A final flashback blurs the lines between dreams and reality as "Patrick Melrose" asks — and answers — what it takes to overcome trauma. [Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Patrick Melrose,” including Episode 5, “At Last,” the series finale.] “Patrick Melrose” began by throwing itself headfirst into the present problem while barely skirting the cause. During the first hour, audiences watch as Benedict Cumberbatch’s lead character sends himself on a recurring loop of benders; Patrick takes drugs to counter the drugs he’s already taken, and eventually, painfully, arrives at the realization he’s an addict. He spends the entire hour thinking he can quit, but piles of increasingly dangerous evidence indicate he cannot. The series appears focused on one man’s quest to free himself from his own self-destructive tendencies, which is a tale told too many times before. But the limited series’ final hour is its premiere’s counterpart. Audiences have come to know why Patrick turned to drugs in the first place, and in the aptly titled fifth episode, “At Last,” he finds comfort not only in reining in his bad habits but in coming to terms with what was done to him. With his father dead and buried and his mother burned to ash, Patrick is forced to confront the past one final time and ends up finding hope in the future. It’s a satisfying, well-paced, and impeccably performed ending, even if Patrick’s ultimate inspiration is a bit familiar. “Patrick Melrose” finds its spark of originality in how he gets there; it may even spark a bit of a debate, though ultimately either answer is suitable. Readers of Edward St Aubyn’s novel may have further insights into the final flashback, but a young Patrick confronting his not-so “dear old dad” is presented here as an equivocal scene; it could be real or imagined. And yet it works either way because it’s treated as authentically as any other moment from Patrick’s past. After asking to go to the bathroom, an adolescent Patrick reemerges to tell off his abusive father. “No,” he says when asked to come sit down on the bed. “I won’t do what you say anymore. […] It’s wrong. You’re wrong. Nobody should do that to anybody else.” For a child to say that in that specific moment is a bit hard to believe, and the scene — as it’s been shown before — was at least implied to end differently. But it’s David’s reaction, brought to unexpected life by Hugo Weaving, that begs reconsideration: Could a grown-up Patrick imagine his dad’s reaction? David raped his wife, his son, and other children who came to visit their European getaway. Could Patrick possibly think his monster of a father would accept what he’s said and reflect inward on such horrific acts, unless he saw it happen in reality? Perhaps Patrick only saw in flashback what he wished his younger self had said; maybe he imagined his father’s reaction because that’s just what Patrick needed to believe in order to move on as an adult. After all, as a child, he didn’t know others were being abused, and in the flashback, he said: “nobody should do that to anybody else.” With that in mind, it feels more like something Patrick wishes he could have told his father had he known what was happening to his mother. “When we were here, when I was a child and we used to come here — and for some years afterwards, father used to… he used to rape me,” Patrick tells his mother, Eleanor (Jennifer Jason Leigh), during a flashback in the finale. The audience has been aware of this since Episode 2, “Never Mind,” but what matters isn’t that Patrick struggles to get the words out or the fact that he said them at all. It’s that his mother, Eleanor, responds bluntly, barely pausing to weigh what her son has confessed: “Me too.” That Patrick learns this after he’s gone through so much — drugs, a failed stint at rehab, etc. — puts a thoughtful spin on what his grown self needs to overcome his past trauma. In his mother, he found a fellow victim and a cautionary tale, but he empathized too much with her and ended up mimicking her binge-drinking and toxic self-destruction. He was a man torn between loving his mother as someone who shared his burden and hating her for not protecting him from it. “Patrick Melrose” played with these contradictions constantly, and perhaps succeeded best in presenting Patrick’s slide toward the bottom with his slide down the class system; he went from a young man inheriting family money that he was all too eager to blow on drugs and booze, to a covetous adult who didn’t want to give up the estate in which he was abused as a child, to a working man who accepted the world around him. His money was ripped away from him, and he was able to find the light. Was that a necessity for his rehabilitation? Maybe