“I just want my city back.”
There it is. Scarcely five minutes into episode three, Steve Zahn nails Treme’s central thesis dead to the wall. Speaking with Toni, his pro bono lawyer, after an unpleasant exchange with Military Police landed him in jail, Zahn, as the impassioned to a fault Davis, sums up what every character who has thus far graced David Simon’s New Orleans opus is collectively feeling. They want their livlihood back. They just want things to go back to the way they were.
By now it’s apparent that, more than it is about a city in recovery, Treme is about hope and yearning through desperation, and how tragedy forces these feelings on people because, frankly, the alternative of giving up is not an option. In one of the early reviews of the series, someone mentioned what makes David Simon’s projects so appeaing, be it The Wire, Homicide, Generation Kill, etc, is the care with which he treats his characters and subjects. David Simon loves people, cares abut people and their stories. The Wire took people and institutions of power to task for the way they abused and mistreated the citizens they were designed to serve. Generation Kill took an unflinching look at what havoc an unpopular war has wreaked on the very people who enlisted, dutifully and patriotically, for the mission. Simon treats the characters large and small who make up Treme with similar empathy, people who are struggling to reclaim their lives even though the things that once came so easy have suddenly become so much harder due to forces beyond their control. If the characters of The Wire and Generation Kill are victims of power structure and war respectively, the characters in Treme are victims of nature.
Antoine, who meet at the start of this week’s episode tagging a stripper from behind in her double wide, is still trying to crawl his way back onto steady ground within the city’s thriving jazz scene, but it’s slow going. He’ll play any time, anywhere gladly, but he want augment his music career with a steady job. He’s fine with that, but his morale is dealt a crushing blow when he’s told that Kermit is taking his crew to New York for a high paying benefit show, but he missed the invite. A few too many drinks later he stumbles into Sonny and Annie and decides to serenade sweetly to the music, a nice image that is quickly shattered when he drunkenly bumps into a parked cop car with his horn. Unnecessarily quick to react, the two cops rough him up, trash his trombone and haul him into jail. Not exactly the banner evening.
Speaking of Sonny and Annie, the pair got a lot more face time this week, which is alright by me. Annie’s violin skills catch the eye of a musician of note named Tom, who offers her a spot playing on a few tunes at an upscale event downtown. This comes to the chagrin of Sonny, who more or less dropped his last twenty bucks and change on a bottle of whine in celebration of Annie’s birthday. But when his plans take a back seat to Annie’s last minute gig, he slugs the bottle himself in a closet. What a romantic.
Elsewhere, Toni’s still insistent on helping Ladonna track down Daymo, but it’s an investigation that continues to hit wall after wall. In meeting with the sheriff, she’s amazed at the indifference he shows regrading Daymo’s whereabouts, even though he was relocated to his precinct after the storm. Ladonna, meanwhile, decides to call in a favor of her own to her brother in law, a judge wo may or may not have the pull and connections to give her a few good leads as to her brother’s whereabouts. But Ladonna has long been at odds with her husband’s side of the family, so she’s not expecting too much. The Ladonna/Daymo/Toni thread to me seems pleasantly Wire-esque, pitting a few well meaning souls up against a system that seemingly doesn’t give much of a fuck and refuses to cooperate.
Meanwhile Albert is still trying to get his tribe back together when, while helping a fellow tribe member survey the damage of his home, he finds the dude’s father, also a tribe member, left as little more than a rotting corpse beneath a canoe in an old shed. This leads to one of the more powerful scene’s in the episode, where a Mardi Gras ceremony honoring the dead tribe member is rudely interrupted by a busload of tourists who stop to gawk and snap photos. The scene, which wraps up the episode, brings Davis’ words from earlier back around full circle: Leave us alone and give us our city back. They’re trying to honor one of their own who has passed, but all others see is funny costumes and dancing.
Davis continues to be the irascible fuck up and comic relief of the show, this time blowing a full week’s pay from his short tenure at the hotel to work his way back into Darcy’s good graces. Stuck to keep her business afloat while the insurance companies dangle her insurance money just out of her reach, she accepts his invite to dinner because, like just about everyone else in the show, she’s too beat down and defeated to put up much else of a fight. This, combined with lots of wine, leads to them “reconciling” in Davis’ apartment.
So yeah, good shit as usual. I’m particularly pleased with the show’s ability thus far to avoid the trappings of becoming a pitty me, post Katrina drama, which it so so very easily could have been. There’s sympathy for the characters, but just enough. Fortunately the show is so textured and fully realized that it carries itself above being some sort of Katrina cash in. In the wrong hands this show could have been a disaster. Dealing with sensitive material like Katrina is an enormous balancing act that borders on tightrope walking. Fortunately Simon and company know how to tread lightly and with care.
RB
