Maggie Gyllenhall in “The Honourable Woman” (photo: bbc.co.uk)
Saw the first of eight episode of this new BBC production—“both mystery and spy thriller” says Willa Paskin in Slate (clip)—on the Sundance Channel last night (Thursdays, 10 pm). Reviews have been smokin, and certainly the first hour:fifteen was exceptionally strong, laying down a lot of tantalizing clues about what’s to come, with the backdrop “the incredible complexity, raw emotion, and intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Paskin says.
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the head of a U.K.-based arms company and has recently been made a baroness, so is Lady Nessa Stein. She and her brother were orphaned young when their father, a major seller of arms to Israel, was assassinated in front of them. Now she runs the company, and her brother the company’s foundation. They are determined use their money for good, so are in the midst of a project to bring communications technology—cables for phone and internet access—to the Palestinians, including, she says at one point, “to the schools and hospitals we have built.”
The episode begins and ends with violence, including an early quick-cut of an event Viewer thinks might have been another violent act. In the middle, various people are trying to figure that one out, including Stephen Rea, as an over-the-hill MI6 agent assigned temporarily to the Middle East desk, as punishment it seems (I missed some muttered dialog, but I can read the script here). He and Gyllenhaal independently elude their handlers for frank conversation with what I suspect is a short list of people they can trust.
Lots of clues, lots of intrigue. Very promising. Says Paskin, “The Honorable Woman is in many ways, most of them cerebral, an extremely impressive piece of work” that “oversimplifies very little.” Cerebral? Reason enough to watch.
Do you think the publicists tried–perhaps unconsciously–to replicate National Geographic’s most famous photo in that picture of Maggie Gyllenhaal above? There’s something odd about the eyes there.