Shane Meadows’s new British miniseries, The Virtues, stars Stephen Graham as Joseph, a painter, decorator, and alcoholic at a crossroads. We first meet Joseph when he is surrendering his child to the boy’s mother, who is bound for Australia with her new husband. “I’ll always be your father,” Joseph says, with the resignation of a decent man who realizes he has demons he must conquer. Joseph makes his way Ireland to confront past traumas that are revealed through a progression of hazy flashbacks. Meadows and co-writer Jack Thorne use the series’s four tidy episodes to craft, through patience and understanding, considerable depth of character. Joseph has numbed himself to the truth of his past through regular bouts with the bottle. On the one hand, he’s a gregarious drunk who will buy drinks for the entire bar until he blacks out, his paycheck spent. Yet he’s no drunken lout; a storm rages in his head.
Graham, best known for playing thugs (he was a particularly vile racist in Meadows’s previous series This Is England) is restrained in this outing. Joseph’s alcoholic binges lead to guilt and blackouts, not acts of violence. Once in Ireland, he moves in with his sister and brother-in law, played by Irish actors Frank Laverty and Helen Behan, who worked powerfully with Meadows on This Is England.
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Graham, best known for playing thugs (he was a particularly vile racist in Meadows’s previous series This Is England) is restrained in this outing. Joseph’s alcoholic binges lead to guilt and blackouts, not acts of violence. Once in Ireland, he moves in with his sister and brother-in law, played by Irish actors Frank Laverty and Helen Behan, who worked powerfully with Meadows on This Is England.
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