The Man Who Was Matthew Perry

The Man Who Was Matthew Perry

Perry, a globally beloved sitcom's star, made braver choices off-camera than he may have made on it, writes

Manik Sharma.

IN a debate for BBC Newsnight roughly a decade ago, a typically sarcastic Matthew Perry rips into conservative author Peter Hitchens’ opinion about drug addiction being a bad choice as opposed to a health hazard. “Read something other than your own book,” Perry says at the end of the conversation. Somewhere in the middle, he also calls Hitchens ‘Santa’. The fiery debate went viral in an era where ‘internet virality’ was yet to become a thing and it underlined Perry’s front-footed (if flawed) approach to eking meaning out of his own personal troubles with drug addiction. Perry obviously advocated for rehabilitation and for former abusers to become the arbiters of reform around the world. It wasn’t a fool-proof argument at the best of times, but in Perry’s own way, there was a sense of desperate earnestness about it. Coming especially from a man in pain, who maybe wanted to heal by helping others.

Perry never quite shied away from his problems. His struggles with alcoholism on and off the stage were well documented. They were events that Perry himself owned up to in interviews. “I’m doing this in the public eye, so I’m kind of an example to people who might be struggling with this,” he says in an interview with David Letterman in 2002, the prospective peak of his addiction. It’s hard enough being a public figure with a flailing personal life, it is another to be one of the most popular sitcom actors around the world. Like a crest of feverish fame and immortality held against a feeble, mortifying inner sanctum. The dichotomy of that life, the poisonous elasticity at the core of it all gives you this retrospective sense that Perry might have accomplished more off the stage, than he did on it.

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A LATE-CAREER RECKONING

With Killers Of The Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese 'Writes' A Few Wrongs

By Rahul Desai

MARTIN SCORSESE’S latest is an unsparing 206-minute epic about greedy white men plundering an oil-rich land and murdering its natives while posing as saviours. It is, of course, a historical film based in 1920s Oklahoma; Killers of the Flower Moon is adapted from David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book of the same name. The setting is Osage Nation, where Native Indian families who retain the mineral rights on their reservation start to die of a “wasting sickness”. The specifics revolve around a former World War I soldier named Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a man who marries into a rich Osage family to further his uncle’s ploy of infiltrating the tribe to inherit their oil headrights. His wife, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), begins to grow weak from suspected diabetes; her sisters perish under strange circumstances. One is shot dead, another is killed in an explosion, yet another is consumed by an unnamed illness. The Osage members do not suspect that Ernest’s uncle – an Osage benefactor named William King Hale (Robert De Niro) – is the ‘kingpin’ of this slow-burning demolition job in the wilder West.

Hale, the deputy sheriff, is the architect of a conspiracy that speaks to the broader complicity of the outside world. Read the first line again, and the story is timeless for how it lays bare a naked Americanism – the genocidal foundation pillars of white privilege, its mid-century girth, its Middle-Eastern sequels, its present continuity – in all its deflected capitalism. Martin Scorsese chooses to convey not a snapshot but an entire portrait in scale. It’s a remarkable and inescapable effort: The narrative doubles up as an admission that, no matter what Scorsese himself symbolises as an American storyteller, his legend pales in comparison to the story of America. If we watch all his movies back to back, we might come away with the complicated morality of oppression, which in turn implies the invisibilisation of the oppressed; we see the doers because history is manipulated by them. But Killers of the Flower Moon is definitive proof that fiction remains in service of a reality that’s bigger than his chronicling of it. The doers are, for once, nothing without the dignity of the undone.

For instance, the Ernest-and-Uncle schemings dominate the film in terms of screen-time – they represent a very Scorsesian exploration of semi-organised crime, guilt, violence and death. These are men trying to wipe out an entire people and grab their cash, except they’re not very good at being cold-blooded or subtle. They’re like mobsters burdened with the pretense of playing humans. There are errors, miscommunications, bad ideas, gore and punishments (in the film’s funniest scene, the older man brutally paddles his nephew for screwing up). Even when the Federal Bureau sends their best detective to investigate, the courtroom portions feature the messy awakening of Ernest’s conscience. It’s familiar territory.

But the reason Lily Gladstone’s performance is so beguiling is because the actress single-handedly manifests the ‘other’ side of a Scorsese duel. Their chaos is nothing without her calm. It almost feels like she is challenging the director to break the pattern and subvert the sins of his aesthetic. She doesn’t say a lot, which leads her oppressor to fill in the blanks with his own tortured noise. This is entirely by design. When Mollie is on screen, the crippling innocence of Osage morphs into a sense of trust and grace. Gladstone’s face alone evokes the character of a tribespeople that crave for belonging rather than status, for co-existence rather than power. The way she looks at Ernest suggests that perhaps he, among all the vultures, is the only one capable of reflecting. Or, at best, reforming. It’s in his name, too. She knows that Ernest has married her for money. The arrangement is obvious. But Mollie isn’t in it to buy her way into the books of the White West. She isn’t in denial about his intentions. She even jokes about his put-on charm, only to allow herself to be seduced by it. At some level, she believes that her bravery might renovate their marriage into an interfaith romance – rich-meets-poor, good-rescues-bad, love-fixes-greed – the kind that she hopes will become a torchbearer for mixed-race peace in future textbooks. She jumps into the cage to tame and be mauled at once.

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