Luck Be Dustin Hoffman Tonight: Luck - The Pilot

Luck Be Dustin Hoffman Tonight: Luck - The Pilot

Posted on Friday February 24, 2012, 15:36 by Stephen Carty in Small Screen

While television was once seen as cinema's lesser cousin, the idiot box is now able to attract some major talent. Take Boardwalk Empire for example. The pilot was benevolently overseen by Martin Scorsese (who stayed on as executive producer); the impressive ensemble remains headed up by veteran character actor Steve Buscemi, and the whole shebang is orchestrated by one of the Sopranos' key writers, one Terence Winter. Arriving with a similarly-impressive line-up, the pilot of HBO's new horse racing drama Luck comes directed by Michael Mann, starring Dustin Hoffman and under the watchful eye of Deadwood creator David Milch. Like the horses galloping around the track, there's no shortage of pedigree here.

As you'd expect from Mann, the pilot is hugely stylish and sumptuously shot, and includes typical Mannian tropes like the badass in a suit (naturally) and an ultra-cool soundtrack (including Elliot Goldenthal’s theme music from Mann crime classic Heat). As you'd expect from Milch, it's a measured and tightly-knitted affair where multiple plot-arcs and character interactions criss-cross like an elevated spaghetti junction. Plot-wise, there's not a whole lot going on in this first episode, aside from Hoffman's 'Ace' Bernstein getting picked up from prison by his loyal driver, 'the Greek' (Mann favourite Dennis Farina, doing his usual thing), and a bunch of degenerate gamblers placing complicated bets at the track. For now, it's all about laying foundations.

The thing is, however, that while HBO’s best are typically slow-starters which require patience as we get used to the lay of the land and learn who’s who – like The Wire and Game Of Thrones for instance – Luck’s pilot is a particularly difficult series-launcher. Usually with shows that play the long-game, there are sporadic bursts of violence to keep the less-patient viewers interested until they’re hooked on the characters and storylines, but that’s not the case here. Like Milch’s Deadwood, you got to admire how the profanity-penning showrunner refuses to pander to audiences with easy characterisation or dialogue accompanied by a neon sign reading “Exposition!”. Even so, the result is fairly inaccessible to begin with.

It also doesn’t help that the audience is thrown into the world of competitive horse-racing head-first, so much so that HBO sent out a glossary of terms along with the screener DVDs. Feeling a tad lost at first? Here are a few tips: a “Pick 6” is where the gambler must pick the winning horse in six consecutive races; and a “Bug Boy” is an apprentice jockey. Anything else, you’ll have to figure out for yourself. Pace-wise, the opening instalment is often slow, but interestingly this serves to build up the anticipation till race time.

Though pilots tend to centre on their main character in order to provide us with an anchor while the other players are introduced, here Dustin Hoffman has surprisingly little screen-time. That said, he’s magnetic whenever present as the slick-haired former kingpin with a score to settle, and the ensemble is impressive throughout, from Nick Nolte’s growling owner to John Ortiz’s hostile trainer.

So overall, a slow and difficult pilot, but one which, given the talent assembled, should blossom into a rich, layered and dense series. We hope. Reports have suggested that the pace picks up dramatically from the fourth episode onwards (like The Wire, perhaps), and if nothing else, the equine drama at least provides something different given that nearly every other show on the box revolves around some combination of cops, vampires and forensic scientists. What about you? Which way are you hedging your bets with Milch's latest?