As Billions is premiering on Showtime tonight at 10pm ET, reviews have been pouring in… and guess what? It is getting a LOT OF LOVE and BIG THUMBS UP from the critics. HURRAH!
So… Welcome to a little celebration organized by Damianista & JaniaJania!
We both read all reviews that came out and picked our TOP TEN. Damianista selected her favorite paragraph from each review and JaniaJania added her two cents to that paragraph. Hope you enjoy our post as much as we enjoyed collaborating on it!
First things first! … This is not a review but it’s a little story PressTelegram reports Billions co-creator Brian Koppelman has shared with them: “Koppelman tells a story about how years ago he was sitting in an agency in New York with Levien when they saw Lewis, who was then starring in HBO’s “Band of Brothers,” walk by. “Dave turned to me and said, ‘Someday we are going to work with that guy.” He’s the best actor.’ ”
And as you think if it can get any better than this… Please come join us in indulging ourselves in our favorite press reviews that talk about the depth and brilliance the writing and acting, and, in particular, our favorite actor brings to Billions and make a BIG toast to 12 weeks (and hopefully several seasons) of our NEW favorite show!
Just as he saved the C.I.A. melodrama “Homeland” from its own histrionic urges, Mr. Lewis pulls “Billions,” which begins on Sunday, back from the brink of macho outlandishness with his natural gravitas. As the hedge fund titan Bobby Axelrod, Mr. Lewis might spend most of his on-screen time spitting out cocksure zingers, but he’s that rare TV actor with the self-possession to make even overdramatic lines sound organic.
So interesting how an actor’s self-possession, confidence and general emotional stability can inform the performance of an otherwise over-written piece, no? There’s a book there in how exactly Damian manages to pull it off. It’s like he gives it his all, methodically, every time, but not so much that the limitations of the writing or the part ever really do him in, as such limitations would do in so many other actors. There’s enough of himself, his organic gravitas, always there providing the backbone a character needs to be believable.
It’s great stuff. But Bobby Axelrod is the character you can’t take your eyes off of….The Sopranos and Mad Men aside, American television has not been great at exploring the psychological price self-made men and women pay for their success. Our most popular narratives are far more comfortable promulgating the bromide that anyone can be whatever they want to be in this society — as if there are no barriers or costs to overcoming class disadvantages and barriers. Axelrod is the perfect example of how emotionally battered the journey up the social-class ladder can leave you.
The irony inherent in Damian’s infallible ability to understand class disadvantages and human costs of being denied things cannot be overstated. Artists are always urged to play what they know, write what they know, BE what they know. The best art comes from deep experience. Yet, Damian has this mind-boggling ability to make art out of a human experience that he can’t ever have possibly, given what we know about his personal history, experienced himself. His ability to do that, in a way, transcends art, doesn’t it? It’s a construct, a lie, like art is, yet. unlike a lot of what passes as art, what Damian does is as natural and as truthful as anything you’ll ever witness.
I cannot think of another actor this side of the late Laurence Olivier who is as good as Lewis at deliberately obscuring what his character really thinks, feels or believes. He did it in “Homeland” and “The Forsyte Saga.
An allusion to Olivier. Hm, where have we heard that before? 🙂
source: Showtime
Giamatti and Lewis are two hugely talented actors, and seeing them up against each other is enthralling. Each time they engage in a toe-to-toe tête-à-tête, the screen vibrates from the tension and the tightly reined power. “Billions” does a terrific job of contrasting their characters, both in the script and in production design details and lighting, but it doesn’t back away from their similarities, even as they’re on opposite sides of the law.
Yin and yang, good and evil, yet, two sides of the same coin. One of our commenters worried that the story seems a bit too much hero vs villian. Only in the hands of two finely nuanced actors, plus hopefully a story that takes us to the heart of each of their journeys, will we be able to see the story as not simple black and white.
The biggest reason to watch Billions is the acting talent, something which even the endlessly expository dialogue and absurd characterizations can’t totally quash. Ms. Siff is a fascination, even if Wendy is flat-out ridiculous. Messrs. Giamatti and Lewis wage an actorly combat as pitched as their characters’ on-again, off-again legal battle.
A bit of a rehash of the same thing NYT said, only a bit harsher. Yes, there is a bit of “flight of fancy” in the writing, literal as well as figurative. Literal, is the way I described it, I think, in my review of the pilot. Maybe even ridiculous. Yet, not obvious. Meaning that the story may surprise us. And, like WSJ, we’re pretty sure the performances will hold it all up.
There’re big issues at the edges of this story – income inequality, profiteering from 9/11, the way big financial types often pay big fines to avoid jail for wrongdoing. But “Billions” excels most at painting a compelling portrait of how powerful men – and the women behind them – move the world. And the idea that many of their decisions center on such small human details is both a compelling and a frightening notion.
Indeed. It’s the thing about the flutter of a butterfly’s wing setting off an earthquake. You’d think that with growth and evolution (even if it’s dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest) we’d all be getting more stable, but, with increasing disparities and injustices, the world just keeps becoming more fragile doesn’t it.
At first, Lewis seems miscast as Axelrod. We really do not believe that he’s the guy who grew up in The Bronx, and his presence begs the question whether any New York-born actors were considered for the role. Still, Lewis is such a good actor, with a sleek, flinty edge that gives him a believable authority.
