Boardwalk Empire Review: “What Jesus Said” (5×03)

More than it does anything else, this week’s episode of Boardwalk Empire confirms the show’s storytelling method, remaining entrenched in the series slow (we might instead say “steady”), novelistic approach to telling its story through the accumulation of character-driven scenes, rather than necessarily through developments of the plot. There are plot developments as well, of course—Luciano and Siegel’s murder of several of Doctor Narcisse’s girls this week guarantees a reckoning in the episodes to come, for starters. But, as is always the case with early season episodes, much of what goes on here is place-setting, standing up dominoes that we’ll later have much more fun knocking down.

You know this already about Boardwalk Empire, and either you’ve bought in or, if you haven’t, you’ve likely stopped watching altogether. So while I wish the show could be a little faster paced, a little lighter on its feet, writing to that effect is fruitless. Instead, the show from week to week rises and falls on the strength of the scenes it chooses to focus on. This week, the focus is on a few key scenes, with some additional characters scattered about for the sake of moving the season along.

This week, the focus is on Chalky White, and this is good news indeed for the viewer. Chalky and his newfound companion, Milton, break into a house and take the widow and daughter who live there hostage. Milton spied a safe in the home before, and is determined now for its contents. The girl, Fern, and her mother prove pluckier than expected, however, and they stall Milton all day long with lies about where the safe is located, when the man of the house will arrive home, and so forth. The scene is an extended vignette, a sort of pseudo-bottle episode tucked away inside “What Jesus Said,” and it is magnificent, unsettling and exquisitely tense, feeling for all the world like a lost Flannery O’Connor story.

It’s no great shakes at this point to state how astoundingly talented Michael Kenneth Williams is, but it bears repeating here anyway. Chalky is a silent observer for much of this episode, answering very few questions, and even those cryptically—does his daughter know who he is, Fern asks. Chalky says, “She knew what I was.” But neither Chalky nor Williams needs say anything to be effective. The actor imbues even silent stares, of which this episode has several, with great import. The tension builds and builds, and of course we know, instinctively perhaps, that Chalky will kill Milton. He will act to save this family from being murdered—that will be the bridge too far for him. But when it happens he receives as thanks only a gun leveled at him, and orders to leave the house. Chalky’s experience has been such that he believes himself deserving of little more.

This is a brilliant scene, and a great breakdown of Chalky’s character at this point, filling in many of the blanks of the premiere, as well as of the gap between seasons. He is still reeling from Maybelle’s death, and it is the event that has led him to lose everything else, as well. He and Nucky are mirrors of each other as ever, but, as we’ve learned time and again, Nucky will always have one advantage Chalky can never have.

It’s that advantage that allows Nucky to spend the episode gallivanting with Joe Kennedy, despite having committed as many crimes as Chalky and then some. Kennedy is a cracked mirror held up against Nucky (or, more truthfully, Nucky is the one with the cracks). He has a large, happy family; he claims never to have committed a crime in his life; he does not drink. He is exactly the sort of man Nucky pictures himself as, and in seeing him, he is the sort of man who makes Nucky realize that he himself, is not that sort of man. Kennedy prods and pokes, asking Nucky “What are you?” when Nucky attempts to distinguish himself from gangsters. He can’t. He tells white lies about his family, his relationships with wife and brother and nephew and children. And Kennedy sees through them, rejects Nucky’s deal, and pours him a single glass of booze.

When pressed, Nucky says that the reason for all this, for everything he’s done, is this: “I want to leave something behind.” Which, YAWN. This trite sentiment has become such a cliché of the prestige TV drama as to be annoying and practically comedic. Here it is stripped even of any nuance or additional detail. Kennedy is equally unimpressed, and perhaps the emptiness of such a platitude is an intentional commentary on Nucky’s own emptiness? But if this is the case, the show had better make with another, better reason, and soon.

As for the flashbacks to young Nucky, they depict his introduction to the seedier side of the Commodore’s business, witnessing first a man who claims to be in love with one of the Commodore’s girls, and then, later, the aftermath of that same man’s murder of that same girl. It’s a hard lesson for a ten-year old. He’s also enamored with a young girl named Mabel Jeffries. The flashbacks continue to become more interesting, especially in the ways the intercut with the present day story (the connection between the Commodore’s girls and the dancer in Nucky’s club is not lost on the camera or the editor).

The rest of the developments I’ll deal with below in some stray observations. What we have here in this episode chiefly is direction, even if that direction could use some additional nuance. The justification for setting the season in 1931 become ever more obvious as time goes on, and the show begins to move pieces into interesting places, and to set up viable, vital conflicts and character combinations. It could be faster paced, and I especially wish that the balance of characters per episode was a little more even. We’re still very much in the part of the season that will seem more valuable in retrospect—but when even the slow build toward chaos is this beautiful, and this riveting, it’s hard not to be swept away just one more time.

Stray Observations:

– Margaret greets Nucky from the darkness in the corner of his living room, which is an extremely cartoonish moment that detracts from the lovely acting that both Kelly Macdonald and Steve Buscemi do in this reunion. There is such a sense of history, grudging respect, and yes, lingering love, between the two, and these are all conveyed nearly entirely wordlessly. If only Margaret weren’t lit like a comic book supervillain.

– The world surely joins me in demanding a Mickey Doyle spinoff series.

– Narcisse’s return is almost entirely expository, just as Luciano and Siegel’s massacre on his house at the end is simply a trigger for future stories. There’s the promise of more interesting developments as a result, of course, but it rather bugs to still be doing this kind of seed planting in the third episode of eight.