TV PREVIEW
“Rectify,” 9 p.m. Thursdays starting June 19, Sundance
Daniel Holden (played by Aden Young) dismantles a pack of gum and places individual pieces one by one down the dollar store conveyor belt. Sundance Channel’s “Rectify” creator Ray McKinnon tells his cameraman to close in on the gum as each piece passes by.
“Visual absurdity of the highest order,” mused McKinnon, while taping the eighth episode of the show last month in Griffin.
"Rectify" does not convey "visual absurdity" along the lines of, say, Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge." McKinnon's "visual absurdity" is on a much subtler, cerebral plane of existence, a thoughtful indie style embodied by the Sundance Channel as a whole.
“I don’t think any of us look at this as a television show,” said Abigail Spencer, who plays Amantha, Daniel’s doting sister. “It’s more the art of it all. We feel like we’re making one very long film each season.”
The show, returning for its second season on Thursday, is set in a small fictional town called Paulie but uses Griffin as its muse. The city, 40 miles south of downtown Atlanta, has seen its fair share of films and TV shows including “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Mississippi Burning” and “The Walking Dead.”
But over several months earlier this year, Sundance firmly planted itself in the city, using restaurants such as Murphy’s and Bank Street Cafe, as well as the local Hill’s Tire & Auto for shooting sites.
“They’ve brought money into the community,” said Tom Gardner, who owned Hill’s Tire until last month with plans to retire. “They’re nice people, easy people to work with. They worked around our schedules. If a customer came in, they’d stop shooting until we took care of them.”
Without a lot of distractions, the actors themselves bonded, eating many meals in Griffin together.
“We love it here,” Young said. “I’ll rush into the supermarket to get some eggs and milk, and I’ll end up talking to the butcher for 20 minutes. People provide me with script notes. People want to be extras.”
During season one, Daniel returns to his hometown of Paulie after spending 19 years on death row accused of murdering his girlfriend. But he was freed on a technicality, not proved fully innocent. Rip Van Winkle style, he has a tough time adjusting to the modern world while half the town still thinks he’s guilty. In the season finale, the brother of the girl he was accused of killing nearly beats Daniel to death by his sister’s grave.
Season two returns just a few hours after that incident as Daniel’s family prays for his recovery in the hospital.
Once Daniel recovers physically, he has to figure out his own path for mental recovery, said Young, who captures Daniel with a complicated blend of resolve, sadness, gallows humor and anger. “He at times is incapable of understanding the consequences of his actions,” Young said, noting how last season Daniel impulsively choked his half brother Ted Jr. and asked to kiss Ted’s wife, the angelic Tawney. “He follows his desires. He indulges in the art of living.”
McKinnon, as the primary writer of the show, said he felt more time crunched to finish these 10 episodes than he did the first season, when he had to do only six and had far more lead time before the show aired. An Oscar-winning filmmaker with an admitted perfectionist streak, he said tight deadlines to create the level of art he aspires to is difficult.
“When you’re doing six, eight, 10 episodes like this, it doesn’t make sense to speed through it, but this is the model nowadays,” said McKinnon, who grew up in Adel and built his acting skills in Atlanta theater stages in the 1980s and 1990s. “You’re trying to elevate the medium. It’s a razor’s edge. It really is.”
He admits being exhausted after working every day for five straight months to get the show finished. “I’m trying to get the tone, the pace, grasp that unnameable thing, that essence that makes a show unique.”
