TV Review: "The Narrow Road to the Deep North"
Jacob Elordi is haunting in this riveting adaptation of Richard Flanagan's novel, a bleak TV series that is perfect for our battered and cynical world.
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Warning: Spoilers for the series follow.
There’s no question that Jacob Elordi’s star continues to rise. In addition to starring in the gay romantic drama On Swift Horses, he’s also starring in the Australian miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North, based on Richard Flanagan’s novel and now streaming on Amazon. The center of the show is Dorrigo Evans (Elordi in the past, Ciarán Hinds in the diegetic present), a surgeon who serves in World War II. His time before enlistment is one marked by two romantic entanglements, one with his fiancee (later wife) Ella and one with his uncle’s wife, Amy. His time in war, however, is dominated by his imprisonment by the Japanese in Thailand, where he and his men are forced to work on building the Burma Railway, while his life in the present is marked by professional success as surgeon but a looming misery in his private life.
Elordi always captures just the right elements of vulnerability and sex appeal, and this is particularly apt for the character of Dorrigo. While his times with his uncle’s wife Amy–played with a sort of understated intensity by Odessa Young–are filled with a sort of lambent glow, one that’s achingly romantic, the exact opposite is true when he is in the jungle. There, he clings to what little bits of humanity he can while all around him are the filth and horror of human misery. Watching the light slowly leach from his eyes as he sees his men succumb to the conditions of their enslavement is nothing short of heartbreaking.
Ciarán Hinds is also in his element as an older Dorrigo, his craggy face bearing witness to a lifetime of grappling with deep-rooted trauma. By now he has managed to build quite a remarkable life for himself, recognized as one of the foremost surgeons in the world. Yet, nevertheless, there is a haunting emptiness to his eyes, an awareness, for both him and for us as viewers, that he left some essential part of himself behind during those torturous months in the jungles of Thailand. He might have come out of it alive, but there were many who didn’t, and it’s clear that he can never forgive himself for his survival.
I knew going in that the scenes in the jungle were going to be wrenching, devastating, and difficult to watch, but I don’t think anything could have prepared me for just how awful it was to see this torment unfold on-screen. We watch in snippets as Dorrigo’s men are slowly stripped of their humanity, both in the physical and spiritual sense, reduced to a state of existence that can only be called bare life. By the end they are little more than walking skeletons, merely existing in the hopes that they will one day find some measure of freedom from their servitude.
Two scenes stand out for their sheer unrelenting horror. In one, a soldier has become deathly ill and, having been dragged out in front of the others, he is beheaded by the cruel and heartless Colone Kota (Taki Abe)l, who seems to see it as an academic exercise, a means of impressing his subordinate, Major Nakamura (Show Kasamatsu). In the other, the ill-fated Frank Gardiner (Thomas Weatherall) is quite literally beaten to death by the guards when he won’t tell them who was missing from that day’s work (and the men themselves won’t give themselves up). Even though he begs his fellow soldiers for help, and even though Dorrigo pleads for his life, there is nothing to be done. In the end is reduced to a sad lump of flesh in the mud, deprived of both life and dignity.
Like so many others who have endured unspeakable trauma in war, the past is never far from Dorrigo’s mind. What’s more, it’s clear that his marriage to Ella–played as an older woman by Heather Mitchell and a younger by Olivia DeJonge--is deeply unhappy, which is why he repeatedly seeks out an affair with his partner’s wife. It’s clear that it’s not even physical, at least not really. Instead she is an outlet from the prison that his life has become, or perhaps it’s because he sees in her some echo of his doomed love for Amy. Or maybe he’s never been happy with Ella and has grown tired of pretending. It may be all or none of these things. What’s clear is that Dorrigo is still broken, and nothing and no one can really put him back together.
Thus, the tragedy of Dorrigo and Ella’s marriage is that their unhappiness isn’t either of their faults, not really. How could a man like Dorrigo, who witnessed the absolute worst that humans are capable of, ever hope to really return to life as it was? When it comes down to it, is it ever possible to put a life back together when your entire psyche has been stripped bare and tortured in the dark jungles of Thailand? Dorrigo himself seems to recognize this when he remarks, during the introductory remarks to a book containing the artwork of one of his friends who died in the jungle, that horror can never really be contained. It simply is. This might as well be the thesis for the show as a whole.
There’s something remarkably powerful, devastating even, about the series’ final moments, in which Dorrigo, having finally returned to Australia, seems to see Amy. Their eyes meet, but they don’t speak a word to one another. Given that we already know that Amy has been killed in a fire–Dorrigo got word of her demise while still imprisoned–we realize that she is just another aspect of his prewar life that he can never regain, a slice of innocence that has slipped forever beyond his grasp.
Just as devastating, if not more so, is the final’s finale, as Dorrigo suffers a fatal car crash. In this moment both past and present collide in this singular moment in time, as Dorrigo imagines himself back in the jungle. Like so many other wounded people, he has returned to the site of his greatest trauma. One can only hope that he finds some measure of peace in doing so, though the series is deliberately ambiguous on this point. There is no romance here: just bleak, ambivalent reality.
If I have one complaint about this series, it’s that it tends to paint its Japanese characters with a very broad brush. To be fair, I haven’t read the novel, but from what I understand Flanagan is a bit more even-handed in his approach. Though we do get a few periodic glimpses into their motivations, notably when Kota and Nakamura meet after the war, when both are in hiding, for the most part they are little more than terrifying forces that make the Australian soldiers’ lives a living hell. Given that we have witnessed the horrors they’ve inflicted on the prisoners while the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki–which Kota references in an effort to paint their actions as not so bad after all–take place off-screen, this indictment lacks the bite that it appears that it’s supposed to have.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of those miniseries that is designed to stay with you long after you finish it. It ultimately begs the question: what was it all for? We know that the railway was eventually abandoned, left to rot in the jungle, a testament to the follies of imperialism. Justin Kurzel and Shaun Grant have given us a bleakly unromantic portrait of wartime and its attendant sufferings that is a fitting war story for our own weary era.