BWW Recap: HOUDINI You Think You Are?

Harry Houdini - America's premier Escape Artist, showman extraordinaire, potentially a template for that most American of literary creations, the Superhero, and, if you believe the premise of the current miniseries on The History Channel, a person psychologically addicted to running away from his own person and reality. HOUDINI, the two-parter that began Monday night and concludes on Tuesday on the History Channel, is based on a psychiatrist's biography of the great performer, which was subtitled "A Mind in Chains." However, from the show and its star, Adrien Brody's, portrayal, he was less a man in chains than a man on the run.

The show begins from a nose-bleed inducing height on a bridge over the frozen Mississippi River, looking down on a hole cut into the ice. A huge crowd is assembled on the bridge to watch, and three figures stand on the ice around the hole. On the bridge, Houdini, clad in nothing but a turn-of-the-century bathing suit and chains, has a moment of introspection about his drive, derived from an urge to escape death, before plummeting through the hole into the water. While getting out of the chains underwater presents no difficulty, finding the hole again to exit is more completed. So begins the recollection of his life, as it passes before his eyes.

We see him first as a man on a third rate vaudeville circuit with his young wife, Bess (Kristin Connelly), stuck doing a magic show in a brothel, where he discovers his knack for escaping from chains. Then, we're tossed further back, to his childhood as Eric Weiss, the magic-obsessed son of a loving mother and a stern Rabbi father, when the old man is ejected from his Appleton, Wisconsin temple for his continued failure to learn English. The show doesn't dwell on this traumatic incident, nor much on the father, who is presented as a presence haunting Harry over the years; although the old man is never shown to be particularly cruel or abusive, just rather dour and mono-syllabic... only in Yiddish, apparently.

HOUDINI continues in much the same vein, showing its hero in biographical vignettes that are more interested in showing Harry's increasingly dangerous escapes and how he did them, than in explaining his psychological underpinnings, in spite of the source material (Also unexplained is the fact that Brody, although portraying a Jewish immigrant from Hungary who was raised in the American Midwest, sounds like he's in a Scorsese gangster film, particularly in his numerous voice-over monologues). He's in 1894, courting Bess in Coney Island, by making birds magically appear from origami. Then, he's getting publicity by having a surly cop lock him up in the town's allegedly impregnable cell. Next, he's meeting his great fan, Jim Collins (Evan Jones), in a small magic shop and offering the young man a job as his illusion designer. By 1900, he's attracting bigger crowds in bigger towns, like Chicago, doing even more theatrical jailhouse escapes, with Jim's able help. All this time, with no mentioned obstacle, or even much shown effort, he has become "The Great Houdini," one of the new century's rare superstars, playing to fascinated crowds in grand theatres, famous and rich enough to settle his now widowed mother in a mansion in Brooklyn.

So far, so good. We've covered over twenty years of a life and we're not an hour into the story. At this point, HOUDINI gets its sea legs when it introduces more weighty conflict into the tale. Harry is recruited by the Secret Service to spy on European heads of state. The United States, and its ally Britain, are concerned about Germany and other potential combatants in the brewing conflict that will become World War I. Who would be a better person to infiltrate the secrets of the royalty of Europe and their ministers than a celebrity showman about to start a European tour? Harry accepts the charge to become a secret agent from Lord Melville (the always wonderful Tim Piggott-Smith) and is rewarded by being made a "born" American citizen, by a bit of official tinkering with his passport. Harry's escape from his poor immigrant past is as well accomplished as possible at this point. With his usual cocky aplomb, he has no problem charming the Kaiser into inviting him into dinner after performing the death defying bullet catch. Secrets of the German army are revealed and duly passed to a contact, before Harry moves on to Moscow, to equally charm the Romanov family; and to really annoy Rasputin, whom he invites to punch him in the stomach.

Throughout the show, Harry has used this trick with men he has irritated: he invites them to punch him in the gut. He has physically trained so hard that hitting him is akin to punching a wall. He bears the many punches he receives with a smile, although the camera pans into the muscle wall to show the trauma the blows cause. At this point, the punches begin to have a more metaphysical significance. Because the real danger Harry's foray into espionage causes is to his marriage to Bess, who can only imagine it is infidelity that explains Harry's mysterious and unexplained absences. She begins nitpicking at him, flirting with an English officer at a party after Harry pulls off a hair-raising break-in at the German Embassy in London, while simultaneously "performing" an on-stage escape. When he sees her on another man's lap, we again see the blow to his gut.

In addition to friction in his marriage, his career is slowing down. For the first time in years, he cannot fill a theatre. It is 1914 and the new attraction, film, is beginning to siphon off vaudeville audiences. Harry is getting desperate and dictatorial with those around him, and Bess has started to smoke pot to "relax." A last ditch publicity stunt occurs to him and we're back at the top of the bridge as we were in the beginning. He plunges and finds himself trapped beneath the ice again, with further images of his life pass before his eyes.

HOUDINI is a sumptuous production and, particularly when it goes to Europe, its design is enough to make a dedicated DOWNTON ABBEY viewer weep with nostalgia. However, some of the history was a bit off. For example, in 1914, when Harry and Jim are viewing their new cinematic competitor, the film they are watching is Chaplin's THE RINK, a movie that came out in 1916. While a mistake like this one will only annoy the obsessive-compulsives in the audience (at your service), it's a shameful miss for a network that brands itself "The History Channel." All that said, Brody is charismatic, and the story has some melodramatic delights. Since Harry's flashes of his life, as he struggles underwater, include scenes of him as an older, gray-haired man, I'd say it's safe to assume he escapes this trap as well. Let's tune in and see how he does it.

HOUDINI concludes Tuesday, September 02, 2014 at 9:00 pm on The History Channel.

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