Emmy FYC: Riley Keough in "The Girlfriend Experience"
Friday, June 17, 2016 at 3:30PM We're sharing Emmy FYCs as nomination balloting continues. Here's our much missed contributor Matthew Eng (who now mostly resides at Tribeca Film)...
Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz’s The Girlfriend Experience, the glossy and gripping new series loosely “suggested by” Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 feature experiment of the same name, has, in all honesty, about the same chance of becoming a serious Emmy contender as Fuller House. This is in no way a blight on the series so much as an indicator that a work like The Girlfriend Experience, which airs on STARZ, is at once too under-the-radar and, more significantly, too polarizing to appeal to the Television Academy, who probably wouldn’t even know how to categorize a half-hour drama that sports a restrained tone, a notoriously well-known premise, and a uniquely challenging connection between protagonist and audience.
It’s on this last front that The Girlfriend Experience has made its most provocative and absorbing strides. And that’s largely due to the perfectly-cast Riley Keough, who turns in the type of confident, commanding, and utterly distinctive star performance that immediately makes one question and reformulate every preconception ever held about this actress, still best known as one of Mad Max: Fury Road’s rebellious war-brides, although The Girlfriend Experience (and a well-received turn in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey) are destined to change that...
Keough plays Christine Reade, an ambitious Chicago law student/intern who rushes headlong into a side job as a paid escort for both the proceeds and the pleasure, only to find her two worlds colliding in irrevocably damaging ways.
It would have been relatively easy for Keough to simply play a cipher or else recede into the series’ drafty and immaculate high-end interiors and let its splendid cinematography and elliptical writing do the heavy lifting when it comes to fleshing out Christine, or “Ashley,” which becomes her work name of choice. The Girlfriend Experience is impeccably-crafted enough to have survived a vacant center and the performative dualities of its central persona might have even benefited from a fuzzy or fluid presence.
Keough nails the gorgeous blankness and camera-teasing stillness that are both requisite elements of the show’s eerie mise-en-scène. But she also cultivates a fully believable person in Christine, ensuring that The Girlfriend Experience is actually about someone and a genuinely interesting someone at that. The admirable economy of the series’ unromanticized storytelling occasionally risks isolating viewers by foregoing any and all traces of casual, everyday spontaneity in Christine’s life, leaving it up to Keough to fill in the blanks, which she accomplishes with preternatural subtlety and a remarkable level of comfort in her own body and mind that renders the explicitness of thought unnecessary in a show where almost everything else is fairly explicit.
As a performer, Keough possesses the deep self-awareness and reflexive equanimity that allows Christine to ease, appease, and convince her clients and companions, as well as the deceptive strength and coolheaded intelligence that convinces us that this woman could feasibly bring an entire law firm to its knees, as becomes the case later in the season. But there’s also an inherent warmth to the spunky naturalism of Keough’s acting, an insouciantly observational style that prevents Christine from only registering as a figurative character: she laughs like a twentysomething, rolls her eyes like a twentysomething, bullshits her professor like a twentysomething, says “your guys’s” like a twentysomething. This is still a largely stylized performance of sculpted expressions and deliberate detachment, but Keough manages to create important moments of real spontaneity. During a rough and particularly degrading encounter with a clingy and manipulative customer in a midseason episode, the brief, fierce flashes of frustration in Keough’s eyes and the curtness of her responses communicate Christine’s own unease in a way that the scene as-scripted can only hint at.
In moments like these, Keough unmistakably builds Christine out of flesh, blood, and steel, but she isn’t necessarily unearthing some Real Christine that exists outside her secret life as “Ashley” or even reassuring audiences unsettled by the basic recessiveness of her personality. From January Jones’ Betty Draper to Julianna Margulies’ Alicia Florrick to Robin Wright’s Claire Underwood, modern-day television has been a reliable furnisher of glacial beauties unconcerned with viewer sympathy or identification. Keough takes this familiar characterization one step further—and pointedly distinguishes the performance from prestige television’s appealing cadre of antiheroines—by bravely blocking us out from any deeper emotional connection. In total tandem with Kerrigan and Seimetz’s creative intents, she reserves Christine’s right to remain a question-mark, even as the stakes are raised and Christine herself becomes prone to some unforeseeable follies and pitiful lapses in judgment.
In “Blindsided,” this season’s exceptional ninth episode, which is, in essence, a half-hour panic attack, Christine gets the rug mercilessly pulled out from her at the office. On Mad Men or The Good Wife or House of Cards or any other show, such a blow would likely necessitate an uninhibited release of emotions for a female character. But instead of taking us on an emotional journey, Keough (along with Kerrigan and Seimetz) insists on a psychological route into Christine’s experience during this crisis, revealing and concealing her character through tense and tactical conversations, in which she barely raises her voice above a tightly-measured whisper. The camera rests on her in drawn-out, tension-magnetizing moments of active, whirling thought, where the only visible movement on Keough’s pallid face is a twitch, a blink, or a breath. The waterworks indeed arrive by the episode’s end, but it’s a scene in which the emotions are far from conclusory and are actually complicated and purposely called into question by the voluptuous dread that Keough’s playing continually conjures.
In a show that presents sex work as a constant negotiation between candor and circumspection, Keough walks that fine line within every aspect of her interpretation and does so without boldfacing her own decision-making. Her performance is a triumph of poking holes in a superficial facade, revealing flickers of pleasure and amusement but also anger and sadness, only to quickly repair the spaces before we can see too far inside.
It’s the type of performance that drives one to incessantly wonder, “What is she thinking?” But this is uncertainty shrouded in personal mystery, not vagueness. And like the headiest and most involving mysteries, Keough refuses to settle for any quick and tidy resolutions, luring us in without ever emerging too far from her own protective shell. In this instance, answers hardly matter. Her suspense is enthralling enough.
Reader Comments (7)
"...still best known as" one of Elvis' granddaughters...
this is a great read ... however I have to disagree. Keough remains a cipher. Ive watched the whole season and I don't think I've seen more than a couple of expressions out of her. The performance works within the context of the show, however it is no revelation of the abilities of the actress. She has a great face onto which the viewer can project a lot, but I haven't seen her give anything beyond detached bemusement.
Yes. Good defense. I think it would've been easier for Keough tu play Christine any other way, but she had the understanding of what they were doing, what was needed of her and kept us all out while remaining interesting.
couldn't agree more! i thought she was brilliant on this show!
I thought she was very good, but she does give me a little of the January Jones/Mad Men vibe of "perfect for and in this role, but maybe not in anything else."
"Blindsided" was a standout episode for sure - both for the show and for Keough.
I've just finished the series. I'm fascinated,
Before you review a tv show, make sure you at least watch it or do your research. Her escort name in the show is "Chelsea" not "Ashley". "Ashley" was her friends name.