I will be writing
about Louie this season because if you don't write strained thinkpieces about Louie then you are thrown in blogger jail.
Louis CK has been all
over the talk show circuit promoting up a storm for the fourth season of his
acclaimed FX show Louie, and the fact
that he "took a year off" between the third and fourth seasons always
comes up. His explanation is that he didn't really take time off, but just
spent more time working on the show, and he thinks that this season is the best
one. "Elevator, Pt. 1" is a great example of this, as it balances
terror, love, exasperation, and believable urban serendipity all in a brisk
22-minute package.
That's what this show
does best--delivering sharply divergent emotions, themes, and experiences in
jolting, memorable ways. It's a sign of how the show has matured that there
don't need to be any overtly comic moments in the short film sections--CK is
confident enough in his dramatic storytelling to just tell his stories, and
rely on the interstitial standup bits to deliver the yuks, as they always do.
When Louie started back in 2010, I
was excited, but part of me wanted CK to just keep cranking out hour-long
standup specials, since he had put together a run of three that were arguably
the funniest and smartest of all time. Now I actually look forward to his short
films more than his standup, which I never thought would happen.
This episode is
classic Louie--two short films that
have no direct connection to each other, besides featuring the same central
character. In the first chunk, Louie takes his daughters on the chaotic
underworld of the NYC subway system. His youngest daughter, Jane, begins the
episode by being certain that her waking life was actually a dream, and she
decides that a fun thing to do would be slipping off the train just before the
doors closed. Louie, always very protective of his daughters, goes predictably
nuts, but channels his panic into a surprisingly well-executed rescue mission.
There was something thrilling about the gusto with which he laid out precisely
how he was going to retrieve Jane to his older, more stable daughter
Lily--"As soon as the doors open, we are running, running, fast, and we are going to go up the stairs and cross the
mezzanine, go to the downtown side, get on the first train coming back going
back downtown, and we're going upstairs, back outside, crossing Lexington and
going back downstairs to find Jane!" It was a great example of how living
in New York City is filled with so many complex variables that need to be juggled
to accomplish every daily task, and how this is especially compounded when you
are responsible for highly quirky children.
When Louie does reach
Jane, and thankfully she is totally fine, except for having a very skillfully
selected creepy, dirty hand with questionable rings placed on her shoulder by
an inquisitive stranger, he explodes on her in a way we haven't seen before.
Louie is typically extremely distant and awkward, but here he really unleashes
his anger at how what he cares for most in the world could put herself in such
danger so carelessly. He keeps yelling at her and shaking her until she cries,
and tells her that she should be crying so she remembers how badly she screwed
up. An intense example of the highly dramatic potential of the most ordinary
event, like the early episode "Halloween" from years ago, when Louie
is intimidated by costumed guys while trick or treating with his daughters.
This had more tension and a huge emotional payoff though, while that one was
sort of all atmospherics.
The second short film
begins what will presumably be a multiepisode arc. We see an old woman with
what seems like a Russian accent played by Ellen Burstyn stuck in an elevator,
and she does not handle it well. Of course, it's Louie's apartment building and
Louie happens to be the one waiting for the elevator when this happens, and he
is stuck with getting the old woman's pills so she doesn't pass out or worse in
there. After being given her apartment keys, Louie finds an attractive younger
woman sleeping on her couch, who the old lady tells him is her niece. She
didn't know she was home, so she asks Louie to go wake her up and so she can
wait with her, and Louie, nice guy that he is, obliges.
Naturally, the niece,
who speaks no English, freaks out when she is awoken by a casually obese
red-haired man, and chases him from the apartment. Louie sprints out of there
and up to his apartment, probably moving faster than we've ever seen him, and
seems genuinely thankful that she didn't stab him.
The episode ends with
the niece, who sort of has the same scuffled, used up brunette beauty you see
in NYC that Parker Posey's character did in previous seasons of the show,
bringing over a delicious homemade apple pie. The two get along famously,
despite the fact that they can't understand a thing the other says. This is
becoming a theme for Louie, as he ended season three with a scene of him
laughing happily with Chinese people in a remote Chinese village, thankful that
they were feeding him. This is an interesting recurring theme for a comedian
and actor so skilled with communicating, and for whom communicating as
precisely and logically as possible seems so important. It's a good bet that
we'll see this relationship between Louie and the pie-bearing niece soon, and I'm
looking forward to it. After all, he's had such bad luck with conventional
relationships, that maybe he needs someone to share a simple, pre-linguistic,
pastry-based understanding of companionship and warmth with?