Vladimir Review – Rachel Weisz is consistently great in a TV show you’ll love for years to come | television

VWladimir is that rare visitor to the screen, and it’s television suitable for adults. The eight-part adaptation of Julia Mae Jonas’s provocative 2022 novel of the same name has not shied away from the characteristics that made the book great—dark comedy, dark insight, and the evisceration of accepted piety—and fit them perfectly into the new form. Screenwriter Jenny Bergen, who has clearly digested the book to her bones, retains all of Jonas’s intelligence, confidence, and, most importantly, her willingness to live in the gray areas and enjoy the complexities of middle-aged life.

It also has Rachel Weisz, who gives a wonderful, unflinching performance as the unnamed heroine, a tenured English professor beloved by her students, and her husband John (John Slattery, in his only role, but he does it so well and so much better than anyone else that who are we to object to seeing him again?), another tenured academic on the same campus – who has just been suspended for sleeping with students. His defense is that this was before the rules changed. “It was a different time” is a recurring phrase – not just from him (this is the beginning of Jonas and Bergen’s devotion to pulling the rug) but from his wife, other members of the faculty and their peer group, male and female.

Wise’s character has always been aware of John’s affairs. They had always had, as she put it, “an arrangement – ​​what kids today call an open marriage, but without all those arrangements.” terrible “Communication.” Which is a line so great you might want to set it aside as a treasure to be admired for years to come, for its endless accumulated wisdom and the pressure of the generational divide entirely from the mouth of a character accustomed to privileging reason over emotion.

It’s this trait that makes her unwilling to fall in lust with the new man at work – a smart, sexy young man named Vladimir (Leo Woodall), who is cheerful, charming and somewhat flirtatious – but perhaps with everyone? He is also married to Cynthia, a bright, exciting young woman who is now on track to obtain an English professorship as well, an increasingly attractive option for our hero/anti-heroine students. The ability of students to determine their adult destinies, not just through sexual harassment complaints, but by enrolling in one class over another, forms another thread in the increasingly dense narrative web.

But it is the differing intergenerational attitudes to John’s activities that provide the greatest resolve. As the number of complainants increases, our professor faces from all sides gossip, conflicting opinions and the need to navigate the path between self-protection (which can also mean protecting John, if only to preserve his pension), protecting her family (especially her daughter Syd, played by Ellen Robertson) and justice.

But what does justice look like? “It’s very difficult for me to understand—something that doesn’t work in lesser productions but works beautifully here—“how consensual relationships that were pleasurable not despite the power dynamic but because of it could be viewed as painful or harmful after the fact,” says Weisz, contemplating John’s accusers in one of her character’s many speeches to camera. As a female colleague, I feel a little insulted.”

Later, when she talks to the college president’s wife, trying to postpone the harassment hearing until after John’s retirement, they bond over golden memories of their private affairs with lecturers (“It Was a Different Time”). Are they deceiving themselves? Save themselves? See the uncomfortable, juicy truth at the core of this common human experience? Earlier, the novel’s heroine notes that she’s unlikely to have power—sexual, intellectual (as she tries in vain to get her students to hook up with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca when all they can see is the misogyny of her age) or otherwise—over anyone else her age. Are you acting out of envy or anger?

The show is interested in all of the above. Part of its power is its insistence that none of us is pure in our motives, clear in our conscience, or honest with ourselves or others; We also do not treat life with the respect it deserves, nor do we treat the people we meet with the compassion they need. We contain multitudes, and nothing is black or white. Whatever young people think now, they will learn this too – perhaps sooner than they would like.