I'm a David Hare fan, too, Donald. And like you, I was a bit confused and disappointed by his Netflix mini-series, Collateral, especially in the wake of the brilliant BBC trilogy [Page Eight, Turks & Caicos, Salting the Battlefield] which--as you mention--had been stocked with most of the top tier of recent British acting talent and masterfully anchored by Bill Nighy, whose world-weary intelligence officer embodied Hare at his best, but perhaps also John Le Carre and Graham Greene at their best. What defines Hare at his best? His grasp of the cold, fatuous, inhuman power at the heart--the nexus?--of British [and American] governance, espionage, AND business/finance and his willingness to express this perspective with forthright intelligence and crackling drama. But there's something else that Hare and his world-weary characters embody at their unique best--a sad but accurate sense of liberalism's fatuous self-flattery and its endless and dangerous misinterpretation of human nature. We see this perspective in his best plays, e.g., Plenty, Skylight, The Vertical Hour et al. We saw little of it in Collateral, although its hints were there. The main problem, I think, with Collateral is that it represented Hare's attempt to do a basic, TV friendly police procedural, which never quite gelled with his actual sensibility. But with the brilliant Carey Mulligan and others involved, it was certainly entertaining and involving. No harm, no foul.
You could be right: "Collateral" feels like an attempt at a basic procedural. I worry, though, whether the current, increasingly cynical political climate is dulling the insights of the best of us to nuances and complexities.
I'm a David Hare fan, too, Donald. And like you, I was a bit confused and disappointed by his Netflix mini-series, Collateral, especially in the wake of the brilliant BBC trilogy [Page Eight, Turks & Caicos, Salting the Battlefield] which--as you mention--had been stocked with most of the top tier of recent British acting talent and masterfully anchored by Bill Nighy, whose world-weary intelligence officer embodied Hare at his best, but perhaps also John Le Carre and Graham Greene at their best. What defines Hare at his best? His grasp of the cold, fatuous, inhuman power at the heart--the nexus?--of British [and American] governance, espionage, AND business/finance and his willingness to express this perspective with forthright intelligence and crackling drama. But there's something else that Hare and his world-weary characters embody at their unique best--a sad but accurate sense of liberalism's fatuous self-flattery and its endless and dangerous misinterpretation of human nature. We see this perspective in his best plays, e.g., Plenty, Skylight, The Vertical Hour et al. We saw little of it in Collateral, although its hints were there. The main problem, I think, with Collateral is that it represented Hare's attempt to do a basic, TV friendly police procedural, which never quite gelled with his actual sensibility. But with the brilliant Carey Mulligan and others involved, it was certainly entertaining and involving. No harm, no foul.
You could be right: "Collateral" feels like an attempt at a basic procedural. I worry, though, whether the current, increasingly cynical political climate is dulling the insights of the best of us to nuances and complexities.