not, but it gave the series an observant eye extending beyond just Patrick and provided commentary on a developing British class system, as well. (Pip Torrens’ Nicholas Pratt dying from his utter disgust at new-age customs was a pitch-perfect end for the character and his embodiment of old money, white privilege, etc.) In the end, Patrick turned himself around for his children, but he was only able to do so after his parents were gone. Before, while his mother was stuck in a life she didn’t want, he struggled to see what his addictions were doing to his family even as he punished himself for them. It’s a dark view on hope to argue that your tormenters must be dead and gone before you’re able to move on from their sins, but again we return to that final flashback. Whether it’s real or imagined, Patrick is standing up for himself in that moment, just as he stands up for himself in the end. Patrick’s struggle isn’t over. The first episode’s events are still present in his mind and the minds of viewers. That, too, may be necessary; he may need to remember in order to keep on the right path. He’s fighting — he’s trying — and that’s what matters. “Patrick Melrose” captures this quest with just enough style and just enough insight to make it resonate. Seen together, the episodes prove quite powerful and leave ample room for interpretation as well as application; not every addict will follow Patrick’s path, but everyone can identify with his journey. That didn’t seem possible at the start. Grade: B+ “Patrick Melrose” is available to watch in full on Showtime. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.<doc-sep>It was a few hours before the premiere of Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War” late last month, and Benedict Cumberbatch was not about to violate the studio’s ban on spoilers surrounding the penultimate chapter of the most lucrative movie franchise ever. “Don’t ask,” he said, in response to a mock-question about his turn as Doctor Strange. “All I can give you is a nice recipe for Aperol spritz.” But Mr. Cumberbatch was happy to speak volubly about another complex work of serial narrative hitting the screen this spring — one that also unfolded over many years, commands an ardent fan base and features him as an unusually intelligent man battling dark forces (albeit armed with vicious wit and bulletproof irony rather than magical orbs). “Patrick Melrose,” a five-part limited series that debuts on Showtime on May 12, is based on five autobiographical novels by the British writer Edward St. Aubyn, whose exquisite prose and subtle portraiture have won them almost cultish devotion. Published between 1992 and 2011, they follow an upper-class Englishman on a 40-year journey of recovery from horrific childhood abuse, addiction and the soul-killing snobbery of his milieu.<doc-sep>
Based on the three episodes Showtime made available, that wasn’t enough to approximate the texture of Mr. St. Aubyn’s work — the way pathos, for better or worse, peeks through the cracks of his comic-splenetic detachment. There’s no way of knowing what the writer, David Nicholls, and director, Edward Berger, would have done with more space. But as it is, it feels as if they’re scrambling just to work in all their favorite bits from the books. What they haven’t found time for, or didn’t know how to achieve, is a cinematic equivalent for Mr. St. Aubyn’s framing consciousness, the way Patrick and the other characters — the family members and friends who inhabit his desiccated upper-class milieu — pick over their own lives, fighting a battle of wits with no winners. Instead they seem to have focused on getting across the story, whose shattering elements don’t prevent it from feeling too familiar, a tale whose various parts we’ve heard before. Mr. Nicholls flips the order of the first two books, beginning with “Bad News,” in which the 22-year-old Patrick flies to New York to retrieve his father’s ashes and goes on an epic cocaine-and-heroin bender, and following with “Never Mind,” the first novel, set during a day at the Melrose’s home in southern France in Patrick’s childhood. The change disrupts the chronology but makes for a more unified, recovery-focused narrative, hitting us up front with Patrick at his most damaged. (And, of course, starting with Mr. Cumberbatch in the foreground rather than Sebastian Maltz, who plays Patrick as a child.) Other decisions also seem aimed at providing a coherent narrative experience at all costs. Mr. Nicholls deals with the books’ reliance on interior monologue and description by putting snippets of Mr. St. Aubyn’s prose into the characters’ mouths as conventional dialogue, sometimes to salvage an acerbic bon mot but often just to get in background information.