When I first discovered stories as a kid, I was in love with plot. I was thrilled by the way that everything could slide so neatly into place. But as I watched and read more, the thrill began to vanish. Plots began to feel like freeways: great for moving you along efficiently, but all pretty much the same. And, in truth, you can't see much of life from them. You're better off on the streets, back roads and alleyways.
Someone who grasps this is Lisa McGee, the Northern Irish screenwriter who had an international hit with Derry Girls, a beloved teen comedy series set during the violent Troubles of the late 1990s. This time out, McGee has turned her unruly sensibility to a crime show. The result — Netflix's How to Get to Heaven from Belfast — is a madcap riff on the murder mystery. Vastly entertaining and flagrantly Irish, the show serves up so many different tones that it's like watching one of those performers who can juggle a chainsaw, a puppy and a bowl of jello while playing a banjo with their teeth.
The story centers on three late-30s Belfast women who've been friends since going to Catholic school together. There's Saoirse (Roísín Gallagher), a tireless fantasist who created a hit cop show that even she thinks is stupid. Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) is a bossy, foul-mouthed bourgeois mother of three — imagine an Irish Reese Witherspoon. And there's Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne), a lovelorn lesbian who's stuck as her mother's caregiver. She might seem like a drip, except that Dunne gives her the quiet drollery of a Buster Keaton or Stan Laurel.
The three hear about the death of their estranged school friend Greta with whom they have long shared a dark, potentially ruinous secret. And so they head down to scenic County Donegal to pay their respects. But they quickly realize there's something suspicious about Greta's death.
At Saoirse's urging — she writes crime shows, after all — they begin to dig. Naturally, trouble follows. Soon they're dealing with everyone from an enigmatically murderous outlaw named Booker to Liam, a member of the Irish Garda, or police, who they fear will learn their secret.
Now, I worry this description may make the show sound like a cosily routine murder mystery. It is anything but. As the show leaps between past and present, our heroines rocket from one loony scene to the next. They see ghosts. They have car crashes (yes, more than one). They find themselves in funerals, five-star Portuguese resorts, abandoned lighthouses, yachts, golf carts, jails, religious processions and country and western nights at a pub where women dress as Dolly Parton — not to mention a St. Patrick Day's parade bursting with the screwball exuberance of a Preston Sturges movie.
The opening episodes of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast are so gleefully freewheeling that it's a tad disappointing when later on it serves up some obligatory crime show stuff — you know, explaining the crime, drawing a moral, etc. The show is at its best when it's most anarchic.
Luckily, McGee is less interested in the creaky mechanisms of mystery plotting than in conjuring up a giddily surreal world, one that weds some of David Lynch's sense of teenage darkness to an antic comic style akin to the Marx Brothers. The show is teeming with garrulous Irish folk whose dialogue just sings. None more so than Robyn, niftily played by Keenan, a buzzing beehive of a woman who fires off obscene and blasphemous lines like a rapper.
The glue that holds all the lunacy together is the decades-old friendship of its heroines. Here are women who know how to annoy, wound and manipulate each other. They bicker hilariously. Although they've grown up and gone their separate ways, they're still living out feelings and experiences they shared back when they were teens in their school uniforms, a period to which the show keeps flashing back.
We see the adult Saoirse, Robyn and Dara in their younger selves, each living out a destiny that feels almost pre-ordained, both in its trajectory and its frustrations. With devoutly unsentimental Irish good cheer, McGee reminds us that they carry the past with them always.
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