I Am The Night

The writing can lay the nihilism on a bit thick. ... And yet there's no denying the spellblindingly ominous mood cast over six episodes. [21 Jan - 3 Feb 2019, p.12]

The miniseries attempts to sew together true events with fictional characters and storylines to mixed success. ... Pine's dogged, self-destructive, and heart-breaking performance as Jay is what pulls the viewer from episode to episode.

It takes a while to really get going, but once I Am The Night starts spilling its secrets, it doesn’t stop until the very end.

The series' historical speculation is just dirty and plausible enough for the story. But the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short is beside the point: What the series does best is capture the sick fascination with grisly violence, making the audience complicit in the grotesque world it portrays.

Night stumbles through some complex racial themes; to be blunt, it’s more comfortable with the rapey-murdery angle. But there’s sincere texture in the exploration of Fauna’s African-American family. ... Night isn’t great L.A. Noir--the plot moves at corpse speed--but it’s a vivid TV treat, filmed in real locations haunted by history that might just be too weird for basic cable.

Night’s pacing can be frustrating — this mini would be a lot more effective if it were cut to four hours--but the surprises and twists in the final two episodes make it more than worthy of your investment.

I Am the Night may be a little too formulaic to be TV’s next limited series with maximum impact--a la “Sharp Objects,” or what TNT really wants, another “True Detective”--but it’s well positioned to deliver the kind of entertainment that overly serious fare often overlooks.

Pine’s lightness mitigates a lot of paint-by-number murk in the course of this miniseries--six episodes of louche noir, mildly feverish nonsense, and murder-mystery comfort food. ... Despite the absence of a badge, Singletary might be the truest detective on television. There’s a refreshing honesty to his trashiness.

In some ways, I Am the Night is too much--and not enough--of a good thing.

Good performances, strong start, but the pulp and cliches eventually take over.

Unfortunately, though Eisley is affecting, Fauna’s story feels like it’s skimmed over. The racial elements are intriguing. ... But, like Fauna’s character, this aspect of the tale is underdeveloped. Pine, who’s also an executive producer, has more success with Jay, giving a contemporary spin to a film noir-style antihero.

Fauna, portrayed by India Eisley with wide-eyed naiveté that occasionally crystallizes into a flinty determination to get to the bottom of her complicated origin story. ... Pine throws himself into the part with his usual gusto, giving Jay a manic edge that keeps him from floating too far into cliché. That does not, unfortunately, hold true for the rest of the series, which proves to be the kind of drama wherein a revelation drops and a dramatic peal of thunder isn’t far behind.

Those who get through the first several hours of this meandering mystery/morality play may well be invested to see it all the way through. It’s not terrible in the end. Nor is it spellbinding or particularly memorable.

Slow and stupid more often than it shows signs of genuine noir craft, and yet will probably hook you if you watch very much of it. Its ample supply of celebrity kink, cold-case magnetism, and twilight menace will easily (okay, not easily, but adequately) distract you from its corpse-like pace, its blockhead dialogue, and, well, everything else.

Sure, it takes time to build characters, but “Night” feels super sluggish.

It takes a few episodes for Pat/Fauna and Jay’s paths to come together; by the time they do, a crucial amount of plot momentum has been sacrificed for the sake of establishing a creepily suggestive mood. Jenkins clearly wants to deliver on a theme of motherhood and abandonment, but Eisley has difficulty shouldering the weight of Pat/Fauna’s story, which just grows weirder instead of more compelling.

A slick, functional update of an L.A. noir. But it takes far too long to get weird—you’ll have to stick around until episode four for the sex cults, incest, violence, and freaky performance art; until then, it’s too many clichés from movies you’ve seen before, with little new to add.

“I Am the Night” is a low-rent “Chinatown”-like series that’s gratuitously old-hat, but pretty watchable despite a tortured self-awareness of its own decrepitud

By making Fauna, and Jay, the twin centers of a story that is nonetheless about George and a high-profile murder victim, I Am The Night becomes the dramatic equivalent of a name-dropping social media poseur.

Eisley is not up to carrying the emotional load it requires, especially at this measured pace. Over the course of six hours, Fauna is forced to grow up a lot from the largely sheltered girl we first meet, but Eisley’s performance barely varies from one landing point to the next. While Jay’s end of things is dripping with film noir tropes (one pivotal confrontation takes place in Chinatown, just in case we’re not clear that this story has things to say about the murky morality of powerful institutions), it’s much livelier thanks to Pine, even if Jay ultimately turns out to be primarily Fauna’s sidekick.

Eisley is lovely, but placid and reactive. Even when Fauna's playing detective, there's nothing inquisitive in the character, no intensity in the performance and none of the writers nor directors--Victoria Mahoney and Carl Franklin follow Jenkins---quite knows what to do with her. ... Pine is exceptional--raw, broken and yet very funny. Whether he forces the story to become his by virtue of his A-list status and charisma, because Eisley is too meek to command the frame or because the writers' interest in Fauna is fickle, remains open to debate.

The result is a bland hodgepodge.

Pine and Brooks have hammy moments, but for the most part, their big performances feel appropriate to the retro context. If only the writing played to these strengths. ... The pacing is off, too. Early episodes get bogged down in exposition and digressions.

The important racial component of this story is shallow and stereotyped, and the connections to the crimes of George Hodel are faintly rendered. I Am the Night paints a decent portrait of mid-century L.A. noir, but it mistakes darkness with depth, treating anything real or substantive with coy hesitation.