In the Flesh: The Bear s2e06-7: ‘Fishes’ and ‘Forks’

In the Flesh: The Bear s2e06-7: ‘Fishes’ and ‘Forks’

‘Fishes’

“I make things beautiful for them,” gasps a drunken Donna Berzatto (Jaime Lee Curtis) from the depths of what must be a decades-long depression. “But no one makes things beautiful for me.” It’s a heart-wrenching line reading, Curtis’s voice quavering with a complex mixture of rage, self-pity, desolation, and hopelessness, her lined face flickering from rueful, self-aware smile to expressionless death mask in the space of a moment. It’s a tall order for a character to come into an established show and recontextualize fully two thirds of its major players in the space of a single episode — think of Jon Jon Briones’ immediately destabilizing performance as abusive con man Modesto “Pete” Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, or Sully Boyar’s as Carmela Soprano’s devastatingly direct therapist, Dr. Krakower, in a single episode of The Sopranos — but Curtis pulls it off with aplomb, mining history from every tic and explosion of temper. Her eldest son Michael’s (Jon Bernthal) increasingly obvious addiction to painkillers, her daughter Natalie’s (Abby Elliott) compulsive attempts at managing her brother’s dysfunction, Carmen’s silent reticence — it all snaps into perspective in the shadow of this deeply unwell and unhappy woman, whose incredible talent in the kitchen brings her and her family nothing but misery.

Directed by series creator Christopher Storer and co-written by Storer and Joanna Calo, Fishes lives in the close-up, haunting its actors as they wince, shout, brood, and weep their way through the nightmarish gauntlet of a Berzatto family Christmas. Bob Odenkirk’s barely concealed malice as “Uncle” Lee, Oliver Platt’s straight-faced bullshiting, Gillian Jacobs’ easy, tender chemistry with her husband Richie (Ebon Moss Bacharach), John Mulaney’s sly but genuine turn as cousin Michelle’s (Sarah Paulson) boyfriend Stevie — it’s a positive embarrassment of riches, one of the best and most natural-feeling ensemble casts in recent memory. That we’re meeting half of them for the first time sweeps by so easily it hardly feels worth remarking on, except that to establish and develop so many characters in a hair under an hour is a testament to Storer and Calo’s talent. The dysfunctional dinner table, a now-standard set piece for the prestige drama, fairly seethes with energy as Mikey and Lee fence over the absent Donna’s astonishing holiday spread. When things finally erupt into physical conflict, it feels real in an ugly, intimate way that not even the dramatic overreach of the episode’s final big surprise can derail.

Early on in ‘Fishes’, Donna bullies her youngest, Carmen (Jeremy Allen White), into saying “I love you” to the rest of his family. By the time she drinks enough to launch into her pitch-black monologue, it’s easy to understand why Carmen is so hesitant to express sentiment. The time and effort his mother lavishes on expressing her own love to her family, and on trying futilely to get them to fill the wound in her heart, has been the black hole around which his entire life has revolved. When you see what love costs the people closest to you, when you see the screaming matches and deformed relationships it leads to, how could you so much as pay lip service to the concept without feeling its gnarled claws brush against the back of your neck? Sometimes loving people is just bad all the way through, a huge expenditure of effort no amount of sentimentalizing can make sense of. Sometimes it’s just people trying to hurt each other and themselves until they finally feel they have permission to die.

‘Forks’

Jeremy Allen White may bring in the awards and grace the show’s promotional images, and there’s no denying that with his captivatingly unusual features and low, constricted affect he’s giving a compelling performance as traumatized chef Carmen “Carmie” Berzatto, but it’s Ebon Moss-Bacharach’s frustrating, combative, and hyperactive Richie who’s the heart of The Bear. Everybody knows a Richie. He’s divorced and hasn’t moved on yet. He owes money all over town. He’s bounced from job to job for decades without ever managing to acquire any real skills. Like Gob Bluth and his fellow members of the Magicians’ Alliance, Richie demands to be taken seriously in spite of his clear absurdity. It’s to The Bear’s credit, and to Moss-Bacharach’s especially, that Richie rises above mean-spirited comic relief. He’s tragic, just shy of pitiably so, but there’s a tremendous vitality to him, a sense of strength and of ferocious loyalty. In ‘Forks’ we get to watch him do something so simple — find purpose in his work — that it’s difficult to believe it could provide substance for an entire episode, much less a riveting one.

To see Richie blossom within the framework of a fine dining establishment even as he bristles at being dispatched to learn the trade from fancy out-of-towners is both heartwarming and sad. It’s an old song, a man who can’t change for his loved ones but will to prove himself to strangers, but Moss-Bacharach makes a meal out of it, rendering Richie’s emotional journey no just easily comprehensible but deeply relatable without ever really spelling any of it out in his own words. Richie is a man who knows he isn’t needed. Not by his ex-wife, Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs), who calls to tell him she’s remarrying, not by the staff of the soon-to-open Bear, who we’ve seen openly discuss his combative uselessness, and not by his best friend, Mikey, who took his own life in the throes of addiction prior to the beginning of the series. To fit into a hierarchy in service to a greater cause, as Richie does at chef Terry’s (Olivia Coleman) prestigious Ever, is for him almost spiritual, enkindling a rebirth of his passion and channeling his energies. When he belts out Taylor Swift’s ‘Love Story’ alone in his car there’s such rough, unrefined passion in his voice that he upstages one of the world’s most famous pop stars. He’s a man transformed.

And then, as all good things do, it comes to an end. His week staging at Ever wraps up, and after a melancholy and wide-ranging conversation with head chef and owner Terry, he departs. Will he carry what his time at the restaurant gave him forward? Will he collapse, like Terry in her anecdote about her own early failures, into bitterness and projected resentment? Moss-Bacharach’s performance is so natural and so nuanced that anything seems possible. The scene in which he calls Carmen solely to berate him for sending him somewhere he loves with all his heart is one of the show’s most crushing and emotionally taxing. Richie is so upset at having tasted purpose and belonging that he has to find a way to ruin it for himself, to twist it somehow into an insult to his skills and status. “I know you sent me here to get me out of the way,” he shouts over the phone. “I know it was to humiliate me.” Who are we when we can no longer accept pleasure, or accomplishment? What happens to the good in our lives when we close ourselves off to the possibility of fulfillment in favor of the safe, reliable bivouac of bitterness? I’ve seldom seen a crossroads in characterization as compelling as the one at which Richie stands as Taylor belts her hit out over the end credits.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn't exist.