Media Musings: Comic actor dad is rad in 'Breaking Bad'
Bryan Cranston has the saddest mustache in all of television.
The patch that he sports above his upper lip on the new AMC series "Breaking Bad" looks like a hot chocolate smear that he neglected to wipe off his mouth.
It's a 'stache that signifies failure, that tells the world, "I could shave it off, but really, so much else is going wrong in my life, should personal grooming really top the list?"
In short, it's the perfect set of whiskers for Walter White, the middle-aged high school chemistry teacher that Cranston plays so frighteningly well on the tense and darkly funny new series. Cranston is best known for playing the perpetually chipper dad on "Malcolm in the Middle," so to see him so convincingly play such a despairing, seemingly doomed character -- and to have that character be the lead on a regular weekly series -- is pretty powerful stuff.
With his off-the-rack department store shirts, permanently pained expression and, of course, that facial fuzz, Walter is the poster boy for late-middle-age male regret. He's a teacher in New Mexico who gets little respect from his students, partly because they see him on the weekends at his second job washing their cars. When his doctor tells him that his persistent, debilitating cough is inoperable lung cancer and he has six months to live, it seems like the last card of a bad hand finally being dealt.
But sometimes the worst news can inspire people to do great things. From "The Bucket List" to "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," movies and television are filled with terminally ill characters who use their final time on Earth to achieve their dreams and reach some sort of graceful closure with their loved ones.
What does Walter do? He starts a crystal meth lab out in the desert.
That makes "Breaking Bad" sort of a perverse meditation on the American dream, particularly that middle-aged dream that you can chuck it all, all your bad decisions and your fears, and start over late in life on the road to wealth and happiness.
It's just that Walter's career change isn't inspired by Tony Robbins motivational tapes, but by his knowledge of chemistry and his 11th-hour conversion to the ranks of the utterly immoral.
So far, "Breaking Bad" has been almost breathtakingly dark as Walter tries to stay afloat in the crystal meth game. Much of the first three episodes has involved a run-in with a pair of rival dealers; one gets killed and disposed of in an acid bath, the other gets padlocked in the basement while Walter decides if he has the nerve to execute him.
The series balances the paranoid terror of the drug trade with moments of unexpected comedy. I loved the scene where a panicky Walter sits down and makes a "pros" vs. "cons" list of whether to kill the dealer. Under "pros" he had a whole list of reasons, such as "Judeo-Christian principles." Under "cons" he had one reason, "He'll kill my entire family if I let him go."
That family, by the way, includes a pregnant wife and son who are blissfully unaware that their harried patriach is the Tony Montana of Albuquerque and a hothead brother-in-law who happens to be a DEA agent. Obviously, at some point Walter and his DEA brother-in-law will collide, but right now the brother-in-law is good for moments of terrific comedy, such as a ridiculously misguided attempt to "scare straight" Walter's son from smoking marijuana.
But this show belongs to Cranston, and the amazement at seeing an actor known primarily for lightweight comedy sink into a juicy dramatic role with such crazed conviction. If seeing Cranston as a desperate, depressed family man isn't enough of a challenge for him, we also get flashbacks where Cranston plays Walter as a younger man, when he seems to have the world by the tail.
How did Walter go from that engaged, happy young man to the older one we see strangling a drug dealer in his unfinished basement?
The answers are making for compellingly raw television, and "Breaking Bad" is proving to be an excellent companion piece to AMC's first dramatic hit, "Mad Men."
rthomas@madison.com
PR Newswire
Bryan Cranston plays Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who gets involved in the crystal meth trade, in AMC's tense and darkly funny new series "Breaking Bad," which airs at 9 p.m. Sundays.
