We have many cases of authors using fiction as a mechanism to talk about their addictions, hoping that putting your struggles into written word will serve as an Alcoholics Anonymous manual. Stephen King is an example that comes easily to mind, but Edward St. Aubyn is also a notorious case through the ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels, which have also served to atone for the odd sin.
The Drugs Don’t Work
Addictions on the screen can tend to excess, which is why it has been believed that we were facing another case of interesting work difficult to adapt. But it was managed to be adapted, and quite remarkably as well, by the German director Edward Berger, author of the successful new adaptation of ‘All Quiet Front’. That war movie and this five-episode miniseries available on Movistar+ show that he has a good eye for adaptation.
The Patrick Melrose who gives his name to the novel and the television version, and serves as the avatar of St. Aubyn himself, soon receives a phone call informing him of his father’s death. We soon observe that the event upsets him greatly, and the series will develop for us how his complex relationship has upset the protagonist since his childhood and has led to his spiraling with alcohol, heroin, amphetamines and the abuse of all.
Each episode of ‘Patrick Melrose’ adapts one of the novels written by the British author, which leads the series to have a fairly ambitious scale, moving through time and geography. We can find ourselves in France at the end of the sixties as well as in Great Britain at the beginning of the two thousand. Berger manages to keep the narrative consistent and the character study intact.
Because the miniseries manages to be a good reflection of the turbulent reality of the addict, but it does not renounce a certain sophistication to make its moral complexity elegant. It helps for the company to have a performer of the stature of Benedict Cumberbatch, who is no stranger to such haughty and potentially unsympathetic characters as Patrick, but here he manages to give it a special character so that it doesn’t feel derivative of his other work.
Cumberbatch manages to capture the difficulties of this character to face the world and his past from sobriety, revealing the creatures that can torment you unless you truly explore yourself. The direction and the script never cease to be elegant and careful, making one of the best exercises in recent years in the field of miniseries.