“Half Man” Tests the Limits of Brotherly Love
The course of fifteen-year-old Niall Kennedy’s life changes the first day he walks to school with his almost-stepbrother, Ruben. It’s 1986 and, like so many boys with spindly physiques and a love of science fiction, Niall (Mitchell Robertson) is dogged by bullies—though, in his case, the harassment is also a result of his mom’s romantic involvement with a woman, Ruben’s scowling mother. Niall, closeted and cerebral, is terrified of Ruben (Stuart Campbell), an earthy, charismatic bruiser fresh from a juvenile-detention center, but he intuits that the older boy may be his best chance at survival. When Niall’s tormentors yell their usual slurs on that fateful morning, it’s Ruben who makes the next move. He shoves Niall into a wall and asks, with their faces inches apart, “Are these guys bothering you, Bambi?” They both know that Ruben is a pit bull, and that he’s asking for permission to be unleashed. When Niall finally cops to the obvious, Ruben pulls out a knife and urges him to head to class alone: “You’re not a witness if you don’t see what happens.”
The new HBO/BBC drama “Half Man” follows Niall and Ruben, who consider themselves brothers even after their mothers’ breakup, for the next three decades. Set largely in a working-class neighborhood of Glasgow marked by chipped paint and dowdy patterns, the series adheres to the jagged rhythms of Niall and Ruben’s relationship, skipping over years of separation or estrangement to catch them as they reënter each other’s orbits, willingly or otherwise. Niall (played as an adult by Jamie Bell) might deploy his sibling as an attack dog, but he can’t insure that Ruben (a newly ripped Richard Gadd) won’t occasionally charge at him, too. As their mutual competitiveness grows shockingly ugly, Niall learns to turn Ruben’s Samsonian strength and fury against him, knocking down the pillars of Ruben’s own life.
Men, society tells us ad nauseam, are simple creatures. Even those beating the drum of the male-loneliness crisis seem convinced that the problem of men’s stunted emotional lives is easily solved: more group activities, less time online. Gadd, the creator of “Half Man” as well as one of its stars, clearly believes the matter is more complicated than that—and makes the dynamic between his two leads as thorny, codependent, and, at times, troublesomely erotic as it can get. (The other male-bonding drama of the moment, “DTF St. Louis,” in which one middle-aged suburban dad is credibly suspected of murdering another, is practically feel-good by comparison.) Gadd’s ambitions are evident from the opening scene, when, in a framing device set in the present day, Ruben crashes Niall’s wedding—an event he learned of that morning. The pair sequester themselves in a shed while guests revel outside in the sunshine. “You look gorgeous,” Ruben tells Niall. “If I wasn’t family, I’d get up underneath that kilt right away.” He reaches for Niall’s privates in a juvenile show of dominance. We soon see that Ruben has made a lifelong habit of such sexualized power plays—and that Niall’s deep-seated shame about his queerness was likely augmented by shame about his attraction to a man who calls him brother.
“Half Man” is a grimmer affair than Gadd’s previous series, “Baby Reindeer,” a fictionalized account of his experience being aggressively stalked by a woman for four years. The most potent material in the new show is connected to themes he explored there as well: internalized homophobia, the sexual assault of men, and the evasion of blame. In “Half Man,” Gadd’s treatment of these themes is richer and more mature; with the two projects, each defined by shifting notions of victimhood and culpability, he’s emerged as a bard of self-loathing. Ruben, never book-smart, is aggrieved by the doors that open for Niall as a result of his academic achievements. Niall, for his part, only comes to hate himself more as gay acceptance goes mainstream, his initial distress over his sexuality compounded by humiliation at being unable to get past that distress. His yearning for Ruben’s approval and fear of his own desires are so acute that, when the show flashes forward to Niall’s wedding again, one half expects to see a woman waiting at the altar.
His soon-to-be spouse, as it turns out, is someone he met decades earlier—a reminder that, for a story with such chronological breadth, the cast of characters is surprisingly small. But the meagreness of the world befits its protagonists, both of whom become stuck in certain phases after failing to come to grips with their formative traumas. The size of the ensemble also belies its strength. Of particular note is Niall’s mother, Lori (Neve McIntosh), who joins her ex-girlfriend, Maura (Marianne McIvor), in defending Ruben despite his many transgressions. As the show progresses, she treads a blurred line between offering Ruben second chances and simply enabling him, especially as his antisocial rampages repeatedly land him in prison. Her unsentimentality toward her own son, meanwhile, is funny, upsetting, and, I suspect, thoroughly British. “I’ve given you life,” she scolds Niall. “I don’t need to give you respect.”
Gadd’s post-penitentiary Ruben is another formidable presence, endowed with a leonine rumble that betrays his dissatisfactions, and a predatory gaze that quickly sizes up those around him. But, as the series’ writer, Gadd doesn’t deliver much in the way of fresh insight about troubled masculinity. Ruben is a hurt person who hurts people, and the kind of patriarchal figure who sees it as his right to subdue members of his own family, as long as he also protects them from outsiders. The most didactic and mannered scenes are the ones that purport to explain him; for all these efforts to psychoanalyze, he ultimately feels more like a cautionary tale than a fully realized character.
But the show’s plotting and Niall’s exquisite complexity more than make up for Ruben’s relative flatness. The many leaps in time to the wedding—to which Ruben shows up on a motorcycle, angry enough to knock his brother out with a single punch—consistently ratchet up the sense of dread, and the suspense over why or how these two have stayed enmeshed. (A flashback to Niall’s university days offers a clue: alone and overwhelmed in his first week away from home, he calls Ruben in the middle of the night, whispering, “I need you,” as though relapsing; Ruben arrives the next morning like a vampire who’s been invited in.) The sad but realistic turns in their lives are engrossing, as is their slow convergence. If Ruben is blatantly pathological in his obsession with status, his tendency toward self-sabotage, and his inability to take responsibility, Niall is gradually revealed to be afflicted with the same qualities, albeit in a less expected package. His characterization benefits from its rootedness in a specific era, when it was more understandable that he might have been too busy trying on masks to sort out his identity—or to reckon with his complicity in his brother’s crimes. Bell, whose screen roles have long radiated decency and sensitivity, channels that guilelessness once more, only to expose it as yet another façade that helps Niall to conceal his darker impulses.
Against all good sense, Niall pursues a childhood dream of becoming a writer—an aspiration he cultivates by reimagining his father, a bartender who scribbled on the side and died young, as a thwarted literary talent. His breakthrough comes with an autobiographical novel, which centers on a thinly veiled Ruben. Critics and journalists prove more interested in the book’s antihero than in its author; as Ruben himself crows, “I’m your fuckin’ muse.” But Niall is the series’ singular achievement, in part for his awareness that he’ll always be a shadow to a man who has more life force than he knows what to do with. On his wedding day, Ruben asks him whether he loves him. After dissembling for a minute, Niall gives an honest answer: “It’s the only thing I’ve ever felt.” ♦