So, you’ve got your pitch: brothers trapped in a co-dependent death spiral, set amongst New York City’s fine dining scene. The brothers will be played by A-listers. Jason Bateman can add some of his Ozark grit, while Jude Law can cash in on that glorious string of pompous assholes he’s played of late (from Vox Lux to Firebrand). Add to that a slate of high-profile directors—two actors hopping behind the lens, Bateman and Laura Linney, plus Ben Semanoff, and, to top it off, The Order’s Justin Kurzel, who’s a real talent when it comes to unflinching brutality without the fear of exploitation.
Black Rabbit has every tool you could possibly need in your Netflix miniseries belt. And it certainly walks and talks with a fair bit of style. It’s all dimly lit city bars and back alleys, dust pirouetting in the rare streak of sunlight, nicotine stains that seem to hang in the air itself. The violence is gnarly. The soundtrack slides easy from Fontaines D.C. to Interpol.
Yet, it’s a hard show to really sink your teeth into. Every time I’d find myself drawn in by how well-presented the whole affair seemed, I’d be struck by a turn in the narrative, or an excess scene, that suggested the writers were just trying to spin the wheels to hit their eight-hour-long episode quota.
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The actual meat on the bones of this thing is relatively slight. Bateman and Law play Vince and Jake Friedken, who went from traumatic childhood to mildly successful band to more successful restaurateurs, only for Vince’s drug habit to catch up to him in a nasty way and Jake to buy him out of his share of the place.
There’s a semi-biblical slant to the way the series so intimately ties their fates to the idea of past sin and culpability, played up in the way both golden child and prodigal son are introduced: Jake is seen living in the congenial, smooth jazz harmony of the Black Rabbit restaurant, while Vince is desperately trying to flog collector coins in a parking lot, only for some outsized Coen Brothers-esque misfortune to befall him.
On the run again, Vince returns to New York City, hoping to finally settle his debts with Joe Mancuso (Troy Kotsur, who might be stuck playing the standard gangster role, but still has a way of holding the energy in the room). Every scheme blows up in Vince’s face in an increasingly ludicrous fashion, in a way that apes the emotional chaos of the Safdie brothers’ Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019), yet never embraces the inherent absurdity at play like those films do.
Creators Zach Baylin and Kate Susman are clearly after something more sombre and self-reflective. Only, the stories that surround the Friedkens—head chef Roxie’s (Amaka Okafor) discovery that the “work family” is a false front when people come in the way of profit, and interior decorator Estelle’s (Cleopatra Coleman) conflict of personal ambition versus an overbearing boyfriend (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù’s Wes)—don’t amount to much beyond establishing a sense of compromised morality.
Bateman is too easily caught in a sardonic loop. It prevents him from getting truly messy. Law is in better territory here, performance-wise, because he has a subtle, convincing way of layering on the charm and then turning slightly to catch it under a different light, so that it suddenly looks very ugly indeed.
Because of that, I wish Black Rabbit were a little more uncompromising with its characters, at least to match what Law is capable of, instead of ultimately presenting these brothers as good dudes pushed towards bad decisions because of some deeply ingrained impulse to prove themselves as worthy. After all, there’s enough talent here. Why not make the most of it?
