1-1-1: Mosaic

 2018, d. Stephen Soderbergh - 6 episodes - crave

The What 100: A famous children's author and philanthropist takes in an aspiring artist as border and protege, but expects perhaps something more. Her friend and neighbour lets her know of the discovery of rare earth minerals on her property, but she's not interested in selling or developing the land. A new man enters her life with ill intentions. And then she winds up dead. 3 years later, the sister of the man convicted of the author's murder tries to unpack what actually happened.

(1 Great) Mosaic is, quite simply, an exceptionally compelling mystery, in large part due to the intricacy of the network of characters and their dynamics. The show over its six episodes paints a web of interconnected lives and/or interests in the small rural community over two different time periods. The characters are complex individuals, each with their own motivations, both before Olivia Lake (Sharon Stone, Total Recall) goes missing, and after her fiancee Eric (Fred Weller, In Plain Sight) takes a plea without admittance of guilt in her murder. The first two episodes focus on establishing Olivia's life (and her complicated personality) while also highlighting Eric's swindling of Olivia for outside interests, and Josh's confusion and disappointment in the life he's living on Olivia's estate (Garrett Hedlund, Tron: Legacy), and introducing the many other players invested in this story. The latter four episodes find Eric's sister, Petra (Jennifer Ferrin, The Knick) trying to solve Olivia's murder, and the time jump takes the players into new and very different places than they were three years earlier, with many willing to help, others reluctant, and some outright hostile, while still others seem to be helpful while in fact are not at all.

(1 Good): Soderbergh shoots the whole production with a natauralistic feel, as he's been partial to in this second phase of his career. Lighting is largely ambient, while the camera is very free moving and intimate in the proceedings.  The result of the style is one of immersion, or at the very least, fly-on-the-wall, where you feel like you are a watchful observer in the mix (we'll get to why that is in a minute). The intimacy makes you feel a part of the tangled narrative. The characters relate to each other in the complex and messy way that humans do. I wouldn't be surprised if there were stretches of the performances that were unscripted, and left to the actors to decide how the characters were feeling and how they would express themselves in the confines of the scene. I could not get over how many threads we're asked to track, and yet how easy it was to track them all. We're often ahead off Petra in her investigation, and yet the actual who and what and why of Olivia's murder still isn't completely made clear, as screenwriter Ed Solomon does a terrific job of pointing at numerous plausible suspects, and keeping them all relevant (and even adding a few red herrings along the way) straight through to the finale.

(1 Bad):The naturalist styling of the show means it can't exactly hit specific points harder than others, it can't have a dedicated message it's trying to send. There is a point it gets across about the rich, that things apply differently to high-society than it does to everyone else, it but can't really make more space to drive it home. It's not a class-warrior of a film  But maybe it didn't need to be. There's a discomfort, even a predatory nature to the upper-crust,  Olivia included, and it points to it, calls it out. There's also tiers to the upper-crust, and even there, Olivia is kind of seen as lower status, of less serious money. So it's a question of which side was after her, the rich who look down on her, or the poor who resent her? 

META: Mosiac actually started life as a "nu-media" project, an app where the viewer could observe the story through any character's perspective. The way that Soderbergh shot the footage makes a whole lot more sense when you realize you're supposed to be afforded the ability to watch from any character's point-of-view. Maybe the real "bad" is that the app seems to be long gone, as it sounded like an interesting experiment.  At the same time, what remains as an expertly edited production that just crackles like a lit fuse. We watched the whole thing in one sitting, because we had to see it through to the end.