Summary
American Gigolo lets kindness seep through its stylish but facile exterior, showing new sides to two key characters.
This recap of American Gigolo season 1, episode 4, “Nothing Is Real But the Girl”, contains spoilers.
When Jon Bernthal was cast as The Punisher, it seemed like an obvious choice. You take the thinly-veiled psychopathy of, say, Shane from The Walking Dead – remember the barn scene? Man, that show used to be so good – and just paint a skull on it. Hey, presto – instant anti-villain. But it’s a testament to Bernthal’s low-key brilliance that the Punisher moment everyone remembers most fondly is when he leaned against a headstone half-dead in Daredevil Season 2 and monologued about his daughter getting her face blown off. Bernthal has something few actors have these days have; an ability to venture inside himself and pull out pain and trauma by the fistful. He always plays broken men because on some level he must be one, or recall being one, or be able to imagine so vividly that he can become one on cue.
American Gigolo season 1, episode 4 recap
There’s a scene in “Nothing Is Real But the Girl” that’s slightly reminiscent of that graveyard monologue. It isn’t as powerful, obviously, nor is it really a monologue, but it has the same vibe; Bernthal fumbling around the edges of words, trying to find the right ones to put together. He doesn’t seem to be acting here, but sweeping out some dark recess of a soul touched by regret.
We’ll get to that in a minute. First, setup. American Gigolo needed to find a way to get Julian back into the world of pricey prostitution for exclusive clientele, but it had to be careful about it. The show has already depicted that world in a particular way and reminded us that Julian is resisting it. You can’t just let a supposedly reformed man waltz back into the lifestyle that cost him a decade and a half of his life in the first place. He should know better. So, this episode concocts a good, heart-warming excuse for him: The cute doggo that was following him around in American Gigolo episode 3 gets knocked down, and the veterinary costs to save the pooch far exceed what Julian or the dog’s homeless owner can afford.
Luckily, a little earlier in the episode, Julian was presented with the opportunity to accompany a wealthy tech executive named Anne (Heather Mazur, playing this role like it might be the last one of her career) to an event she was attending. He refused, but since needs must, he gives her a call. It turns out she’s in town to attend a high school reunion but bottles it for reasons that remain mysterious for a while. She makes Julian take her to a bar, where they get drunk and do drugs, and have sex in the bathroom, and then she nearly kills the pair of them while careening into oncoming traffic.
Something’s up with Anne, obviously. Julian coaxing her into explaining herself is what reminded me of that monologue. He’s so tender in this exchange, so able to make Anne feel at ease enough to reveal that in high school she killed her boyfriend while drunk driving and never faced punishment for it because her parents were wealthy. She was planning on attending the high school reunion to face the people who knew what she did; perhaps to face their judgment and finally receive some kind of condemnation for her crime. When Julian reminds her that it’s brave to fly across the country to face such a thing, you can tell that, in some way, he’s talking about himself.
The pep talk works. Anne attends the reunion, alone, and gives Julian a wedge of cash to pay off the dog’s vet bills and then some. He now knows he has a solid source of income. But he has also presumably realized that, in a way, he can use his line of work to do some good, and perhaps absolve himself of some of his sins – not to mention work through the lingering aftereffects of some of the sins inflicted upon him. This brings us to Detective Sunday.
Sunday is still investigating the various murders that seem to all be connected, in one way or another, to Julian, and that investigation takes her to Julian’s strung-out mother, who flees at the sight of Sunday and almost dies in the desert heat until she’s forced to stagger back. Here, we see a sensitive side of Sunday that we haven’t until now. She’s still obviously feeling guilty about having cost Julian so much of his life, and as the pieces of his past begin to slot into place – his mother still thinks she sent him to an exclusive school – you can read the realization on Rosie O’Donnell’s face. She realizes that Julian was abused by his neighbor, sold off at 15, groomed into a life of sex work, and then framed for a crime he didn’t commit. After all that and 15 years in prison, it’s a wonder he hasn’t killed himself, let alone anyone else.
This makes Sunday melancholy. She calls her ex, Rachel (Heather McComb), laments the loss of her younger brother, and then has a nice exchange with Paloma (Melinna Bobadilla), the lady who works the late shift on the desk at the gym she works out at. She doesn’t do any more investigating, really, and I think that’s a helpful way of letting us see a side of the character we haven’t yet.
But we also know she’s seeing another side of Julian, which will presumably help him in subsequent episodes, as Stratton’s goon Panish has developed a cover story to essentially frame Julian for the murder of Colin’s overaged girlfriend since the picture of Julian and Michelle at the scene makes him a relatively easy fit. So, we’ve got that to look forward to. But amidst everything else, what we see in “Nothing Is Real But the Girl” is that, when you take everything else into account, both Julian and Sunday are fundamentally the same things – kind, thoughtful, pained, and on a collision course with one another.
You can watch American Gigolo season 1, episode 4, “Nothing Is Real But the Girl”, exclusively on Showtime.
