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Thursday, May 21, 2015
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS
‘Mad Men’ says good-
bye after seven seasons
TV REVIEW
Final Episode
leaves unanswered
questions
By CHLOE GILKE
Managing Arts Editor
Rest in peace, Don Draper.
During his last appearance in the
“Mad Men” series finale, Don Drap-
er (Jon Hamm, “30
Rock”) is at peace.
His eyes are closed
and his mouth rests
in an uncharacter-
istic smile. The col-
lection of roles and
jobs that bound him
to his harsh New
York lifestyle — husband, father,
mentor and hotshot advertising
executive — barely register on his
still face. He is still alive and breath-
ing, but Don Draper is dead.
One of the major themes run-
ning throughout “Mad Men” is the
malleability of identity. When Dick
Whitman pulls the dog tags off his
friend’s corpse and returns home
from the Korean War with a new
name, he’s abandoning the bag-
gage of his traumatic childhood and
becoming, quite literally, another
person. He is a chameleon, chang-
ing who he is to fit the demands
of the new job and life he chooses
for himself. And he is not the only
one: The Peggy Olson (Elisabeth
Moss, “The West Wing”) of Season
7 couldn’t be more different from
the demure and impressionable sec-
retary we met in the first episode.
“Mad Men” allowed all of its char-
acters to change and shift course
countless times during its seven-
season run — to rise, fall, relapse,
live, die and come back again.
As her friendship with Don has
cooled, Peggy is flourishing with
independence. While Don runs
away from all his problems, Peggy
confronts hers head-on. She’s thriv-
ing at McCann Erickson, poised
to become the next Don and even
more. However, she still harbors a
soft spot in her heart for the mentor
who gave her the spark of hope for
something more than secretarial
work. And as distant as Don could
be, his relationship with Peggy was
one of his most genuine and mean-
ingful. In a despairing moment late
in the episode, Don calls Peggy,
remembering that he never said
goodbye to her in person. He con-
fesses his sins: Hunched over the
payphone with anguished eyes,
mentor seeks comfort from men-
tee. Peggy reminds him that he has
a home and a family to come back
to — a work family, but that doesn’t
make it any less real. Moss and
Hamm deliver some of their best
performances of the entire series,
and the scene aches with the pathos
of their shared desperation.
Immediately
after
this
call,
Peggy gets another from Stan Rizzo
(Jay Ferguson, “The Lucky One”),
who suddenly confesses his love
to her. It’s a bizarre development,
considering that their relationship
always read as mutually respectful
and supportive — never romantic.
When Peggy realizes that she might
have feelings for him, too, and he
bursts into her office to kiss her, the
scene is almost too good to be true.
Historically, “Mad Men” has taken
a cynical approach to love, and with
so little evidence for Peggy and Stan,
their passionate smooch comes off a
bit too pat to be believable.
Don Draper doesn’t want to
choose between work and life. He’s
had his share of both — seven sea-
sons of brilliant advertising pitches
and late nights in the office and
a few months’ worth of aimless
wandering and drunken brooding.
When he arrives in Los Angeles
and ends up at the hippie retreat,
Don is already looking the part of
Dick Whitman, wearing his hair
in a boyish side part and donning
some rugged denim jackets that
are uncharacteristic of the ad exec
persona he left behind in New York.
But he outgrows those clothes at the
retreat: He explores a new part of
his identity entirely separate from
Dick and Don. He has a sincere
moment of connection with a man
who describes feeling insubstan-
tial, more like a can in a refrigera-
tor than an actual human man with
a wife and children who love him.
Don knows this feeling of empti-
ness well. Despite the fact that he’s
offered glimpses of vulnerability to
his children and to Peggy, he won-
ders if there is even a man under
the disguises he’s grown so used to
wearing.
He buries Dick and Don in
the California sand and emerg-
es a new man, eyes closed and
legs crossed and meditating.
He smiles, offering viewers a
quick glimpse at the man he has
become. Then the screen cuts
to a Coca-Cola advertisement,
which Don might have created if
he went back to McCann Erick-
son.
