kilgrave is a real bad motherfucker, and Jones has good reason to be fearful of him. Turns out the Purple Man’s connected to a case Jones is currently working on –that of an innocent Midwestern girl gone bad — and that he may have plans to lure her back into his web as well.
A great deal of “Jessica Jones’s” success rests on the shoulders of the smolderingly beautiful Ritter. Lucky for us, she’s more than up to the task. She’s a fantastic actress and one of her chief assets as a performer is a kind of sexy, snarling surliness (she was memorable and touching as the grown-up daughter of an insufferable novelist in last year’s “Listen Up, Phillip”). It’s a trait that she puts to good use here, mainly in the show’s caustically funny voiceover, which occasionally reads like a collision between Dashiell Hammett and Joss Whedon. Cage is also an interesting figure: he’s almost this show’s equivalent of a femme fatale, with the camera gliding lovingly over his chiseled physique the same way a lesser director might regard the Jessica Rabbit curves of a typical noir dame. Kilgrave is also an A+ villain: like Wilson Fisk, the notorious Kingpin of “Daredevil,” we hear a lot of truly awful shit about Kilgrave before we actually see him. So it’s a testament to creator Melissa Rosenberg and actor Tennant that when we finally do meet the villainous mastermind, he’s somehow even scarier than we imagined him to be. There’s a disturbing and delicious undercurrent of moribund theatricality in Tennant’s performance, and he’s a joy to watch: one of the most vivid baddies in the Marvel canon.
“Jessica Jones” is a welcome breath of fresh air into the increasingly lifeless Marvel formula, and also a radical subversion of standard superhero tropes (indeed, aside from the semi-frequent conversations regarding Kilgrave’s whereabouts, this is a show that passes the Bechedel test with flying colors). It isn’t as poetic or visually ravishing as “Daredevil,” but in its own somber, small-scale way, it’s just as much of a step forward. Ritter delivers a bold, star-making performance and the show that surrounds her is assured and absorbing. Comic book geeks, say goodbye to your social lives for the next few weeks… “Jessica Jones” is just that good. B+