Crime and Punishment

Mark Ruffalo is the prince of pain. His shoulders hunched, his stomach hanging over his belt, his face lined with years of living with trauma, no one does grief better than him. In Task, a new miniseries on HBO, he gets ample opportunity to show us his humanity. The director Brad Ingelsby, who directed Mare of Easttown, another study in broken families, has mastered the art of chronicling a certain type of defeated America, where families are sundered apart, mothers are absent, fathers are lost, and the children are coping.

The Pink Floyd song ‘Wish You Were Here’ in the trailer says it all: ‘We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl/ year after year/ Running over the same old ground/ what have we found?/ The same old fears/ Wish you were here.’ In the voice of an angry young niece, in the eyes of an orphaned boy, in the photographs on the mantelpiece, the pain is repeated like a mournful sigh. The story follows two men struggling to reclaim their lives after a tragedy. One is an FBI agent, the other a man who robs drug houses.
Ruffalo plays FBI agent Tom Brandis, off the field on grounds of compassion, while Tom Plephrey plays the robber Robbie Prendergast, propelled by circumstances into a life of crime. Blood and gunshots are interspersed with moments of sudden beauty, looking up into a sky full of tall trees or jumping into clear blue waters. This is the semi-rural American heartland that sees little hope and even less joy in their lives, yet doesn’t give in to utter despair. It requires a different kind of courage.

Brad IngelsbyJioHotstarMark RuffaloTaskTom Pelphrey