Are we sure it's good? : Too Old to Die Young
There’s an argument to be made that Amazon killed art criticism. By offering customers the opportunity to write their own product reviews of books and movies purchased on his platforms, Jeff Bezos created a voice louder and more angelic than a choir of a thousand Roger Eberts: consensus. Who gives a shit what Slate or the Village Voice has to say if the film you want to watch has a 4.8 stars ranking based on the opinions of 160 people like you?
Exactly. If everyone liked it, why wouldn’t you?
I fall prey to this faulty logic and watch middling big productions all the time. Because it saves time and effort to actually read what someone who actually thinks about books & films for a living has to say about them. Except for Chuck Klosterman and A.O Scott, I rarely give the time of day to critics anymore, which is ironic since I’ve been running an art criticism site for 12 years now. But there’s an exception to this rule: I do sit down and read critics when they’re divided about a topic. Arguing critics is a great hint that a topic is interesting and worth forging your own opinion on.
One project that no one seems to agree upon is Nicolas Winding Refn & Ed Brubaker’s 2019 television show Too Old to Die Young. After the resounding success of Drive a decade ago, Winding Refn has become a reference for beautiful sleaze. His subsequent movies Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon might not have been as strong as Drive, but they helped shape his identity as the-guy-who-make-artsy-movies-that-are-actually-fun-and-watchable. Kind of Walter Hill and Michelangelo Antonioni’s bastard son.
It was a question of time before Winding Refn tried his hand at television. The form became somewhat of a safe haven for wild, creative people like him over the last decade. It’s also more popular than ever and directly distributed into people’s living rooms. NWR and television was a marriage waiting to happen. But it did happen and it left people fucking bewilered. The episodes were excruciatingly long and contemplative (between 70 and 97 minutes) and it was kind of all over the place.
But was it good, like Nicolas Winding Refn’s movies are good? Well, Too Old to Die Young is somewhat of a different animal. It’s hard to judge by normal standards.
The illusions of meaning and purpose
For the uninitiated, Too Old to Die Young is basically the story of two men: a soulless, psychopathic cop named Martin Jones (Miles Teller) who’s trying to find purpose by becoming an executioner of bad people and Jesus Rojas (Augusto Aguilera), the son of a recently deceased Mexican cartel boss who’s trying to find purpose by living up to his mother’s legacy of violence. It’s a little more complicated than that, but you get the gist. These two eventually get in each other’s way and shenanigans ensue. Extremely violent shenanigans
One of my favorite aspects of this show and one that makes it quite awkward to watch at times is the lack of causality between the episodes. It is very true that you can watch Too Old to Die Young out of order or just a single episode as a self-contained narrative, it would kind of work. I mean, the ten episodes kind of connect in causality but don’t really add up to a coherent superstructure. Some characters are seen in one episode only, never to reappear again. Some exit without saying goodbye. Some just wander around looking for purpose.
The characters seem to be writing themselves as the show goes along and I got a kick out of that. For example, Jesus doesn’t really accomplish anything. The main arc of his character is that he embraces the dark, buried sides of his personality to become a very well dressed bloodthirsty ghoul. His wife Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo) is painted as this dark liberator of women who are enslaved by the cartel, but she spends the entire show wandering around frustrated and looking for the courage to be herself once they move to the United States.
There’s a great scene, I believe in episode 6, where she slaps the shit out of Martin’s girlfriend Janey (Nell Tiger Free) because she cannot bear to be around privileged brats. The conflict between the savior and the executioner in her is great and would’ve been a lot greater without that wet fart of a finale. The characters of Too Old to Die Young are not working towards a greater design. They’re all looking for it, imagine they’re part of it, but they’re a clumsy bag of contradictions that stagger through episodes of brutality.
Of course, this is a little nihilistic-chic and Nicolas Winding-Refn sometimes expresses it in very lengthy and obnoxious ways, but there is something profoundly human about these characters going the wrong way and sometimes hitting dead ends. Martin’s struggle to contain his own dark side is particularly heartbreaking as it ends up costing him everything. The characters’ contradiction an self-defeating ways is what makes them human
The heritage of David Lynch
If you’re not familiar with the work of David Lynch, many scenes in Too Old to Die Young might’ve left you scratching your head. Our greatest living surrellist had a thing for the weirdness of everyday life and the buried darkness that lives within us. In that regard, Too Old to Die Young owes a lot to movies like Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Every episode has at least one scene that is odd for the sake of being odd.
