A scene serves as a sample to portray the pain as something that cannot be measured, carried equally in the bones, or compared. With her husband’s body still warm, Stacy (Michelle Pfeiffer) gets angry when she sees her daughters arguing, returning to triviality, to daily insignificance. That’s what he seems to want to talk to us about essentially. The Madison (Paramount+): There are no scales to measure who suffers more, who experiences grief better, or who was hurt the most by the loss.
In the Clyburn family an invisible “poison” -father’s death- It takes over each body in a different way. In some it pierces the heart until it dismembers it, in others it hardens it. The story that after the series The First Lady marks the return of Hollywood’s eternal catwoman tries to show us the two possible paths after the tragedy: We die with our dead or we continue walking with the loss imprinted on our skin.
At first we could think that it is a distant drama: it borders on the lives of some New York millionaires that have little to do with this side of the map. However, the enormous figure that this family manages in their bank account is a detail. The central thing is universality, which inevitably happens to anyone: the grief, the shock, the existential emptiness, the loss of love for life when someone so close dies.
Without a playable production or too many wonders in the script, the product is valued based on the first-class performances and the triggers it proposes. What if there is a dimension of the dead that we do not get to know during his life? And what if the being with whom you sleep for half a century is, in part, a stranger who reveals chiaroscuros after death?
Stacy Clyburn (Pfeiffer) receives the unexpected news of an accident after her husband (Preston, Kurt Russell) went to spend a few days at his country retreat in Montana. He will have to travel to decide what to do with the body and on that trip to arid lands he will begin an internal journey of guilt and revelations. Her daughters, granddaughters and son-in-law will follow her and share the ranch. Coexistence will make egos collide.
The blow suffered by Stacy is accompanied by a cascade of data that the widow progressively discovers. His spouse’s objects and his personal diary show him a husband who escaped to that wild landscape and felt little company.
In constants flashback We see Preston enjoy nature, disconnect from capitalist life and fly fish in the Madison River Valley (a clear homage to the film here renamed Nothing is forever, A River Runs Through Itdirected by Robert Redford, with Brad Pitt).
It is worth clarifying that this is not a series for those looking for permanent action and scenes with a hit. It’s more about a portrait of the family dynamic eroded by grief and the feelings of the characters based on that. From time to time the scenes stagnate and the narrative stops to beautifully observe, for example, the man fishing, or nature. The photography, with its golden and magical lights, is appreciated.
Created by Taylor Sheridan (the same author of Yellowstone with Kevin Costner), this series that had been announced as a sort of “spin-off” of Yellowstone (a rib, a derivative product that acquires its own independence), it is not. It has a second season announcement and shines when focused on the Pfeiffer-Russell couple and not in the broad characters of daughters, granddaughters and son-in-law.
An important step is the emphasis on the natural habitat-city contrast. Once the protagonist loses her partner and feels “foreigner” in her own homedecides to leave the comfort zone and live without the comforts and luxuries to which New York is accustomed. In the eyes of her daughters, this drastic change in life is seen as crazy. The conflict also arises from the separation of places and old doctrines.
Despite his Hollywood popcorn, The Madison It is worth it as a look at loss, its devastating effects and its way of awakening those who remain. Confirm that Time does not heal everything, but rather it moves the wound to a less prominent place.
Drama Protagonists: Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell Creation: Taylor Sheridan Address: Christina Alexandra Voros Emission: 6 episodes available on Paramount+.
