Photo: Macall Polay / HBO
Batman does not appear in The Penguinand if you accept the show as it is, you won’t miss him. Not when Cristin Milioti, as organized crime heiress Sofia Falcone, is doing her best O-Ren Ishii impersonation, teeth clenched, at the head of a table full of ruthless criminals, intimidating them and bending them to her will. And certainly not when Colin Farrell, under a ton of prosthetics, delivers a larger-than-life version of Gabagool excellence as ambitious henchman Oz Cobb: wiggling his eyebrows in shock, staring at Kubrick in disgust, and pontificating on the evils of the upper class like he’s Frank Sobotka running for another term at the union. That’s all praise, and on the strength of those two performances, The Penguin performs an exorcism that initially seemed impossible.
What series creator Lauren LeFranc achieves is a contradiction. By taking Batman and his fantastic influence on Gotham out of the The Penguinthe city’s criminal underworld seems more rooted in the everyday details of drug deals and power games, in real matters of life and death. Frank Sinatra’s “Call Me Irresponsible” plays on the soundtrack, someone points out Ginger Rogers’ tap dancing skills and Rita Hayworth’s Gilda Reruns on an old box-set television, and there is no break in our suspension of disbelief. But somehow, in this earthly milieu, The Penguin Milioti and Farrell are also first-rate actors – they eat up the scenery and growl over dialogue as if they were auditioning for a Martin Scorsese film. The tension in the series’ contradictory expressions of minimalism and maximalism allows The Penguin simply glides along, picking up speed as it moves toward a final act that reflects LeFranc’s deep understanding of her title character and her extreme confidence in denying the audience the “hell-yeah” ending they might think they want.
We are never truly free of Bruce Wayne; Hollywood usually only lets a few years pass between attempts at this franchise. There were only 13 months between Christian Bale’s adaptation of his version of the character in The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 and Ben Affleck was cast in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel Follow-up measures in 2013. In the same year in which joker The Waynes were used as representatives of the evil one percent, Robert Pattinson was cast as a younger gothic version of Gotham’s nighttime prodigal son in Matt Reeves’ The Batmanof that The Penguin is a spinoff. There were 100 episodes of GothamAnd Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler was broadcast for three seasons. At the beginning of the summer Batman: The Masked Crusader revolved around the title character in detective mode, investigating everything from jewel theft and arson to energy vampires and ghosts. Gotham City has long been defined by the duality of Bruce Wayne and Batman – and the man’s dead parents and the burden of his wealth and all his unresolved trauma. And while The Penguin certainly has some of it, because you can’t set a story in Gotham without It’s about family issues, class tensions and opportunistic criminals, but thanks to a number of clever casting, script and design choices, it also feels completely different to much that has come before.
LeFranc’s unsentimental exclusion of Batman allows The Penguin to thrive in his absence, revealing new facets of a Gotham we thought we already knew all about. Without him, the series is rooted to the ground — with all the petty crime that happens on Gotham’s streets and the way loss dictates our shifting barometers of good and evil — and the season finds wacky and seething ways to explore that spectrum of morality. Oz Cobb and Sofia Falcone get to do evil all on their own in ways that are entertaining and watchable, and many of the show’s character dynamics pulse with a “chaos is a ladder” energy reminiscent of HBO peers. game of Thrones. The production and art design are at their most exciting when the series looks back at the pop culture and mid-century style that shaped Oz and Sofia’s childhood. Sure, it’s casino And Scarface Pastiche, but his purple pinstripe suits and their plunging necklines and fur coats look great. And while the series’ pacing is uneven and its plot machines are largely familiar, especially when Sofia, Oz and various ethnically organized gangs are pitted against each other, the overall execution is thankfully more Gangs of London as The Continental.
The Penguin begins one week after the events of The Batman and provides a little “previous” in the form of reports on the evening news. Carmine Falcone (played by John Turturro in the film, recast in the series by Mark Strong), Gotham’s former patriarch of the criminal underworld and secret father of Selina Kyle/Catwoman, was revealed to be an informant who engineered the downfall of his rivals, the Maroni family, and was murdered. A terrorist attack hatched by the Riddler swept Gotham City, inspiring Batman to reveal himself more fully to the public by rescuing citizens and taking out the Riddler’s incel-like followers. But not even government aid from FEMA and Gotham’s elected mayor preaching unity can dispel the feeling that Gotham is falling apart. When Falcone’s second-in-command, Oz, breaks into his boss’s old apartment to look out at the city through the huge windows, all he sees is a dingy and dirty apartment, as if a layer of soot and mold has settled on every available surface. It may not seem like much, but Oz – nicknamed “Penguin” because of his limp, but also apparently because of his teardrop-shaped frame and beak-like, scarred face – sees an opportunity to take power.