One of my favorite characters that embraces Lynchian surrealism is Janey’s dad Theo (William Baldwin). My man is WEIRD. See, a lot of the Lynchian scenes in Too Old to Die Young are thinly-veiled critiques of the brutality of Los Angeles. Theo is the embodiment of that. He purrs and growls and sniffs, like he’s barely able to keep his animal nature under control. Once in a while, it also comes out as a disgusting comment about his own daughter. Metaphorical and literal signs that Theo’s inner beast is about to burst through collide in his character. He’s thoroughly unique.
Another great Lynchian moment is when Martin visits his gangster acolyte Damian (Babs Olusanmokun) at his house. Previously in the series, they used to always meet at the ice skating rink he owned. But after a failed hit attempt by the cartel that cost him his lieutenant Celestino (Celestino Cornielle), he goes into hiding. In the first scene, you’re brought through a house full of gangsters you’ve never seen before like Jeffrey in Blue Velvet. That scene is echoed almost shot for shot later, except the house is full of corpses and the walls are painted with blood. It is a great illustration of the dichotomy of how people perceive themselves and who they really are in the greater scheme of things.
Everyone in Los Angeles thinks they’re important, but it’s a city that keeps eating its own people.
There are also purer Lynchian moments like the Damian’s dance scene, which seems to fascinate a lot of fans online. If you want to enjoy Too Old to Die Young, you need a certain patience for these almost anthropological observations of human nature. They are weird, deformed and sometimes nonsensical, but they’re never uninteresting visually. If you’re into painting you should definitely watch this show because there’s a lot of static or slow moving images for you to analyze.
But is it good?
Too Old to Die Young is interesting and has flashes of pure brilliance, but it’s a show that is more fun to talk about in retrospect that to actually watch. Don’t get me wrong. Some of its scenes are absolutely riveting. It has, among others, perhaps the greatest intro scene in the history of television. But when the first scene of your show is also the best scene of your show, it doesn’t bode well for the eleven hours and forty-five minutes left.
I kept wondering why Too Old to Die Young got so tiresome at times and I believe it’s because television was the wrong medium for this project. I believe it should’ve been a novel. In fact, it would’ve probably been more successful if there had been first a novel to refer to. The characters are over-the-top obtuse with their lengthy silences at times. The flat, lifeless way they deliver their lines makes them seem like the artificial creations they are. A novel would’ve allowed to look under the hood for common threads. I know talent direction was an artistic choice, but it’s one that doesn’t help Too Old to Die Young deliver an entertaining product.
All these panning shots would’ve come across livelier with written descriptions too. I know a novel is a huge undertaking in terms of time and usually doesn’t deliver on the financial end, but co-creator Ed Brubaker is a big name in comic books and could’ve made something happen.
One particularly frustrating aspect of Too Old to Die Young is that the finale is inexplicably 30 minutes long and ends on a wet fat to nowhere. That finale was so OBVIOUSLY torn down by some producer from Amazon Studios. My guess is that it was filled with the apocalyptic flashes Diana (played by a tragically miscast Jena Malone) sees at the beginning of episode 9 and that it was deemed unwatchable, which is too bad. One day we’ll get the director cut of Too Old to Die Young and movie execs will get another lesson about not getting in the way.
So, I can’t say Too Old to Die Young was good. Two years after the fact, virtually no one is talking about it anymore. Memorable shows like Breaking Bad or even Lost have their own way of resonating through history while Too Old to Die Young seems to have cost its creators in terms of career opportunities. Have you heard about Winding-Refn or Brubaker since? I sure didn’t. But it was interesting. I’m glad that I watched it. It’s the type of art that explores the boundaries of its medium. It both succeeds and fails so that others can use its transgressions in order to move art forward.
By any means, you should take twelve hours of your precious time to watch Too Old to Die Young, but only once. Even more so if you’re an artist looking for some ballsy, inspiring creative material that doesn’t give a fuck about what the powerful think. It’s not afraid to draw outside the lines and become idiosyncratic at times, but let’s be honest: we all wish we had the courage to be more like that.
