The Virtues (TV)
The past is something we all have to reckon with. Whether an internal force or an external force, it is something always working on us. Joseph is about to find that out the hard way in Shane Meadows’s excellent miniseries, “The Virtues.”
The first three episodes of the series starts with Joseph, played by the fantastic Stephen Graham, walking through life. Each time, his focus is more and more purposeful, his destination more clear. Joseph is an alcoholic, and when we first meet him, he is going to his ex-wife’s house for dinner with her family, including their son together. He is going to be told that they are moving to Australia, and taking his son with him. That sends him spiraling, and he goes out, gets blackout drunk, and we see him the next morning, on his apartment floor, covered in his own vomit. Something needs to change, and he’s starting to have flashes back to his youth. He packs a bag, withdraws all of his money, and heads to Ireland.
“The Virtues” starts out focusing on Joseph, and it is primarily his story, but another key figure comes to bear in Dinah (Niamh Algar). Dinah is Joseph’s sister-in-law by way of his sister’s husband. In episode 2, Joseph is walking Ireland, finding his sister, Anna’s, home with her family. It’s quite a surprise for Anna (Helen Behan), because she thought he was dead. When they were children, they were separated, and Joseph was sent to a boy’s home, which he escaped from shortly after. This is the first time they’ve seen each other in over 30 years. Shortly after Joseph arrives, Dinah arrives, as well, and they’re both crashing at Anna’s house. As her and Joseph begin to talk, we find out that she is in a similar situation, with a son she is unable to see, and it’s led to some turmoil over the years. In the final two episodes of the series, Joseph and Dinah will go on their own separate journeys when it comes to their past, leading them to moments that will shape their future moving forward.
Meadows has perfectly calibrated every emotional beat, and we are with the series every step of the way. The scene where Joseph is told about the move to Australia is perfectly written and acted, and the final scene he and his son have, where he is talking to him alone, is a heartbreaking one. He knows this is going to change their relationship, and he tells his son something that makes that clear. There is pain and desperation for a connection from Graham’s performance that is palpable and powerful, and everything that happens after builds off of that pain.
As dark as the series can be, there are moments in the middle episodes that are entertaining in how they play out, even if, beneath the surface, that pain and desperation remains. There’s the way the scene around the dinner table, where Anna is introducing Joseph to her family, starts off considerate and gets awkward as the kids begin asking questions that are too heavy at the moment. (Dinah’s reaction is also a great one, and perfectly defines her character immediately.) When Joseph gets drunk after visiting some old haunts, including the boy’s school he ran away from, the car ride after Anna and Dinah pick him up has some very funny moments in how Anna and Dinah deal with him. The laughs are not comedic laughs, though, but ones that keep a lump in your throat.
Meadows and his co-writer, Jack Thorne, parse the information about Joseph’s past out throughout the four episodes of the series, but it’s not a narrative trick to sustain the mystery; it’s so that we are in Joseph’s perspective the entire time. He is rediscovering these facts as he goes along, and when he finally reaches truth about what happened to him, it’s deeply upsetting in how it happens, and devastating as it leads him down a dangerous path in the last episode. By that point, Dinah is not only an important part of his story, but we also see her reckoning with her past, as well. Her journey leads her to a similar place Joseph’s leads his, face-to-face with people in power whose actions shaped their reality. Watching them face those people, and where it leads them, is riveting, and leads us to an ending that feels inevitable for both characters. How we react to the past coming back to meet us will inform where we go from there. “The Virtues” shows that is not always the place we hope to go, or expect it to take us.
