‘A Man In Full’ TV Review: Jeff Daniels & Diane Lane Are Full-On In Netflix’s Tom Wolfe Adaptation, But That’s Not The Only Reason To Watch
02.05.2024 - 08:17
/ deadline.com
Jeff Daniels and Diane Lane rarely put in anything less than stellar performances, but the Emmy winner and Oscar nominee are rarely as good as they are in Netflix‘s adaptation of Tom Wolfe‘s A Man in Full.
In a fortnight that has seen the premieres of Hulu’s Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough starring Under the Bridge, the Elisabeth Moss spy thriller FX series Veil, HBO’s The Sympathizer, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winner and a third season of the still wonderfully wicked Hacks launching today on Max, executive producers Regina King and David E. Kelley have put a real winner on the track for Netflix with A Man in Full.
On any other show, the never better Daniels as a pugnacious Atlanta real estate tycoon Charlie Croker on the brink of bankruptcy, and Lane as his revitalized razor-sharp ex-wife Martha would be more than enough of a payoff.
As much of a fan you may or may not be of the New Journalism pathfinder’s much delayed second novel, or any of Wolfe’s other work fiction or non-fiction, I’m not going to recite the story chapter and verse, the book has been out for almost three decades, you either know it or you don’t. Leave it at this, Croker and his New South empire is in the hole to the banks for almost $1.5 billion, with a personal debt of $600 million.
The stakes are real at the top, and become even more so at the bottom once the incarceration machine starts to swallow characters up.
Kicking off with some incredibly well considered Shania Twain and including a certain stable coitus scene, the sweeping six-episode saga directed by Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe winner and One Night in Miami… helmer King, and showrun by small screen maestro Kelley, this A Man in Full is a splendid thing to see indeed.