The show doesn’t provide a
definitive answer if he actually
created the ad. All we are left
with is the image of a peace-
ful smile and a group of people
singing about love, harmony and
human connection. It’s a beau-
tifully ambiguous ending to a
show that always challenged its
viewers to question and engage
and to impart their own mean-
ing on every episode. Don is
a blank slate and it’s up to us
to determine his new identity.
A-
Mad Men
Series Finale
AMC
MAD MEN
Mr. Draper will see you now.
‘Pitch Perfect’
sequel: off-key
By NOAH COHEN
Daily Arts Writer
Hold what you love to a high
standard.
The acting, spearheaded by Anna
Kendrick (“Up
in the Air”) as
the irresistibly
not-so-alt Beca
Mitchell,
was
charming
and
lighthearted.
Kendrick
hit
her notes. The
music
was
groovy.
But
“Pitch
Perfect
2” won’t make you feel happy like
an old-time movie because the
direction hit somewhere between
amateurish and hand-me-a-drink
awful, with insidious gags and hurt-
ful tropes suffocating the cast. First-
time feature director Elizabeth
Banks went for the low-hanging
fruit, and the film never found its
sound. The project of “Pitch Per-
fect 2” presented weird and glori-
ous opportunities; we really needed
Banks to step up here. Musical com-
edy deserves better than ironic cari-
catures.
The Bellas, our a cappella heroes,
find themselves in a graphically
embarrassing situation and spend
the rest of the movie recovering.
The long-term objective is clear-
ly outlined, and the once-again
underdogs wander towards victory
without serious conflict. A sense of
community redeems our troupe.
The message of power in voice and
friendship is parodied and under-
mined by a giggling carelessness in
execution. The supporting actress-
es’ identities are little more than
running gags.
Rebel Wilson — playing “Fat
Amy” — does her damnedest to
make her character a complex per-
son. Her fearlessness in spite of
scorn — both in-universe and from
the audience — is phenomenal, but
in her grand romantic denouement,
she’s directed to present herself
more as “Fat” than as “Amy”, as
though overweight people’s rela-
tionships can never be more than a
joke. Sure, the franchise gets points
for including her at all, but it’s not
a win when the primary cinematic
value of a token character is ostensi-
bly their tokenhood.
This problem is redoubled in
the case of the Black lesbian whose
name we forget, the over-sexualized
girl whose name we forget, the qui-
etly psycho Asian girl whose name
we forget and the cute illegal immi-
grant girl whose name we forget,
who constantly makes jokes about
how horrifying life ACTUALLY
IS for REAL PEOPLE in REAL
PLACES in the REAL WORLD. And
this is a light comedy? No, this is a
dark comedy. You might not notice,
because everyone is smiling and
adorable. But damn, the darkness.
It’s
Alanis-Morissette-ironic,
dwelling in that coincidental pov-
erty of humor: the vagina flash, the
lesbian hilariously turned on by
sharing a tent with her straight girl-
friends, the Mexican student joking
about deportation. But these sour
notes can’t touch Kendrick, who
carries the film. Kendrick’s inter-
actions with the German a capella
group, Das Sound Machine, are
deliciously awkward, touched with
a confused sexual tension that has
the audience cooing, and Keegan-
Michael Key owns every scene he’s
a part of, his effervescence legiti-
mizing the absurd cameo of Snoop
Dogg.
But the dramatic turns feel
forced. There’s an underground
pajama party staged just to give
“Pitch Perfect 2” an opportunity
to represent musically the way
“Pitch Perfect” did, and even
worse, when the Bellas go away
to a camp to rediscover “their
sound”, the atmosphere of the
bonding is disappointingly low-
intensity, as though the director
only noticed three-quarters of the
way through the movie that the
script saw insufficient conflict.
The door of the film is left open for
a sequel, but Kendrick’s intended
replacement, Emily (Hailee Stein-
feld, “True Grit”) doesn’t have the
stage presence to fill Kendrick’s
shoes, despite Steinfeld’s organic
puppy romance with the adork-
able Benji (Ben Platt, “Pitch Per-
fect”).
We adore this franchise, but
we wanted the full wit and power
of these ladies to leave us aca-
stounded. Even if the magic of
the music glimmered through, the
greater whole was a hot mess.
MOVIE REVIEW
C+
Pitch Per-
fect 2
At Quality 16
and Rave 20
Universal Pictures