Roush Review: Kate Winslet Rules a Ridiculous ‘Regime’
Review
The Regime
Heaven (or its opposite) knows these turbulent times are ripe for mining dark humor from politics, but The Regime is so overripe it often feels like too much and too little at the same time.
This rare HBO misfire from Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu) is so heavy-handed and cynically predictable, it fails to jolt or surprise as political satire, and it’s too silly to resonate as an allegory of dangerously despotic government. Luckily, this fictional Regime is ruled by Kate Winslet, who won two Emmys for previous HBO projects (Mildred Pierce and Mare of Easttown). She’s ravishing and thoroughly committed to the gag even when asserting, “I am very much not ridiculous” while she’s being absolutely bonkers.
And she’s so over-the-top from the start, there’s almost nowhere for her flamboyantly frenetic character of delusional Chancellor Elena Vernham to go. This painfully arch series’ idea of absurdist humor is to make Elena’s perimenopausal hot flashes so extreme that she sends the entire palace into a deep freeze. But first, we have to endure her crippling fear-of-mold phase and her belief that purifying “potato steam” will rid her and her palace of their many toxins.
What’s global politics got to do with it? Over six episodes, the vain, paranoically phobic and childishly petulant Elena—who we’re supposed to believe was once a physician—manages to ruin her unnamed Central European nation, prized for its agriculture and mining. Cruel to her staff (notably, the haunting Andrea Riseborough as the loyal nanny to her neglected son) and disrespected by her ministers, Elena heedlessly and cluelessly alienates her Western allies, including Martha Plimpton, terrifically tart as a senator attempting diplomacy.
Elena propels her country, and its citizens whom she blithely addresses as “my loves,” into civil war after falling under the Rasputin-like spell of an unstable and violent soldier (an intense Matthias Schoenaerts) whom she inexplicably plucked from obscurity. Soon, this tormented war criminal insinuates himself into her tut-tutting cabinet and eventually her bed, as his idealistic populist reforms mutate into a cruel authoritarian nightmare.
Late in the series, we meet Hugh Grant as her opposition’s unjustly jailed leader, a subplot that’s unavoidably unnerving in its similarities to the tragedy of Alexei Navalny. It would feel timely if it weren’t all so tiresome.
The Regime, Series Premiere, Sunday, March 3, 9/8c, HBO
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