Dominic Cooper is the kind of actor who has the gift of adjusting the audience’s moral compass at will. In the John Krasinski’s movie Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (based on David Foster Wallace’s short story collection of the same name), his monologue about rape victims starts off as a mansplaining, misogynistic morality tale (spoiler alert) about loose girls and aggressive guys who’re essentially animals-on-beer — as, we assume, is Cooper’s character. As you slip further and further into the reverie Cooper induces, the creepiness of his monologue accelerates, till he breaks down and you realise that his entire shtick is autobiographical, that he was the one raped by a group of crazed frat boys — with a beer bottle, no less.
In the opening episode of Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Sam Catlin’s TV show Preacher (based on Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s seminal comics series of the same name), we are treated to an inverted version of the Cooper trajectory: we start off sympathising with his character Jesse Custer, until we realise that he can be lethal when he wants to. A young boy comes up to Custer, the local preacher with a history of violence, and blurts out that he wants Custer to hurt his dad, a wife-beating specimen with rage issues. The boy tells Custer: “They said before you became a preacher, you did things.”
A world-weary Custer starts off on what we think will be the nth iteration of Clint Eastwood’s retired-cowboy speech. But soon, it becomes clear that we ought to be worried about whoever is unlucky enough to face off against Custer. “That’s what these things (fights) do, they escalate. And violence makes violence. It makes nothing much at all,” he warns the boy.
Custer soon befriends Cassidy (John Gilgun) a wisecracking, hedonistic, immortal Irish vampire and rekindles an old flame, Tulip O’Hare (Ruth Negga), as they go on the road to seek some answers about Custer’s newfound superpower. They end up crossing swords with Odin Quincannon (an imperious Jackie Earle Haley), the powerful and slimy owner of a 125-year-old slaughterhouse and meat packing business.
Quincannon’s quasi-sexual obsession with meat is such a difficult tic to convey onscreen without descending to shlock-movie depths. But Haley does it magnificently, especially in a scene where he is holding meat from both his deceased daughter and a freshly slaughtered cow in either hand (“Which is my daughter? And which is the cow? There is no difference”). We have seen this man play a number of cold-blooded characters down the years. Most recently, there was Rorschach from Watchmen and Guerrero from Human Target . In both of these roles, Haley had shown off his dry wit and his ability to infuse the most tense of scenes with moments of unexpected mirth. There is less of that with Quincannon, but we are not complaining.
Apart from its sometimes sophomoric humour (Rogen and Goldberg switch to Superbad mode roughly once every couple of episodes), Preacher has a lot of things going for it. A stellar cast extracts the most out of a taut screenplay. The cinematography captures the ‘gore chic’ aesthetic of Steve Dillon’s art in the comics. Catlin, a Breaking Bad graduate, brings some of the modern-day cowboy vibe of that show to the table. And the music never hits a wrong note, right from the time we are introduced to Custer, with ‘Time of the Preacher’ playing in the background.
The Preacher comics are some of the most violent books ever written or drawn. But the series is not a one-dimensional gore-fest. Some of the political commentary belonged to the front row of American comics, as sharp as anything by Alan Moore or Alison Bechdel. And the impossibly gorgeous cover art by Glen Fabry made sure that every issue was an event. Rogen, Goldberg and Catlin have adapted the framework of the show faithfully, and have played around with details therein, like chronology, the nature of the angels and their eventual fates. And so far it has worked. The show is in its second season now, and the showrunners have taken it to surprising new directions, including the introduction of Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor, who has his task cut out).
I can’t wait for Custer to face off against God, because in the Preacher universe, the more divine you are, the bigger your chances of screwing up at an unimaginable scale.
(The first season of Preacher is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime)