Television Review: For better or worse, the Billy Bob Thornton-starring “Goliath” is a throwback to a simpler age of T.V.
Billy Bob Thornton is a national treasure. Is that really news to anyone, though? While his presence in mainstream American movies has been somewhat diminished in the last five to six years (barring his token, thankless appearance in “Entourage: The Movie”), the Arkansas-born rogue is still one of the most magnetic and indelible screen actors of his generation. He’s consistently, sometimes bafflingly brilliant, whether he’s playing a laconic barber in the Coen brother’s dazzling neo-noir The Man Who Wasn’t There or just an alcoholic, piece-of-shit mall Santa in Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa. With his husky purr of a voice, bathed in the hues of cigarette smoke and bourbon whiskey, his sleepy eyes that betray a cutting intelligence or the way he seems to lose himself fearlessly in the roles he chooses, it’s hard to argue that a movie or T.V. show isn’t automatically better once you find out Billy Bob is in it. Even in not-so-great movies like the Coen’s screwball lark Intolerable Cruelty or Richard Linklater’s dire remake of the children’s classic The Bad News Bears, the actor invents new reasons to keep us watching.
So, how is Billy Bob in Goliath, Amazon’s new legal drama from the veteran T.V. team of David E. Kelley and Jonathan Shapiro? To be honest, it’s a little hard to imagine the show without him. Goliath is a perfectly capable, more or less consistently watchable drama that ultimately never rises above its built-in limitations, except for when Thornton is the sole focus. The fact that he’s playing a world-class A-hole — the kind we’ve seen far too many of in shows at this point, ranging from the prestige likes of Mad Men to bawdier work like Californication — renders this last notion all the more peculiar. In many ways, Goliath operates as your standard-issue antihero drama, but decked out in legalese jargon and acted with more conviction than the material itself deserves. It’s worth watching for Billy Bob, though: he manages to turn a T.V. scumbag who might be unbearable in the hands of a lesser actor into someone we come to care about. If that doesn’t make him a miracle worker, then I’m not sure what would.
Kelley and Shapiro are the team behind watershed courtroom dramas like The Practice and Boston Legal and, in many ways, Goliath feels less like an entry in T.V.’s ongoing prestige reinvention and more like a kind of benign retrogression to a time when television wasn’t so thematically or visually ambitious. This sounds like a backhanded knock to the show itself, though it’s hardly intended as such. Shows like Westworld are emblematic of the adage that ambition does not necessarily equal greatness, and the pleasures to be had in Goliath come from its junky modesty. This is not a show that is looking to change the way you view television: mostly, it’s a pleasant, well-acted throwback that totally befits Amazon’s current binge-watching model. Mostly, though, Goliath is a showcase for the eccentric gifts of its lead performer. Thornton is capable of taking leaden line readings and making them sing with his boozy, sing-songy Southern drawl, and his performance is absolutely dynamite, even when the rest of the show fails to rise to his level.
Thornton plays Billy McBride, who is first seen stealing his neighbor’s room-service leftovers (he’s staying at a fleabag motel, for reasons that will come to the light later) and feeding it to a dog he finds on the street. Prone to bouts of heavy drinking and falling into bed with strange women (yawn), Billy is what T.V. showrunners might call “a real piece of work”. But, as the show so often reminds us, Billy was once great: he used to be the third head of a prestigious legal firm who took a spectacular (and very public) fall from grace, and he now ekes out a meager living taking on whatever thankless case he can get his grubby paws on. He’s also, like the dog he meets in the show’s opening moments, stubborn to an almost unthinkable degree. It’s this hardened obstinance that sees Billy taking on the case that, theoretically, could turn his career and life around: it’s a maritime civil lawsuit, one that involves an explosion on a trawler at sea that occurred under mysterious circumstances. It’s the kind of nefarious potential crime that everyone connected to wants to keep hush on, and it might just be the catalyst that sees our (anti) hero heading back into the thorny morass of his past.
Said past comes personified in the chilly visage of Billy’s old legal nemesis, a nasty fellow Donald Cooperman, played with hammy, lip-smacking cuckoo intensity by the one and only Mr. William Hurt. As if that weren’t enough, Cooperman’s firm — in which all the office spaces are as neatly symmetrical and stylishly foreboding as a Stanley Kubrick set — is also the business that employs Billy’s ex-wife Julie (Maria Bello). And so, as you might expect, Billy is forced to get his shit together, partner with a no-bullshit small-claims attorney named Patty Solis-Papagian (Nina Arianda, overacting to the hilt) and reclaim his life, his purpose, his destiny, man.
Not long after Billy makes this decision, “weird shit” starts happening to him. He’s pulled over by the cops for a stop-and-frisk that ends with him spending a night in county lockup. During a night out with his sullen teenage daughter (Diana Hopper), he finds himself trailed by an ominous man wearing a black suit. Typically, when you’re trying to follow someone incognito, you don’t dress for a night out on the town, but Goliath is so not very interested in logic as it’s traditionally defined (a head-slapping twist at the end of the second episode reveals this to be true). All of these asides are presumably red herrings for the final showdown that will eventually transpire between Billy and his arch-enemy, which is not to say that these various narrative threads aren’t engaging enough along the way — it’s just that three episodes in and it still feels like Goliath is figuring out its voice and purpose.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In spite of its familiarity, Goliath does undeniably have many things going for it. While the show often feels like the kind of sex-and-booze-fueled dramatic lark that could have a home on Showtime, the show is light on forced sentimentality (it’s still there, but in conservative doses) and its tone is largely breezy and agreeable throughout. Unlike Billions — a show that Goliath resembles in more than a few ways — Kelley and Shapiro’s show is not some sour shrine to masculine power fantasies. It’s a shaggy, low-key character study that is only unconvincing when moronic plotting and blunt speechifying get in the way.
Though it’s not the first show to be set in the sprawling metropolis of L.A., Goliath does possess an unusually pungent sense of location. As someone who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, it’s nice to see the flat, warehouse-dotted expanse of Van Nuys represented in something that’s not a Paul Thomas Anderson film (hey, there’s even mentions of the Van Nuys Municipal Courthouse and everyone’s favorite Valley/Mexican haunt, El Fogato, in the pilot episode!) Goliath works just fine when taken on its own ruddy terms, and Thornton, actorly shaman that he is, ends up receiving some considerable support from his co-stars, nearly all of whom are game in breathing new life into musty characterizations. Particularly engaging is Olivia Thirlby, who plays a small part so smartly and with such nuance I wondered why I haven’t seen more of her in the past couple of years.
The same can’t exactly be said for William Hurt — which is a shame, since he’s technically the show’s second lead. Mr. Hurt is an actor who swings for the fences in almost everything he does, and he’s often fantastic, like when he played Viggo Mortensen’s loopy, homicidal brother in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. When he misses, though, Mr. Hurt can give you a migraine. His sleepy take on the Machiavellian power player that is Donald Cooperman falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. He’s hardly chewing the scenery on the scale of, say, his turn in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, but you almost want Hurt — with his half-burned face and dead-eyed line readings — to leap to life a bit more in this part. I’m sure we’ll see plenty more of Mr. Hurt in the episodes to come, but let’s not kid ourselves: this is Billy Bob’s hour, and it’s a pleasure to have him anchor a small-screen drama of his own, even if it’s not as great as we might have hoped. Matt Zoller Seitz recently dubbed him “the redneck Laurence Olivier” in his review of the show and if that description doesn’t get you at least a little excited for Goliath, then I’m sorry, but you’re probably dead inside.
Grades: “Of Mice and Men,” C+. “Pride and Prejudice,” B-. “Game On,” B-.
