Steve on TV: Pucking around on the down low; great casts can’t save bad material

Heated Rivalry doesn’t waste time on will-they-or-won’t-they. This little Canadian drama that turned into a sleeper hit for HBO Max has its leads — Hudson Williams as Montreal hockey star Shane Hollander and Connor Storrie as his Russian rival Ilya Rozanov, who plays for Boston — getting down in a hotel room just a few hours after they’ve been swatting their sticks at each other on the ice.

What gives the show its power isn’t the vigorous and precisely choreographed sex scenes, where a centimeter’s placement of a concealing thigh keeps the show from plunging into full porn. No, it’s the big question at its core: Will these two tough, hot guys travel an unusual reverse course, from hate sex into something, years later, that feels like first love? That trajectory is what turns the fellas’ closeted bromance-with-benefits into a swoon fest.

Much of Rivalry, adapted from a book series by Rachel Reid, is dangerously simplistic. The episodes document Ilya and Shane’s sweaty down low hookups, their professional progress in the rink and their endless sexts to each other under the fake names Lily and Jane to keep their colleagues off their trail. (After all, hockey is a sport that wears its heterosexual bona fides as visibly as the beards its players grow throughout the season.)

Three of the show’s six episodes have a predictable rhythm that gets a little monotonous. Yes, the sex is hot, but it can feel repetitive, a little like the show’s production design: a series of luxe chambers that share an amber, firelit glow that becomes as boringly unvaried as it is aspirational.

But episode 3 is a stand-alone standout, focusing on New York hockey Captain Scott Hunter — played by François Arnaud. Then come two simple but dramatically perfect moments that make episodes 5 and 6 pop. First, there’s a teary profession of love, declared in a language the loved one doesn’t comprehend. Second, there’s the simple phrase — “I like you” — that serves as Heated Rivalry’s emotional watershed. (As a bonus, the final episode features a meet-the-parents scene that immediately enters a cringe hall of fame, especially in its deployment of the word “lovers.”)

So three of Heated Rivalry’s six episodes really deliver. The other three would be thin gruel, except for two things. First is the chemistry between the leads; whatever the actors’ real-life sexuality is, they sell the passion here. That’s largely thanks to the show’s second big strength: Storrie as the smoldering, smirking Ilya. The actor isn’t Russian. Who knows if his pronunciation and accent are anything close to authentic? But the guy has star power (and glutes) for days, compensating for the charisma deficit that swamps any scene the amiable but dead-eyed Williams has to carry solo. Heated Rivalry has been picked up for a second season, which is sort of a shame. In hockey terms, it’s like Ilya and Shane together: a great match that, ahem, sinks the puck more often than not. 

NETFLIX

Nobody warned me how bad Jay Kelly is. It didn’t seem possible, considering who’s involved. It stars the great George Clooney in the title role, playing a beloved Hollywood actor much like himself. It’s co-written and directed by Noah Baumbach, who’s had a hand in terrific films, from his autobiographical The Squid and the Whale through Marriage Story and Barbie, which he co-wrote with his director wife Greta Gerwig. His pedigree, on the indie film scale, is almost as impressive as Clooney’s. Plus, the new movie includes a good supporting cast: Laura Dern, Adam Sandler, Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson, Riley Keough. But wow, is this thing lazy, self-indulgent and self-satisfied.  

The plot? After finishing his latest big Hollywood shoot, Clooney’s 60-something Kelly decides to risk mingling with the little people — aka, those of us without screen careers and bodyguards — and take a train across Europe to a film retrospective in his honor. Baumbach’s influences seem to be Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, late-era Fellini (lots of “colorful” extras crowd the scenes) and a Scrooge-lite, end-of-life summary, like the one the doctor undergoes in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries — only delivered with Showbiz glitter instead of Scandinavian melancholy.  

If one of the lowlights is the “amusing” English that Italian actor Alba Rohrwacher has to speak as Jay’s chaperone at the film festival, another is a scene between Dern and Sandler. They play Jay’s publicist and manager, and both have the chops for almost any challenge. I mean, Dern almost single-handedly dragged David Lynch’s three-hour phantasmagoria Inland Empire to a place of transcendence. Here, though, the Oscar winner has to deliver what’s intended to be a bittersweet apology to Sandler’s character about the end of their relationship long ago in Paris. The speech deserves to be studied as an example of how not to write expository film dialogue. It defeats even Dern.

