DOROTHY RABINOWITZ: TRUE DETECTIVES AND REAL LIFE SPIES
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“True Detective” comes with all the ingredients for one of those dark, atmospheric series built around a search for a mysterious murderer—think “The Killing.” Set in Louisiana, it is awash in atmosphere and authenticity, along with overtones of the occult emanating from a sensationally ugly homicide, all peculiarly irrelevant to the reasons for this saga’s electrifying power. Det. Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson), police veteran, is assigned to the murder case of a young prostitute, along with Det. Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey)—a self-possessed man who keeps his distance to a degree the genial Hart can’t abide. He expects more, some sharing of thoughts, from the partner at his side all day.
Hart has reason to regret his wish when Cohle does venture to chat a bit, early in the first episode. In a word or two here and there he’s soon delivering subtle but unmistakable indicators of the cold-eyed observer he is—indicators, too, of the wit and eloquence of this script by series creator Nic Pizzolatto, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. They’re also signals to Hart, vague but disturbing ones, that his new partner’s views are unlike any he can grasp, alien to all that he understands to be normal and right.
A family man, Hart doesn’t, himself, always follow the straight and narrow, but his transgressions—mainly his taste for sexy women other than his attractive wife—are, as he sees it, the essence of normality. A kind of right for a hardworking detective, and even a good thing for his marriage. A man needs release, he’s given to explaining—for the good of the family. His partner Cohle’s transgressiveness is a very different kind—the real thing, and deeply offensive to Hart.
It looks, the laconic Cohle tells his partner while staring at the local streets barren of life, like someone’s memory of a town. It’s the first of the stream of alienating comments that the imperturbable Cohle delivers, and Mr. McConaughey’s imperturbable isn’t easily equaled. He’s spectacular in this role of a detective unyieldingly confident in his views of life and society—they’re not sunny—and in what morality requires of him.
It requires a lot, and much of that violent—this is about two detectives, after all, in search of a murderer. But there’s seldom a moment when it’s not clear that all the dramatic energy of the series has been invested in the characters of the two partners. It’s hard to remember any other first-class drama about detectives on the hunt for a killer that ever occasioned so little interest in whodunit. All the real suspense here, all the fascination, derives from the partners—especially those conversations, which Hart recognizes from the outset as a personal threat.
He has to hear a lot more than eerie observations about how the town looks like a memory—enough for Hart to tell his partner he has to “stop talking s—t.” But the talk inevitably continues as the drama deepens, as Hart’s domestic life becomes more complicated and the search for the murderer rolls on—led by the indefatigable Cohle, who religiously stores every clue he thinks he’s found in the black notebook he carries around.
The search takes the detectives to a revival meeting attended by the poorest of the poor and the faithful—a sight that causes Cohle to hold forth on the absurdity of religious belief, the ignorance of the believers. It’s a good bet nobody in the crowd “is going to be splitting the atom,” he says with characterically controlled contempt. To which the outraged Hart retorts bitterly, as he has so often, as he accuses his partner of complete incomprehension of the ways of decent, normal people in the world who have lives, who enjoy getting together and sharing things, including faith. But neither this argument nor any other has any power to persuade—Cohle’s certitude is impenetrable, the armor that makes him so vivid a character—and he continues, implacably in this remarkable scene, to lay out the case for the absurdity of religion.
Mr. Harrelson’s Hart is irresistible as his foil, a power in his own right, the guy everyone would rather have a beer with though he’s on the road to bad trouble, a man given to explosive rage—something Mr. Harrelson does very well.
The drama unfolds in a series of flashbacks separated by many years. Hart and Cohle, no longer young, end up reporting on the past in separate interviews—a formula carried off with subtlety and high intelligence, like everything else in this detective story.
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