‘Before’ Review: Billy Crystal Is Convincingly Somber in Apple TV+’s Otherwise Unconvincing Supernatural Dud
I’m not saying Apple TV+ has an issue with repetitive storytelling, but the new drama Before is the service’s third series featuring a renowned comic actor playing a man mourning his dead wife. Not the streaming platform’s third series ever to rely on that hoary trope. Not even their third series this year to draw from that particular well.
Before, with Billy Crystal grieving a dead spouse, follows Disclaimer, with Kevin Kline grieving a dead spouse, and the second season of Shrinking, with Jason Segel still grieving a dead spouse. That’s three shows with this core conceit to premiere since… October 11.
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Unfortunately, Big Widower Energy is far from the only way that Before feels like Apple TV+’s most Apple TV+ piece of programming to date. You could show me any glum, washed-out frame from Before and, even without knowing who was in it or what show it was from, I would be able to identify it as an Apple TV+ show, because there is a certain subset of Apple TV+ programming that relies on excessively dour, bottom-of-the-fish-tank aesthetics as an artificial proxy for earned sobriety.
Very little is earned in Before, which is basically a flimsy direct-to-video movie from the late ’90s stretched to 10 stultifying half-hour episodes.
Crystal plays Eli, a child psychologist mourning wife Lynn (Judith Light), who died by suicide in the late stages of a struggle with cancer. He lives a life haunted by memories of her, refusing even to open the door to the bathroom in which she died.
Eli has mostly stopped seeing patients and nearly stopped communicating with his daughter Barbara (Maria Dizzia). Then old colleague Gail (Sakina Jaffrey) says she has an interesting patient for him. Then a mysterious eight-year-old boy (Jacobi Jupe’s Noah) eerily shows up in Eli’s apartment and the therapist has to return the child to frazzled foster mother Denise (Rosie Perez). Then it turns out that the interesting patient Gail had for Eli was… Noah!
Noah is having episodes or spells or incidents. He’s lashing out and stabbing classmates and speaking in a strange foreign language, though Denise insists that before these incidents began, he was “the sweetest kid in the entire world.” He doesn’t see dead people exactly, but he’s experiencing things beyond conventional understanding, though whether those things relate to ghosts, demons, trauma, mental illness or Unknown Phenomenon TBD isn’t instantly clear.
Eli thinks there’s a rational explanation for Noah’s behavior, because he’s one of those characters whose idea of small talk with a priest is to declare: “You know what I believe in? I believe in facts. You believe in fairy tales created to keep people from facing the truth.”
Oh.
Now if you’ve ever seen a movie or a TV show before, you can probably guess that it doesn’t take long for Eli to begin sensing that his connection to Noah goes far beyond anything that can be explained “rationally.” But at the same time, Before is also the sort of show that concludes with a five-minute monologue that both explains the series’ title and tries, without an iota of success, to suggest that aspects of the plot make sense if you’re just open enough to believe in them. In case you haven’t figured it out, I was not.
I’m sure it’s possible to be more on the Before wavelength than I was.
It’s a show that occasionally works on the most rudimentary of levels. For an episode or two, I was intrigued by the sound design, which treats every auditory cue as an assault on Eli’s self-imposed isolation, and I appreciated the ominous environment that was being established before the bland and basic scares set in.
Some of the scares are mildly effective, though not because of anything creator Sarah Thorp or various directors — Adam Bernstein for the pilot, Jet Wilkinson as primary producing director — do. It just happens that people hallucinating worms under their skin and insects going into orifices into which insects don’t belong will always be disturbing, a thing I know because I’ve seen the worm and insect thing play out in too many horror movies to count.
If that sounds a bit supernatural thriller by-the-numbers, let me assure you that Before is at least as much creepy kid by-the-numbers and child endangerment by-the-numbers and it works on those rudimentary levels as well.
Noah spends the entire series going into various dissociative states and experiencing an assortment of seizures and possession-adjacent incidents. Your reaction is bound to be somewhere between “impressed at his commitment” and “concerned at the level of simulated trauma he had to experience for a subpar television show.” My ratio was probably around 25/75 between those two extremes, but maybe you’ll be more generous. Maybe I’d have been more impressed with the juvenile acting if there were more evidence that the thing the show gradually pulls back to reveal was in any way evident in Jupe’s performance.
Those things that the show eventually reveals are frustrating for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that several identical surprises are treated as surprises in multiple episode-ending cliffhangers. The show keeps saying the same thing over and over again, increasingly undermining both actual psychiatric diagnoses and supernatural flights of fancy in the process.
Almost none of it makes sense, but any time there’s a lapse in logic, you just have to say “dream logic” and move on, which is one of my five least favorite types of storytelling.
The dialogue is consistently awful and without human personality or feeling? Dream logic. None of the supporting characters or performances have even the slightest resemblance to actual humans? Dream logic. Eli hears a kid speaking a mysterious foreign language, goes to an academic friend (Itzhak Perlman’s Drake) who gives him access to an online translator, which reveals that the language is a not uncommon language that Eli uses to learn a phrase — a phrase that’s completely an English cognate — and then the language is never relevant again and Perlman’s character is never mentioned again? Dream logic!
That last example is also an opportunity for Eli to utilize a web browser on a MacBook, which Apple always appreciates. When dream logic and product placement join forces with a grieving widower in a generally colorless world, that’s an Apple TV+ sweet spot.
Stripped completely of any of his familiar comic mannerisms, even when sharing scenes with a rambunctious pug who stands as the show’s most likable character, Crystal is fully convincing as a man who needs more sleep and wishes the faucets from his upstairs bathroom would stop dripping.
Once I stopped caring what was happening in the show, most of my interest was put into wondering if Crystal being generally “fine” was giving Before a modicum of grounding that it didn’t deserve or if there was any chance that a more comfortable dramatic actor might have taken this thin part and somehow elevated it. The conclusion I came to was that Crystal was, if not quite mah-velous, as good as this show could get. He’s not to blame for the lack of supporting players for him to act opposite, nor for the chronologically disorienting narrative that denies him a believable arc. Dream logic!
The most peculiar thing about Before — yes, more peculiar than the tentacle monsters Noah is seeing or the mumbo-jumbo Thorp intersperses throughout the series for “authenticity” — is how many good actors pop up and do nothing.
Robert Townsend, experiencing a career renaissance, plays a friend with a cool hat who vanishes from the story after throwing one weird party, the result of which is never mentioned again. (Dream logic.) Hope Davis plays a doctor who appears in the show at the halfway point to disapprove of everything Eli does, presumably because she doesn’t understand dream logic. Jennifer Esposito is a psychic cleanser in one episode. Don’t ask. Barbara Bain pops up in another episode and, like nearly everybody in the series, she provides one piece of mystery progressing data and never returns.
Judith Light is around a lot (I added “Judith” because otherwise the sentence is inaccurate, since the show is compulsively underlit), defying death, but she deserves more and better. It’s reflective of the show’s tapestry that Ava Lalezarzadeh is one of the highest-billed actors in the cast, playing what my notes refer to as “Unnamed Exposition-Repeating Assistant” (she’s finally called “Cleo,” but by that time it hardly matters).
As a vehicle for Crystal to prove that he can be humorlessly somber, Before at least fulfills a very basic mandate. But as a spiritual thriller with supernatural overtones, it’s a lifeless dud that will do little to change that running joke about Apple TV+ being a repository of star-studded limited series you’ve never heard of. Watch Pachinko instead.
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