Sure, there were probably a lot of natural born Bronx boy/men who would have gladly lined up outside Yankee stadium to audition for this part. It is a bit of a lie to cast a Brit as a salt of the (cemented) earth New Yorker. But, somehow, Damian makes you forget the lie and forget you’re being lied to in a way no other performer can. He’s putting Americans out of work, as Stephen Colbert quipped: “Americans can seem like jerks too”. To which Damian diplomatically replied, “Nah, it’s okay, I’ll be your fall guy.”
Billions doesn’t divide its characters into binaries as banal as that of “good” and “bad,” but Chuck’s purposefully less appealing than Axe, and quite a bit of that bluntly has to do with looks. Axe is a sexy, fit, virile man with laser-beam eyes and a smooth, insinuating voice, while Chuck is hairy, overweight, and viscerally uncomfortable with himself in the tradition of many of Giamatti’s best characters, though his intelligence and his fearlessness, not to mention the backing of the government, render him a formidable ally.
The discrepancy in the protagonists’ appearances physically literalizes their resentment of one another. Chuck is an heir to political royalty, but Axe is the sort of apparently self-made alpha that truly commands our society’s respect. Axe symbolizes our country’s uneasy relationship with large-scale con men, who represent the American dream of transcending a broken social system while simultaneously further breaking said system, while Chuck illustrates that elections merely allow voters to choose from among a limited group of socially preordained candidates. Billions is disinterested in conventional “morality,” which is the paradoxical wellspring of its moralism.
“Even when the cameras aren’t rolling, Lewis is the master of this domain. On one of the final days of shooting in early December, the star is seemingly everywhere at once, conferring frequently with director Michael Cuesta, cheering for other cast members as they wrap their work for the season, and chatting with the crew. He’s not one to constantly escape to his dressing room between takes. His co-workers note that the Eton-educated Londoner maintains the character’s outer-borough New York accent even while chewing the fat between scenes.
Sorkin has been impressed with how deeply Lewis has immersed himself in the world of hedge fund titans to understand the essence of “Billions.” Sorkin made a few key introductions for Lewis early on (he won’t name names), but it was Lewis’ research and craft that brought Bobby Axelrod to life.
“He has really made Bobby a singular character — real in a way that I would not have imagined if you’d asked me a year ago,” Sorkin says. “It’s a remarkable thing to see someone so embody this character that you have birthed.
Uproxx has a HILARIOUS review that likens Axe and Chuck to Tom and Jerry!
By the end of the pilot, the two of them are engaged in a game of billionaire cat-and-mouse, kind of likeTom & Jerry if Tom chased Jerry around with threats of criminal charges instead of a frying pan.
And all in all, it’s pretty good. Lewis is convincing as the fast-talking New York financial whiz, so much so that it almost makes you forget he is very, very British in real life. And Giamatti gives it the full Giamatti, all exasperated and hard-charging and red-faced-with-his-tie-loosened-and-top-button-unbuttoned. Both of their characters are Complicated, capital C, in the way main characters in prestige cable dramas often are.
Lewis and Giamatti are two of the best actors working — no doubt they will soon be battling each other for an Emmy — and their presence together is great wealth of its own sort. Axe is one of Lewis’ more voluble roles, but the actor maintains his power over stillness by allowing his character to say much while giving little away. Giamatti may splutter and spit a bit more, but he is just as menacing, albeit much more human [….] Men are animals, and the alpha will out [….] Billions isn’t so much about titans as gladiators, and as in ancient Rome, male spectacle is the point.
A power over stillness. What creature is this, Damian asked of Bobby when preparing for the role. Well, what creatures are both Bobby and Chuck? And what primal spectacle will we be watching?
And finally a love letter so much in the spirit of all the love letters we write to Damian on these pages, except with a firm check on the effusiveness, of course, and published in a magazine that Zadie Smith aptly called “a weekly love letter to a city.”
When production for Billions began, in July, Lewis intended to embody a “compelling stillness.” But as the season progressed the Zen-master approach no longer felt appropriate. He said, “I just found, for Bobby, once we made the choice that he was a jeans-and-trainers guy, and that he liked wearing knitwear”—he broke into a sort of garmento-inflected American accent—“that he was going to take the space. It was a way to find the expansiveness of the king.”
Didn’t know garment district dwellers had a specific dialect, but okay. What Collins is getting at is the way Damian hones in on specifics of what a character wears, carefully examining how what he wears functions in how he holds himself and how he moves. Damian’s understanding of a character is conscious and planned, but, by some miracle, manifests in a way that looks effortless. We sense that Damian works in much the same way as the late great Alan Rickman said of his own work, “I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously.” And to that end, even when he’s being a hard-ass about getting things just right, Damian remains a delightful team player. What a gorgeous picture Collins paints of Damian’s goofy lovability on set:
He kept up the banter and thus—on a bone-cold night—his collaborators’ morale. He chatted with the wardrobe assistants (“You have on a peacoat, almost a pea tunic”); he broke into song (Madonna’s “Holiday”; the Welsh national anthem). Between antics, he kept pushing the director to refine the encounter.
“I asked for some more specific psychology,” he said, “and I didn’t really get an answer.”
The thing is, Damian, as someone who seems to want to intimately know and flawlessly capture the full spectrum of human experience, probably asks questions that no one can answer. But, through his work, he somehow manages to get at the answers implicitly on his own.
merçi de nous faire connaitre toutes les belles choses,écrites par la presse!des belles choses;tellement méritées