My ears haven't been the same since I completed my marathon of Whit Stillman's filmography. Thanks to this filmmaker, I have grown more intolerant toward dialogue that single-mindedly drives the plot forward. I love how Stillman's characters interact and reveal things about themselves and the society they inhabit. There is a free-flowing vibrancy in the words that makes even the most mundane topics pleasurable to the ears. In contrast, when I heard the characters in the second season of The Four Seasons conversing, confessing, and bringing their insecurities and judgments to the surface, I was never fully absorbed. I spent the entire time suspecting that creators Tina Fey, Lang Fisher, and Tracey Wigfield made a talky drama to avoid the creative demands of dramatic intensity and visual invention. All they have to do is have directors blandly point their cameras at the ongoing action while the actors deliver their lines with professional commitment.
Unlike the movies of Stillman, The Four Seasons doesn't give you the impression that the people on the screen are moving with ease and talking about things that genuinely occur to them in the moment. The choreography is visible, but that wouldn't have been a problem if it didn't feel so...stiff. Many great filmmakers, like Alfred Hitchcock and Wes Anderson, carefully calculate every inch and corner of their frame so that the action can match their intent, but what makes them great is that such near-dictatorial control yields fascinating, imaginative, audacious results. The Four Seasons, on the other hand, is tightly controlled for minor ambitions. The lines are written in such a manner that they cover a particular topic—Nick's (Steve Carell) ashes, Ginny's (Erika Henningsen) baby, Danny's (Colman Domingo) decision to move to Italy—and move the story forward in a traditional sense.
What's missing from these conversations are sparks of amusement or even ugliness. The friends and couples hang out and fight and crack jokes, but the show's tone is consistently monotonous—there is almost no difference between a scene that's meant to be funny and one that's meant to be confrontational. The characters' lines might as well be background noise, something you can put on while doing the dishes. You could even complete the whole season this way, given that there is nothing worth looking at in the show. The Italian Alps, a beach, a view from a mountain, a motel, and a hospital are visually congruent, which means they never stand apart through distinct visual textures or colors. The filmmakers could have green-screened these settings, and it wouldn't have mattered. Watching shows and movies like these, I wonder if I was too hard on Remarkably Bright Creatures, given that it injected life into its fictional setting, Sowell Bay, so beautifully that you could practically breathe its air. So what if the story collapsed into sentimentality? The bar is now so low that I find myself fondly obsessing over locations while ignoring almost every other filmmaking aspect.
In the case of The Four Seasons, all we really have are the words. Unsurprisingly, then, it often resembles an audiobook you can listen to while doing anything else. There are one or two moments you can point to in recognition, such as when Kate (Fey) and Jack (Will Forte) struggle to pick a movie before scrolling through their phones instead of paying attention to it, or when a mother is unable to properly frame herself during a video call. Still, for a series so heavily driven by dialogue, almost every conversation sounds uninspiring, and this flatness extends to both the visuals and the performances. The show never bothers to explore what stories these friends might tell about their professional lives or what opinions they hold about movies and politics. One episode unfolds during the COVID crisis, but no one mentions how the virus and the lockdown affected or changed them (Jack's social-distancing habit is reduced to a mere quirk). All of them comfortably go on vacations and foreign trips without ever talking about money, bills, or financial pressures. Jack, at one point, brings up money, though the show treats it as nothing more than a throwaway joke. The Four Seasons has a very narrow idea of what topics should emerge during debates and deliberations. Hence, it ultimately comes across as inconsequential, rigid, and hollow. It is, alas, a talky show drowning in empty chatter.
Final Score - [4.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times