This Most Definitely Ain’t Patti Page’s Old Cape Cod.
By Roberto Leal
In 1957, Patti Page recorded her hit song, Old Cape Cod. The wistful tune was a melodic love letter about an idyllic seaside community dotted with quaint villages with the aroma of lobster stew wafting through the air over a romantic moonlit bay. According to Page, “You’re sure to fall in love with old Cape Cod.” Ah yes, a quiet, peaceful haven with ocean views where you could live and raise a family.
That was Cape Cod circa 1950. Fast forward to the present and we find Cape Cod and nearby Provincetown hit by hard times. Crime, corruption, alcoholism and rampant drug addiction have turned the once popular seaside resort area into a dangerous snake pit of inequity. The Cape Cod that is the setting for STARZ’s Hightown isn’t a safe place to raise your cobra, much less your child.
HIGHTOWN: POST MODERN NEO-NOIR AT ITS BEST
The classic film noir genre movies were at their glorious black and white greatest during Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1940s and 1950s. These gritty Cold War-era urban crime thrillers were characterized by tough, cynical private detectives played by actors like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Alan Ladd, who often worked on both sides of the law. The femme fatale was another vital character in any film noir movie. The femme fatale was always beautiful, seductive and her loyalties were never clear and she often double-crossed the hero. In films like This Gun for Hire (Veronica Lake), Out of the Past (Jane Greer) and Double Indemnity (Barbara Stanwyck), these femme fatales personified dangerous dames in the classic film noir era.
The neo-noir movies of the ’70s and 80’s retained the basic template of film noir but were in Technicolor and the acting style was more natural, not quite so stylized. They were often homages to great film noir of the past, Chinatown and Body Heat, come to mind. But they could also be set in a dystopian future landscape like Blade Runner and because the old Hollywood code no longer exists, the sexuality and profanity in neo-noir films are more explicit and not implied like it was in the good old days.
Hightown series creator Rebecca Perry Cutter (Gotham) has constructed a world in what we can safely call post-modern neo-noir. It’s a world that still observes the basic tenets of film noir: crime, world-weary cynicism, corruption and alienation. But Cutter has turned everything else on its head with compelling dramatic results.
Typically, film noirs are set in big urban cities like Los Angeles or New York City. Hightown takes place in what used to be the picturesque seaside resort of Cape Cod but has now deteriorated into an area of crime, alcohol and drug addiction. The old reliable hyper-masculine, hard-boiled hero played by the likes of Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, Jake Gettes has been replaced by Jackie Quiñones, a diminutive Latina who works for the National Marine Fishery Services. Hightown is also populated with a diverse cast of characters including Latinos, African Americans and Anglos. Cutter has a requisite femme fatale in Hightown but also has strong, independent women in other roles.
The opening credits are a fast and furious series of jump-cut images of the ocean, sailboats and sandy beaches, vacationers and people dancing to the sounds of The Textones performing their punk rock version of The Go Go’s hit song Vacation. But look closely, neatly spliced in between those festive scenes are images of people smoking dope, snorting blow and cooking heroin in a spoon. These subliminal-like images foreshadow what this show is really about and why it is called Hightown.
THE LATINA FISH COP ANTI-HERO
Monica Raymund (Chicago Fire), plays Jackie Quiñones, is a hard-working Latina for the National Marine Fisheries Services by day and is an openly gay, promiscuous, coke-snorting, alcoholic by night with no outwardly discernible redeemable qualities. Raymund’s portrayal of this Latina character as a terribly flawed anti-hero is the driving force behind the complicated narrative of this dark, intense and riveting crime drama.
Mike Pniewski (Madam Secretary) plays Ed, Jackie’s fish cop partner and elderly father-figure who worries about her reckless self-destructive lifestyle and is constantly inviting her over for dinner. Ed keeps hoping something will happen that will change the trajectory of her life.
One night Quiñones discovers the murdered body of a young woman. It’s obviously drug-related and it sparks a change in Quiñones. She becomes determined to find out who did it and why. James Badge Dale (The Departed) is Detective Ray Abruzzo. He’s a narc working on the murder and its connection to a larger drug case. He and Quiñones form an uneasy, reluctant alliance to solve the crime. The problem is Abruzzo is an amoral cop with a sex addiction. Abruzzo’s sexual misconduct with confidential informants and a female police officer threatens to destroy not only his career but the entire drug case investigation.
Riley Voelkel (Roswell, New Mexico) as Rene, is the girlfriend of a drug kingpin, Frankie Cuevas, menacingly played by Amaury Nolasco (Transformers). While Frankie is doing time in prison, Abruzzo recruits Rene as a confidential informant. A sexual relationship develops and in true femme fatale fashion, Rene stabs Abruzzo in the back, turns him into the cops and drops a dime on him. The whole drug case against Frankie Cuevas goes up in smoke.
Season one ends with Cuevas getting out of prison with Rene dutifully waiting for him outside the gate. Quiñones tries to dry up at AA meetings with the occasional moral lapse. But she is outraged and more determined to solve the murder of the young girl.
IS THERE REDEMPTION IN JUSTICE?
As with all great film noir, the plot is secondary to the characters in the story. With rare exceptions, the characters in any iteration of film noir are Shakespearean tragic human beings. Their fatal flaws never fail to betray them at the worst possible times. The fascinating paradoxical conflict in film noir crime dramas is the good guys often do bad things to catch bad guys.
As the first Latina anti-hero, Quiñones struggles with her demons of alcoholism, drug use and a hedonistic lifestyle as she earnestly tries to seek justice for the murdered girl she encountered on the beach one night and find redemption in the process.
Season two of ‘Hightown’ premieres on STARZ on Oct. 17 and and is available on streaming services like Hulu and Amazon with a Starz add-on. Also, Season one is currently available free to Prime Video customers.
HIGHTOWN
Stars: Monica Raymund, Riley Voelkel, James Badge Dale, Amaury Nolasco, Mike Pniewski, Atkins Estimond and Tanya Glanz
Featured Photo: Hightown (Credit: Starz)
