Rose Byrne is one of those actresses who justify watching a series or a movie just to admire her acting composure. She’s restrained in the dramatic and expressive in the comedic: it was her way of holding up Glenn Close’s shot in Damages and her ability to bring My Best Friend’s Wedding to her ground even in front of wide-ranging monsters. Comedy tour. So it can be understood that Apple does not want to lose sight of it. While she is preparing to say goodbye to the abrasive Physical, where the contempt that a woman can feel for her own body was exploited, she already has a replacement in the catalog: Platonic, which opens this Wednesday, and which is close, fun and bright. Who would have imagined that her reunion with the actor Seth Rogen and the director and screenwriter Nicholas Stoller, with whom she had worked on Damn Neighbors, would provide us with a series of hilarious jokes.
Sylvia’s youngest daughter no longer wants her mother to walk her to the school gate. It is a detail that places the woman in a scenario that she still saw as distant: her three children do not need her as before, when she decided to put her career as a lawyer on hold so that they would have a mother present, and she finds herself in unknown territory. It is possibly the time to enter a crisis, that of midlife, when she resumes contact with the one who had been her best friend that she has just divorced from her. The reunion with Will is explosive because of the way they challenge and compensate for each other: he avoided falling into the traditional family mold, she took on responsibilities that went beyond instant gratification, and together they face their respective obstacles. of adult life, offering a new perspective to their lives.
The lack of prejudice on the part of Stoller and Francesca Delbanco stands out, with whom he shares the authorship (and who is his wife in real life). The script shows empathy for the two lifestyles, understanding that both serve to write jokes (this is comedy!), that they are respectable, that they are adjustable and questionable to the extent that the characters consider it so. She doesn’t uncover unknown conflicts but she is astute when it comes to x-raying adult life.
His ability to shape characters, in fact, is revealed when Will starts dating a woman younger than him: the usual thing would be to reduce the girl to parody and, instead, she is treated with the same respect than adults, without giving up comedy. And, when Sylvia and Will meet again in the pilot episode, they candidly display both the distance between them caused by a past argument and the ease with which they tear it down: that no-nonsense, often illogical friendship that is just for the sake of it. of the comfort and understanding they feel when they are together.
The secret, however, is in the jokes. While television comedy that has strayed away from the sitcom tends to have trouble maintaining the comic tone throughout the run, let the laughs be a constant, Platónico’s scripts are well-constructed, without bumps, perfectly executing the plot. episodic story so that conflicts and situations are seasoned with hilarious moments. Here Sylvia’s hypersociability when she talks to mothers, the portrayal of the characters’ micro-environments, works just as well as the more direct humor related to drunkenness, loss of papers or situations derived from taking drugs in a restaurant bathroom.
Rose Byrne’s gift for comedy may never get enough recognition, especially when she takes it to the physical realm: she has a couple of episodes where she’s directly memorable (one related to ketamine, one related to dancing) and they place Platonic on the same plane as great comedies of our times like My Best Friend’s Wedding. And, if you add the simplicity of Seth Rogen, there is an unmissable header work, the kind that saves your day and forces you to repeat the jokes so you never get out of a loop of laughter again. It is an exemplary comedy that, incidentally, offers one of the most beautiful friendships in the audiovisual between a heterosexual man and woman, avoiding romanticization and sexual tension to go to the stuff of which genuine friendships are made.