His attempt to go from being Falcone’s agent to being the head of the family that runs Gotham’s drug trade will require eliminating a number of opponents. The next contender for the crown is Falcone’s playboy son Alberto (Michael Zegen), who, though more of a Fredo Corleone than a Michael, is backed by allies like family underboss Johnny Vitti (Michael Kelly). The Maronis, whom Carmine betrayed, are still a threat; although Sal (Clancy Brown) is in prison, his wife Nadia (Shohreh Aghdashloo) is perfectly capable of ruling in his stead. (One of the series’ most unexpected surprises is that Nadia, like Aghdashloo himself, is Iranian, and Sal and Nadia converse as much in Farsi as in English.) There are other ethnic lines within Gotham’s gangs, and each is fighting for a little more of the pie that Carmine used to keep mostly for himself. Most sinister, however, is Falcone’s daughter and Alberto’s sister Sofia, who is released from Arkham Asylum after years in prison and harbors deep grievances against Oz, who used to be her driver. “I’m vindicated,” she says with a tight smile when she and Oz meet again, and Milioti’s acting chops are most evident in these spare moments, when she gives us a glimpse into a torn psyche.
The character Sofia is one of the series’ biggest departures from the comic book stories that loosely inspire The Penguinand their competition with Oz for control of Gotham’s underworld drives most of the tension; each of them plunges into increasing violence to gain the upper hand over the other. Sometimes these escalations are the moments when the series feels most mechanical in its cycle of intrigue-ambush-attack-repeat, and most beholden to its references; I can’t complain about The Penguin imitation Gangs of New Yorkbut when it comes to The Godfather, Boardwalk Empire was there first. (And was better prepared; The Penguin is flatly lit and the action editing can be jumpy.) But then Milioti makes a kind of devious yet angry gesture to show us the depth of Sofia’s resentment toward her family, like filling a glass of wine to the brim while her male relatives look on in disgust. Or Farrell’s Oz goes to a meal at a fancy French restaurant with his assistant Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), a teenager from the same Gotham slums where Oz grew up, leans forward with interest as Victor talks about his now-deceased parents’ money problems, then proposes a toast in their honor. These moments feel uniquely The PenguinThe treatment of these characters is impressive and they do a lot to balance out the predictable plot of the series.
The word transforming is dangerously close to an acting cliché, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to describe what Farrell does in The Penguin. The only thing that remains recognizable about the actor are his eyes, and he uses them to create the emotional arc of this entire performance. Oz is written to indulge other people’s suspicions about him, and Farrell takes great pleasure in exaggerating his hideousness: He smiles so wide that his numerous gold teeth are visible, he raises his already-contrived “Fuhgeddaboudit” voice a little higher when he’s nervous, and he never misses a joke about another man’s lack of masculinity. The character plays into every possible stereotype of an Italian-American; our guy even lets out a Joey Trubbiani-esque “How are you?” But one of the show’s cleverest touches is how it reveals Oz’s identity as a malleable, conscious performance, shaped by his relationship with his demanding mother and codified by the years he spent adjusting to the Falcones. It’s a work of chameleon-like cunning, using the character’s babbling speaking style and penchant for mordant humor to lull us into a kind of amused complacency before a twist makes it abundantly clear that this is no anti-hero story. The Penguin is the portrait of a villain and Farrell’s sympathy is his most subtle secret weapon.
Both Milioti and Farrell play characters that drift into cartoonishness and caricature, but in them the sharp edges of humanity – jealousy and greed, grief and lust, self-hatred and boasting – remain the The Penguin at the same time lurid and plausible. And, more effectively than the films of Christopher Nolan or Todd Phillips, populist; like any worthwhile story about organized crime, The Penguin is really about what it takes to succeed in America. What rules do you have to break to get ahead? What alliances and whose work should be protected in a world where the strongest wins? What does it cost to get out of this system or to try to break the wheel? Milioti and Farrell give parallel speeches on these questions, and The Penguin becomes repetitive at times when you treat the two as bizarre mirror images of each other. If one has a vision of a blue-collar-led future, the other must have it too; if one has an overprotective parent, the other must have it too; if one misses a sibling, the other must have it too. But this trait is forgivable if The Penguin gives its central couple a lot of room to develop and the result is a spin-off that doesn’t need its cinematic predecessor to light up the night.
