by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Despite my overall exhaustion level, I somehow managed to
stay awake long enough to watch a program on KPBS: The Guilty, a three-part miniseries from 2013 that was a
welcome partnership between the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and
Independent Television Service (ITS). It’s a policier set in the British countryside and dealing with a
five-year-old cold case, the mysterious disappearance of four-year-old Callum
Reid (Daniel Runacres-Grundstrom) after an outdoor barbecue party. The case is
suddenly and dramatically reopened when the body of Callum Reid is found buried
in the garden of the estate owned by his parents, Daniel (Darren Boyd, who’s
actually the hottest guy in the movie) and Claire (Katherine Kelly) Reid. Until
then they hadn’t given up hope that Callum would be found and returned to them
alive, and had even maintained a Web site in hopes people would use it to log
on in case they’d seen anyone who looked like Callum or had any leads that
would help finding him. The Reids are also raising another son, Luke (played in
the flashbacks to Callum’s life by Teddy Fitzpatrick and in the 2013 present by
Jude Foley), who’s older than Callum and is Daniel’s son by his late first wife
— and though we’re never told how Luke’s mom died, we are told repeatedly that Luke feels guilty and the
apparent loss of his younger half-brother has only made his survivor’s guilt
worse.
The central character is police detective Maggie Brand (Tamsin Greig), a
quite butch-looking woman whose own marriage to Jeb Colman (Jamie Sives) is
strained due to the pressures of her job as well as the crisis facing their own
son Sam (Tommy Potten). Sam is now four, the age Collum Reid was when he
disappeared, and Maggie was originally assigned to the Collum Reid
investigation under a detective named Anderton, an old-schooler whose idea of
police work was to arrest the most obvious suspect and browbeat them into
confessing. Only Maggie got taken off the investigation because she was
pregnant with Sam and her morning sickness was getting in the way of her
performance, and Anderton proceeded to fasten onto the Reids’ nanny, Ruth Hyde
(Pooky Quesnel — is there really
an actress in Britain named “Pooky”?) and her scapegrace boyfriend Jason Byrne
(Theo Barklem-Biggs). Jason is indeed a bad guy; when he isn’t sneaking around
and trying to have sex with Ruth (and making it a point to inquire what sort of
underwear she’s wearing — “tomorrow, nothing,” she promises at one point) in
various parts of the Reid property, he’s getting her to steal the Reids’ ATM
and their PIN so he can steal from their bank account, since given how they’re
living and what they do in their careers (he’s an architect and she’s a
schoolteacher), they can afford to lose a little money. (We don’t know for sure
what he’s spending it on but we
suspect it’s drugs.) The cops arrest Jason and he commits suicide by hanging
himself in his cell, but he never reveals what he did with little Callum Reid —
and Maggie is convinced he never did anything with Callum Reid since he’s not that sort of criminal. She traces the ex-nanny to a
mental hospital in Germany — in this British-produced show it’s startling to
see Maggie get into a car with the steering wheel on the left side until we
realize that she’s in Germany and the Germans drive on the right side of the
road, like we do and the British don’t — and gets crucial information that makes
her even more convinced that Jason didn’t do it. Also, since the garden was
searched five years before and the body wasn’t where it was found five years
later, the criminal had to be
someone who was still alive to move the body.
At the end of the second of the
three 50-minute episodes (though the BBC has a co-production credit this was
obviously originally aired on Britain’s commercial station) Maggie is accosted
in a parking garage by a man named Tom Rose (Christopher Fulford), who meets
her in the shadows and tells her to follow the mon- — oops, wrong story. He
actually attempts to break into her car while she’s trying to drive away, she
slams the door and breaks one of his hands, and when she finally stops and asks
him what he wants, he demands to be arrested for Callum Reid’s murder. It seems
he’s a Gay pedophile who so far had been able to control his urges, but he
found Callum such an irresistible little morsel of potential delight he picked
the kid up, held him with one arm around the boy’s waist, put the other arm in
front of Callum’s mouth to stifle his screams, and inadvertently put too much
pressure on the kid’s windpipe, killing him. Tom is taken into custody and then
conveniently murdered by a fellow prisoner, thereby leaving the cops with yet another dead guy they can pin the crime on — but Maggie
remains convinced that Tom was not
Callum’s killer and that Callum’s own dad Daniel had something to do with the
crime. Daniel himself is suspicious because while he said he went out for a
drive alone the night his son was killed, he left his car keys in his home
(where his wife spotted them) and it turns out he was really having an affair with a neighbor, Teresa Morgan
(Ruta Gedmintas), who thought he was going to leave his wife for her.
Eventually director Edward Bazalgette and writer Debbie O’Malley give the
ending away in one of the interminable flashback scenes that mar this movie and
keep it stopping dead in its tracks all too often — we see Luke Reid and a
mysterious older kid drowning Callum in the Reid family’s bathtub and father
Daniel burying the body to cover up the crime instead of risking having one of
his sons be prosecuted for the murder of the other. The Guilty was actually reasonably well done but it suffered
from an ill-conceived script with all those bizarre and jarring flashbacks
getting in the way — though Bazalgette and his cinematographer, Gavin Finney,
tried to separate the present from the past by bathing the flashbacks in a
rancid orange glow — and also from an ending that tried to be shocking and just
seemed dull. Still, it was well acted, particularly by Tamsin Greig as the lead
detective (less obstreperously attractive than Mariska Hargitay on Law
and Order: Special Victims Unit but also much less annoyingly schoolmarmish) and Ruta Gedmintas,
who actually makes the stereotypical “other woman” a figure of real pathos.
