American Rust

“American Rust” could stand to clarify its thoughts beyond authenticity, just as it could certainly seek answers with a little more urgency. But there’s something admirable about its measured, deliberate pace.

There are times when “American Rust” gets things just right. ... Too often, though, we’re mired in wheel-spinning storylines. The great Canadian poet Neil Young once told us rust never sleeps, but “American Rust” takes too many naps.

Big narrative promises have been made – the question is, can the series make good on them as it continues?

Thanks to some good, understated dialogue – bucks the general mood , ie that this show was not so much written as collaged from odds and ends of other police procedurals. It’s also because Daniels and Tierney remind me so much of David Harbour and Winona Ryder in Stranger Things. Even so, it isn’t great.

At times it definitely was [good], especially the performance from Jeff Daniels as grizzled police chief Del Harris, who suffered PTSD after serving in Iraq, and an even better one from Maura Tierney as Grace, an impoverished, attractive seamstress at risk of losing her trailer home and enjoying said police chief occasionally taking down her particulars.

So far, it is perfectly all right, the sort of series you might watch more with interest than engagement but which may eventually surprise you — for better or worse.

While the framework sounds like it has all the makings of a twisty murder mystery, American Rust has a maddeningly peculiar way of downplaying just about everything, so there’s no urgency in the three episodes provided to critics.

While too many first episodes go overboard on exposition, “Rust” is often needlessly opaque.

Tthe show translates the book’s rich stream-of-consciousness prose into a flat, run-of-the-mill murder mystery, casting Daniels as the most generic detective antihero you can imagine.

With only three episodes to judge, “American Rust” so far, at least, doesn’t seem totally successful at transcending stereotypes, and creating characters who come across as individuals who are caught up in specific situations. As was the case with “Mare of Easttown,” “American Rust” boasts a skilled cast, who help bring dimension to their characters.

Everything in this is predictable, up to and including the inciting incident. ... American Rust likely has a story worth telling, and a setting worth exploring, but this version fails to make much of a case for either.

There are just enough of those moments for fans of the cast of “American Rust” to check it out, but anyone looking for another “Mare of Easttown” is likely to be disappointed. To be fair, Showtime only sent three episodes for review, and the writing could develop and dig deeper in subsequent episodes, transcending its superficial set-up. The only question is if anyone will still care about the people of Buell by the time they do.

Mare of Easttown got there first, and did it way better.

Chief Del's efforts to protect Billy seem sure to backfire, providing a suspenseful undercurrent to a series that otherwise fails to find a pulse of urgency. [27 Sep - 10 Oct 2021, p.7]

Daniels’ scenes aside, there’s simply nothing particularly distinctive, exciting or surprising about American Rust, which hews to a formal and narrative template that’s as creaky and gone-to-seed as the trailer homes, pick-up trucks, and steel mills to which it pays such evocative attention.

The first three episodes of the miniseries that were sent for review are so relentlessly downbeat, so lacking in urgency, so drained of possibility, it’s hard to care about anything or anyone in them.

All these prestige trappings can’t save American Rust from its fundamental, fatal flaw: It’s hopelessly boring. The series opens on a man crushing up a tablet and painstakingly measuring out a dosage, and it somehow only gets slower from there. What could have been a propulsive murder mystery or a cogent conversation about social issues ends up a snail crawl through a generic town populated by characters whose personalities range from glum to glummer.

None of these threads are particularly interesting, as much as they’re given a heavy gray filter that screams “prestige TV.” Not even Jeff Daniels and Maura Tierney can make the story all that provocative within its humble demeanor.

The plot thrives on contrivance and misunderstanding more often than human emotion, and attempts to draw out what it’s like for characters to live where they do more often seem to end in showy small-town cliché.

Ruminate upon the inability of Jeff Daniels and Maura Tierney to lighten the slow crush of sadness constricting your brain with each new tragedy presented, be it major or insignificant, and despite their best efforts to create sympathetic, fully rounded personas out of very little.