Jay Kelly is filled out with family members of the creative team, including Gerwig and one of Sandler’s daughters, in supporting roles. The nepo train roars on in another Netflix film, Goodbye June. Here’s one more example of a great cast unable to salvage bad material. (To its credit, June is merely forgettable compared to Jay’s big-ticket squandering of talent and goodwill.)

Written by 22-year-old Joe Anders and capably directed by his mom, Kate Winslet (His dad is American Beauty and Skyfall director Sam Mendes.), it stars Winslet as one of four siblings summoned to the bedside of their dying mom. That role goes to Helen Mirren, whose deglamorization here is an insult to that eternally elegant icon. She’s the June of the title, and it’s up to her — on top of the hard business of dying — to reconcile her fractious daughters in time for Christmas hugs.

Winslet plays the brisk corporate daughter, Andrea Riseborough, the all-organic hippie with too many kids, and Toni Collette is the woo-woo yoga instructor who flies in from Australia, waving sage sticks to smoke out bad vibes. See what I mean about the quality of the cast? And the limitations on the roles they have to play? There’s also Timothy Spall as the dad, who’s deep in denial or dementia or both, and Johnny Flynn as the sisters’ only brother, a nice gay bloke given to panic attacks. Spoiler: June dies, life goes on and better movies will be on Netflix soon enough.  

APPLE TV+

Winslet’s former Sense and Sensibility costar Emma Thompson is tremendous fun in Down Cemetery Road. The eight-part series concluded last month, which makes it bingeable if you’re in the mood for a twisty British thriller powered by two strong female performances. (The show is based on a novel series by Mick Herron, creator of that other Apple TV+ hit, Slow Horses, and it’s been picked up for a second season.)

Thompson plays spiky-haired Oxford detective Zoẽ, a bit of a loner (even toward her long-suffering husband) who teams with Ruth Wilson’s Sarah, an art restorer who suspects there’s something fishy about a gas explosion in a house near her own. This is one of those mysteries that leads all the way to the top — in this case, the government as personified by a steely MI6 agent known as C (Darren Boyd). The solution involves the military, chemical weapons and a former soldier named Downey (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett). The dialogue is often crisply snarky, though the tone can wobble unsuccessfully between sinister and goofy. Thompson keeps you watching, though.

NETFLIX

Another strong cast turns up, some of them with too little to do, in writer-director Rian Johnson’s third whodunnit starring a ridiculously drawling Daniel Craig as detective Benoit Blanc.

Wake Up Dead Man sends the effete sleuth into a remote upstate New York town to investigate the murder of a vicious priest. That would be Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), who aims vitriolic sermons at the rare single mom or gay couple who dare to come to his church, hoping to send them stomping out in shame or rage. The suspects in Wicks’ seemingly impossible, locked-room murder include his most faithful congregants, played by Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington and Andrew Scott. But the leading suspect is junior priest, Father Jud (the always wonderful Josh O’Connor), a cleric whose approach to faith is the exact opposite of Wicks’.

Johnson scores swift, lacerating points about our divisive political present. Through Craig’s Blanc — a man of logic and, as a gay man, one who feels unwelcome in a Catholic church — the film voices skepticism about organized religion. Blanc’s gentle counterpart is Father Jud. A moving interaction with a parishioner in need (the wonderful Bridget Everett) shows that the young priest understands that faith is as much about the love between people here on Earth as it is about connection to a higher power. Wake Up is too long, too complicated and gives everyone besides Brolin, O’Connor and Close (who has a blast here) too little to do. But it’s still a kick.  

ODDS AND ENDS

If you watched the terrific Night Manager 10 years ago, based on a John le Carré book and starring Tom Hiddleston, you may be equal parts excited and wary to hear that a sequel arrives on Amazon Prime starting on Jan. 11. Hiddleston is back, with appearances expected from co-star Olivia Colman. But le Carré is no longer with us, so this time the plot is an original. Fingers crossed.

Also, His & Hers has just landed on Netflix. The six-part thriller, shot in Atlanta and based on an Alice Feeney novel, stars Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal as two exes, a journalist and a detective, vying to be the first ones to solve a murder in her hometown. Happy watching.

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous columns here.