The marvelously special Amazon show Transparent, keeps on delivering dynamically as season 3 wraps up. When Chris left us off, faith and religion had begun to take a firmer hold on the show and its characters, and Josh (Jay Duplass) was on his way to visit his biological son Colton to tell him of mother Rita’s death...
Episode 7 "Life Sucks & Then You Die"
Josh arrives in Kansas and tells Colton the bad news; Maura visits his despondent mother in a home and has an explosive encounter with his sister; and Raquel finally has sex with Duvid.
There’s a wonderfully funny scene where Maura’s sister asks Anjelica Huston when she transitioned and became a woman. It speaks so naturally to Huston’s androgynous persona, and to assumptions people make about the trans community, that the joke scores on numerous levels. And the womens’ mutual joy at the misconception sparks a furious tirade from Maura, where Tambor is smart enough to display Maura’s misplaced anger and all-consuming selfishness. Huston proves a terrific foil for Tambor, and he’s fully aware of Huston’s physical and emotional power as an actor. It’s a tribute to how much this show values the acting that they keep the take where the camera momentarily goes out of focus, sacrificing technical proficiency for Tambor and Huston being so fully in the moment.
This episode also features continued lovely work from Alex MacNicoll, who plays young Colton. He projects a beautiful combination of confidence and insecurity in every scene, and he feels both drawn to and repelled by the Pfefferman family energy.
But the MVP of the episode is Kathryn Hahn, who has a huge scene where her spirituality is truly rocked. Hahn, who for years specialized as a secret weapon in supporting roles in broad comedy movies, shows us such a completely different side of herself on Transparent. She’s pulled off one small, quiet miracle after another across the last two seasons, but here her pent-up rage and fear unleashes with a vibrant shock. There may be a full-scale tragedienne inside this stunning comedienne, and her range continues to impress.
Episode 8 "If I Were A Bell"
One of the great pleasures and great frustrations of Transparent is that you never quite know what any given episode will bring you. In this chapter, we see almost none of the regular cast members and instead we focus on young Mort and Shelly Pfefferman during their childhood and first light of romance.
Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, American Honey) directs this strange and distancing episode with a wonderfully subtle approach. It’s not the strongest of the season, as it’s a bit too on-the-nose across the board, but Arnold gets good honest work from her young actors, and it’s a fun to see Gaby Hoffman playing her actual character’s grandmother in a risky casting stunt. My smart friends tell me that transgender research is more effectively conducted over a minimum of three generations, which I assume is part of why the show includes episodes like this and the dive back into 1930s Germany during Season Two. It’s an interesting idea, but somehow the dramaturgy for these episodes doesn’t play out as powerfully as the contemporary storylines.
Episode 9 "Off the Grid"
Maura is informed that she will not be able to have gender reassignment surgery due to heart complications; Josh tells Colton he may move to Kansas; Ali and Leslie (Cherry Jones) continue their dubious affair; Sarah loses her dominatrix; and Shelly finds out the truth about Buzz.
The show hasn’t quite figured out what to do with the relationship between Ali and Leslie: it hasn’t grown throughout the season, and they haven’t used Cherry Jones with any effective specificity. But when Ali goes to Kansas to retrieve Josh, Gaby Hoffman and Jay Duplass do that sweet, deep dance they do in their scenes together. You never doubt for a second that they haven’t been brother and sister for 35 years.
Rob Huebel, another former broad comedy sketch performer, once again shows complexity in his scenes with Amy Landecker, who continues to veer further towards the edge of a very dark abyss while maintaining a comic edge in all of her scenes.
Episode Ten "Exciting and New"
The season finale, named after a snippet of lyrics from the 1970s TV show The Love Boat, has the five Pfeffermans on a cruise ship for a family vacation. The episode succinctly captures the characters’ selfishness, culminating in a big musical number that relays Shelly’s story past, present, and future. Judith Light kills this scene, and it’s a tribute to what she can accomplish with this role when given the chance: Shelly can be an awful cliché, but in the way people truly are clichés in real life. Light dares to commit to the cliché, but she finds pockets where she transcends and we see some deepness underneath. The edits where we see her family’s reactions during this song are telling and priceless, because they hit one of the show’s fundamental themes: how we underestimate the people closest in our lives, and how we underestimate ourselves and our capacity for humanity.
Has there ever been a show like Transparent? Chris will wrap up our Transparent Season 3 review with the final episode