American Gods - 'The Bone Orchard'

Some casting is good. Some casting is bad. Ian McShane was born for this.

It's been a while in coming, but the Starz adaptation of Neil Gaiman's modern classic American Gods has arrived in the UK on Amazon Video.

'The Bone Orchard' adapts the opening chapters of the book, with protagonist Shadow Moon being released from prison early to attend his wife's funeral, and making his way across country with one suit and a credit card to do so. During the journey he encounters the shabby, one-eyed conman Wednesday, who seems to know a great deal about him and offers him a job. He gets into a fight with a seven foot tall, self-styled leprechaun, discovers that his wife was having an affair with his best friend (and that they died not only in the same car crash but in flagrante,) and accepts Wednesday's offer in spite of his better judgement.

Punching!

After the funeral, he is attacked by a rabid VR helmet and subjected to interrogation by a virtual young man, who orders his virtual goons to beat Shadow to actual death. He is cut down from a lynching rope as the goons are violently torn apart by an unseen assailant.

In addition, we open with a tale of stranded Vikings in an adaptation of one of the novel's 'Coming to America' segments, and have a brief diversion as a lonely online dater is consumed by the sex goddess Bilquis(1).

The series is stylish AF; moody and dark(2), with lots of half-muttered dialogue and dimly-lit – although not indistinct; this is quality darkness – scenes in the parts which follow Shadow's normal life. Where the action tips over into the realm of the gods, however, things get a little screwy, from the Red Lodge chic of Bilquis' boudoir to the Technical Boy's virtual limo, from the use of wildly inappropriate diegetic music(3) to signal a disconnect from normality to slow-motion violence in which incredible fountains of blood spray across the shot.

 

Granted, it's an edge look...

With 'The Bone Orchard', American Gods definitely establishes potential, but I don't think it's realised it yet. This is not to say there is nothing to like here, and oddly it's one of the more difficult scenes of the book that comes out best here. At the funeral, Shadow runs into his best friend's wife, Audrey, who is drunk off her arse and bitter as anything. Her awkward, angry attempt at revenge seduction is hard to read and hard to watch, in large part because what could be cringeworthy comes across as raw and real. The writing and direction deserve credit, but huge props to Ricky Whittle and Betty Gilpin for playing the absolute heck out of the scene. It is this quality of reality that pervades much of the series, and in particular marks the noir atmosphere of the real world and juxtaposes with the hyper-stylised god world. Perhaps the most telling lack in this opening episode is a scene set in the latter which compares to the funeral for impact, leaving the magical world seeming flat and unextraordinary by comparison to the mundane.

So, to paraphrase Calvin Candie, American Gods has my curiosity; it remains to be seen if it will up its game and truly get my attention.

(1) Pronounced here 'bill-kwiss', rather than as I have always heard it before 'bill-kiss'. I found that oddly distracting.
(2) Attorneys at Law.
(3) I'm trying to remember the particular instance that caught my attention, and I can't. That's going to bother me.