The Death of Bunny Munro review – Matt Smith is perfect in Nick Cave’s overwhelming study of masculinity | television

TThe peddler used to be an ordinary character – the butt of jokes about the cruelty of man, and the untamable wanderlust of a pea once freed from his domestic shackles. The Death of Bunny Munro, adapted from Nick Cave’s 2009 book of the same name by Pete Jackson while maintaining all its bleak tenderness and unforgiving brutality, gives us the tragedy that lurks on the other side of any comic character worth his salt.

Cosmetics salesman Bunny (Matt Smith, a brilliant, underappreciated actor, as well as the best doctor of the modern era, please send SAE for my study on this) was on the road, sampling another young lady’s products, when we bumped into him. His wife Libby (Sarah Greene, who plays a fierce, loving woman broken by depression and her husband’s choices) calls him. He dismisses her and goes back to sampling. When he returned the next day, he found that she had killed herself. They have a nine-year-old son, Bunny Junior, played by Raphael Matthe, who gives an absolutely brilliant and heartbreaking performance, walking the thinnest of lines between knowing everything and nothing about his father and his possible future. At first, Bunny Sr. tries to distance him from Libby’s mother (Lindsay Duncan), who refuses in a harrowing post-funeral scene. But when social services arrive to take the boy into care, Bunny’s pride or conscience are pricked. The couple peeks out the window and heads out on a road trip along the South Coast, experiencing father-son bonding. Traditionally, this is good stuff. But Cave is not a traditional writer and this is not a traditional tale.

When Bunny can get his customers to buy his ointments and promises, life is good. All he needs is a little money and a lot of sex. Junior watches in nervous awe. If nothing else, his father’s antics are a distraction for the orphan boy from his grief. “She must have wanted to die,” Junior says to one of the many strangers he meets while waiting for his father to finish—uh—charming a client. “That’s why he’s not so sad.” And if a child is reaching for sunglasses instead of the eye cream they need for chronic blepharitis, it’s all part of the adventure.

Gradually, of course, things fall apart. The center of the rabbit cannot hold. His simple but insatiable appetite leads him into more trouble, and his guilt also relentlessly tries to catch up with him. Bunny’s journey is interspersed with flashbacks to his youth, watching his father — another rabbit who, fearing the cycle of selfishness will be broken — neglect him in favor of finding women (“so wonderful,” the father insists) and moments of happiness with Libby before her depression sets in, which certainly has nothing to do with her longing to remain faithful. Junior has comforting visions of his mother, though they disappear when he decides to imitate his father cheering on a striptease. The show at the bar – the moment that almost broke me up.

The Death of Bunny Munro is only six episodes long, with running times ranging between about 30 and 50 minutes. This is generally a sign of quality and confidence and the Bunny Munro is a perfect example of why – there is no padding, stress or desperate pressure here. Each chapter of the story is given the time it needs, and should set an example for others who tend to amplify or undercut their narratives rather than exploit the great advantage that modern streaming has given creators by freeing them from strict time frames and forced commercial breaks.

As a study in masculinity, in men who hand misery to men, and deepening like a southern coastal cliff as Bunny and his son head toward doom, it is as timely and — unfortunately, because the book was written more than a decade ago — as illuminating. The screenplay and Smith do a perfect job of conveying the underlying violence underlying his and his interactions with the women and how little the latter needs to do to provoke that violence. They ask not for sympathy, only for understanding, as they show the rabbit trapped like any rabbit in a trap by the lack of substance beneath his style and the lessons he learned from his father before he was old enough to choose between them. Infidelity may be in the genes, but upbringing is supposed to teach you how to work against your flaws, not with them. The path that Junior – a sensitive, intelligent boy interested in the wider world he might save – will take with no mother to shelter him is what draws you through the dark story. The only hope you can hold on to is that it is set before smartphones, otherwise the question will surely be settled before they even open the window.