"The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey" mini-series review - Samuel L. Jackson's dream project of old age and dementia
A stunningly stylish Apple TV+ anti-detective that is hard to fall in love with but will be remembered for a long time.
The old man Ptolemy Gray (Samuel L. Jackson) miraculously lived up to 93 years and all the remaining days allotted to him by fate, he lives in oppressive loneliness. He barely remembers what happened to him yesterday, and calls his relatives, who occasionally come to visit, by strange names. A black pensioner suffers from dementia and constantly falls into retrospective dreams: there a man remembers his first love, childhood and terrible turning points of his youth. One day, his beloved nephew is killed, and a young nurse, Robin (Dominic Fishback), is assigned to Ptolemy. Having learned about an experimental method that can restore memory, Gray takes the risk and, having received the coveted injection, begins the search for those responsible for the death of a relative.
“The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray” is another dream project that has been trying to be realized for a little over a decade. The initiator of the idea this time was not the producer or even the author of the original novel (writer Walter Mosley, however, acted as a screenwriter here), but the leading actor Samuel L. Jackson. The Hollywood actor watched the rapid development of Alzheimer's disease in his relatives and decided that he needed to tell about old people and their heavy burden in the format of a unique experiment: slowly immersing the viewer in the mind of a sick person and forcing the audience to piece together fragments of the hero's life.
Although the plot of the series is largely detective, there are only a few plot moves from the tabloid genre of Agatha Christie. “Ptolemy Gray” seems to consciously refuse to fit into a strict framework: this is a work for which it is not so much the narrative or scenario turns that is important, but the complex spectator experience. There are paradoxically few large-scale conflicts in the series: all dramatic situations revolve around family squabbles, wandering through the corridors of memories and everyday sketches about the life of a black man from a quiet ghetto.
More than a detective story, "Ptolemy Gray" resembles an aesthetic movie puzzle that has to be painstakingly assembled throughout all six episodes. The plot slips from one flashback to another, and the retired hero himself refocuses either on relationships with loved ones or on unraveling the mysteries of the past. Last year's "Father" told about the terrible dementia everyday life much more effectively, and Christopher Nolan conceptualized memory lapses much more cunningly in "Remember" - and yet "Ptolemy Grey", despite its secondary nature, manages to surprise with one old trick after another.
Perhaps the point is in the gentle indie style chosen by the creators. One of the directors was Guillermo Navarro, the permanent operator of the legendary Mexican storyteller Guillermo del Toro. From his colleague, he seems to have borrowed the warm tones of small apartments, love of bright colors and nostalgic aesthetics. "Ptolemy Gray" looks like a yellowed photograph or a faded film that was lucky to find in an old closet: street light floods the old man's entire room with golden patterns, and magical defocuses create the illusion of fabulousness and unreality of what is happening.
The only thing Ptolemy Gray lacks is pressure. Dramatically it is too passive, visually too cozy. The series does not challenge or argue with the viewer, rather, on the contrary, it wraps him up and prepares him for the sweetest dreams. However, now this ability to distract from everything in the world is required of art more than ever.
This article was sponsored by Yasmina document preparation
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