Barry Season 3 Review: TV’s funniest show goes from good to great-Entertainment News , Firstpost
Barry is propelled by the bizarre inequities of sense of commonality and in its third season it is funnier, darker and even more intimate.
In a scene from Barry’s third season a TV exec tells Sally (Sarah Goldberg), who has just had a big break with a series she is making an OTT platform “that the show isn’t hitting the right taste clusters”. It’s why Sally’s dream of making it big in Hollywood Los Angeles, gets nipped before the bud can even begin to reveal itself. In another scene from the third season the boss of Chechen drug cartel learns rather comically that an open parking lot in the middle of city is probably a bad place to run a distribution business out of. Barry is unlike any other TV show with its surreal mix of gory violence, hilarity and awkward moments of warmth and passion. In its third season that was massively delayed because of the pandemic, the HBO show elevates itself to a new visual language, a stubbornness about its many bizarre ideas and faith in the ability of despair to cough up some of the driest comedy you have ever scene.
The third season begins with Barry relapsing into an emotionless spiral of killing people after picking up hits off of an internet list. While he previously killed out of habit, he now kills out of boredom. Meanwhile, Gene Cousineau – a fantastic Harry Winkler – is still seething from the pain of learning that his protégé is actually behind the death of his late girlfriend. Cousineau, in the most Hollywood way possible, plans a reluctant often absurdist revenge on the hitman. Sally’s career has taken off, and it is through her travails in LA’s entertainment business, that the show really kicks in some teeth with self-aware criticism of the filmmaking business and the dominance of the ‘algorithm’. Even in the third, somewhat sentimentally charged season its Anthony Carrigan as NoHo Hank who takes away the prize of modern TV’s most likeable gangster. As a Chechen, gay, druglord Hank is deliriously memorable and steals every scene he is in. From self-effacing politeness, to choreographing a performance that must treat menace as a source of jeopardy, Hank deserves the spin-off he is most likely to get.
Bill Hader was the master of mime and mimicry on SNL (Saturday Night Live) but in Barry he has manufactured a stiffness that is equal parts tragedy and comedy. His history rooted in the trauma of war, is carefully – never disrespectfully – enmeshed into his ability to live without the compulsion of killing. In one scene he arrives at Hank’s house unannounced, almost begging for a few names he could kill. It’s his way of therapy, and though it eschews conversations about violence as a form of escape, in Barry it merges into the weirdness of the world. Even Barry’s long-time accomplice Fuchs, treats their recent animosity as personal affront rather than a professional one. Starved of friendship, Fuchs appears intermittently in the third season but is clearly struggling with a break-up he reluctantly engineered. Not too dissimilar to Fuchs’ transgressions are Cousineau’s choices, his insistence to nurse the idea of filmic revenge rather than lawful justice. It’s where the third season’s confidence to embrace the extraordinary really shines. Everyone chooses the worse of the two options in front of them, and it makes for a ballast of humour and sarcasm.
Barry has never not been witty. It has a keen sense of culture, where it narrates not just one world but many. From Hollywood’s film scene, to the eccentricities of theatre to the drug cartels and mob hitman. In this third season, however, Barry finds another fertile ground in the arms of love. While Barry and Sally’s courtship encounters its first real bump, Hank’s unattested love for the leader of a rival mob, is tender in the subtlest of ways. Even Cousineau’s yearning for revenge, is built on an elderly man’s last chance at some sort of redemption. It’s the one love story that the show sacrifices to brutally make a point about the notoriety of fate. It’s why Barry is both classically sound in the traditional ideas that it rises from, and modern in the way it sticks to the wider panoramic idea of life always being a glass half empty. It’s a dreary worldview, but in this world of uproarious farce, it works to perfection.
If the writing in Barry couldn’t be admired enough, the cinematography and the biblical camerawork of this new season elevates a mad-cap series to match the absurdity of its ideas. There is beauty and darkness to each scene, punctuated almost perfectly by Hader’s glassy, cold killer with a dream. That Barry continues to pursue acting as some sort of shot at life and soulful living, is as meta as the world of self-help and motivational influencers could be. That a man can be so deranged and delusional and yet act rationally in the face of a gun, is perhaps the ideal metaphor for a world losing to itself, a part of its previous self.
Rating: ****
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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