Roush Review: Richard Gadd’s Brotherly Love-Hate Fable ‘Half Man’ Will Make You Squirm
Review
Half Man
Cain and Abel have nothing on Niall and Ruben, the combative Scottish “brothers from another lover” who are each other’s worst nightmare. These men forge a mutually self-destructive though unshakable bond over three decades in Half Man, Richard Gadd‘s emotionally harrowing and psychologically shattering follow-up to his Emmy-winning Baby Reindeer.
If Reindeer made you cringe, Half Man will make you squirm as the sensitive Niall (Jamie Bell) and the volatile Ruben (Gadd) provoke each other from traumatic childhood into a stunted adulthood. They fight as mismatched soul brothers do, reconcile and start the process all over again until their devastating final encounter. Their bizarre relationship, played out over six chapters that jump years, is shadowed by a cloud of toxic masculinity (Ruben’s) and sexual insecurity (Niall’s) that renders them both, in their and others’ eyes, as deeply damaged and, yes, half men.
Gadd is terrifying, a Lucifer-like presence with glaring eyes and a deadly smirk, his usually unwanted arrival often causing Bell’s timid Niall to cower in a shell of fear and self-loathing. There is an undeniable love between them that harks back to a boyhood when the thuggish Ruben was Niall’s protector and champion, both being raised by single mothers and sharing a flat. (Ruben’s mom is more indulgent than Niall’s.) Portrayed in their hardscrabble youth by Stuart Campbell (Ruben) and Mitchell Robertson (Niall), both excellent, their friendship is inevitably and repeatedly poisoned by resentment, betrayals, and revolting eruptions of sudden violence.
HBO
The framing device occurs at Niall’s wedding, which Ruben interrupts and disrupts by riding in on a motorcycle, unsettling the groom and all who know their tangled, tormented history, which unfolds in episode-long flashbacks. Why is Ruben there? What does he want? All is eventually revealed, and none of it is pretty.
It would be easy to paint Ruben as the villain of this piece and Niall the victim, but it’s much more complicated. They’re both products of a culture that rewards macho displays of virility and condemns what it sees as weakness.
Much of what Ruben does over the years is inexcusable and results in periods of incarceration. Even when he’s out of the picture, he takes up most of the oxygen, bragging at one turning point, “I’m the main character in this relationship. … I cast a big shadow.” But Niall (rhymes with denial) is no hero, an ambitious if feckless writer of thinly veiled “fictional” biography driven by an unearned ego. Forced to make impossible moral decisions regarding his unpredictable “brother” at a too-early age, Niall’s ambivalence and dishonesty regarding his sexuality leads him to commit acts of passive-aggressive manipulation that only fuel Ruben’s fits of savage rage, which often display a shockingly erotic charge.
Their sordid cycle of disappointment, humiliation and bitter recrimination is riveting, but also at times predictable, as we nervously begin to expect the worst even in rare moments of harmony, and creator-writer Gadd never fails to deliver on that threatened promise. They know that they should quit each other for their own good, but in a fatalistic fable like Half Men, we know that’s about as likely to happen as a happy ending.
Half Men, Limited Series Premiere, Thursday, April 23, 9/8c, HBO (streaming on HBO Max)
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