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(E) On 'E.R.', a Pair of Survivors Who Throw Off Sparks |
By Nenad N. Bach |
Published
11/18/2001
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Culture And Arts
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Unrated
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(E) On 'E.R.', a Pair of Survivors Who Throw Off Sparks
The following appeared in the NY Times on Oct. 21. Note the reference to the war in Bosnia; it should be the war in Croatia and I intend and ask others to write a letter to have this error corrected in a story which is otherwise very favorable to Visnjic. John Kraljic October 21, 2001 On 'E.R.', a Pair of Survivors Who Throw Off Sparks By STEVE VINEBERG OS ANGELES -- THE inspired notion of hooking up Abby Lockhart, the full-time nurse, on-again-off-again med student, with Luka Kovac, the Croatian physician, on "E.R." created perhaps the most fascinating relationship on prime-time TV: the meeting of two emotionally repressed survivors who seemed to have given up hope of any pleasure deeper than comfort or convenience. Abby, a recovering alcoholic who dropped out of medical school because of money quarrels with her bitter ex-husband, was revealed last season to be the daughter of a bipolar woman whose periodic forays back into her life keep Abby in a state of anxiety and instability. Luka lost his wife and both his children when their apartment was bombed during the Bosnian war. Luka and Abby's sexual chemistry - his brooding Balkan romanticism sparked the naughty teenager barely hidden under her professional solidity - and their shared besieged humor covered the inner turmoil they kept out of each other's view; sometimes their domestic scenes together were small symphonies of unarticulated miseries. It was a seasonlong masochist's glut of an affair, and in the hands of the remarkable Maura Tierney and Goran Visnjic it was - and continues to be, in the stormy aftermath of Abby and Luka's breakup this season - singularly compelling. "In the writers' minds it was a relationship out of need and not necessarily depth," Ms. Tierney said this summer on the set. "But it's so interesting that they wound up together, because they're both missing something - some part of their spirit is divided." Mr. Visnjic added, "Abby presumed that Luka was emotionally unavailable, and that's why she went for him." Certainly these two, both introduced during the 1999-2000 season, embody the willingness of "E.R." to explore the darker recesses of its characters. "All of the characters are approached through their emotional inadequacies," Ms. Tierney said. "That's how they're defined; that's how the characters navigate the stories." Mr. Visnjic and Ms. Tierney are the best reasons, among a highly skillful cast, to watch NBC's enduring melodrama, which has been around since 1994 and is as affecting as any medical series TV has produced. (As Kerry Weaver, the lesbian physician who directs the emergency room, Laura Innes shares top acting honors with them.) Ms. Tierney, who studied in New York at Circle in the Square in the mid-80's, slipped into the cast of "E.R." after five years on "News Radio" and appearances in several feature films, including Mike Nichols's "Primary Colors." Mr. Visnjic received classical training at Zagreb's Academy of Dramatic Arts (he played Hamlet over seven summers in a co- production of the Croatian National Theater and the Dubrovnik Summer Festival) and first gained the attention of Western audiences with a touching, fully inhabited supporting performance in the movie "Welcome to Sarajevo." "But I consider `E.R.' my biggest training ever," he said. "It's almost easier for me that it's in a foreign language, because it's so foreign in every way for me to be on a show like this." Watching his work, you can guess what he means. His style is both interior and exterior - a stylized approach tempered with psychological realism. As an actor, he seems constantly to be modifying his technique, determining how much to craft his emotional responses, in a way that parallels Kovac's method of acclimating himself to a culture so strikingly unlike his own. Kovac has maintained his wartime mentality, which makes him particularly qualified for the routine pile-up of trauma in the emergency room. But the moral imperative that leads him to make renegade decisions - like denying a kidney transplant to a young man who burned his own out with cocaine - can be unrelenting, and distasteful. So far Mr. Visnjic has been most extraordinary in a story arc involving a dying bishop (a memorable performance by James Cromwell) with whom he tangled over whether or not a drunk driver who had killed a man and his child had the right to absolution. At the climax of this story, the priest persuaded Luka to unearth his buried guilt over his inability to save his own family. Mr. Visnjic began to tell the story matter of factly, from a cautious distance, and then suddenly found himself up to his neck in it. In acting terms, he had wandered into a dangerous area that technique couldn't float him out of; only the depth of his emotional commitment to the character and the scene could. In her first season on "E.R.," Ms. Tierney wore her hair nearly shoulder-length and straggly; it wasn't flattering, but it complemented Abby's low self-image. (Since the show paired Abby and Luka, she's been permitted to look much prettier - a far better choice for both the actress and the character.) With the help of the writers, Ms. Tierney has turned Abby into a multi- layered character. Calm and reassuring with patients, she has a caught-out little-girl side that surfaces when she makes a bad medical judgment. With John Carter (Noah Wyle), the resident she sponsored at A.A. and then grew into a companionable, not-quite-defined relationship with, she's playful and flirtatious, but in a pre- adult way: they're like a couple of kids at their high school prom, even when they're out at a benefit dinner hosted by his patrician family. It's only with Maggie, her mother, that her irony grows caustic and she allows herself the outbursts of both fury and despair that, the rest of the time, she's so careful to guard against. "I find that people who have had difficult childhoods don't cry a lot," Ms. Tierney said. "It just becomes part of your life to bear it. You have to pull it together." Abby's best defense is her humor. Much of Ms. Tierney's performance is a complex comedy routine with a continuously varying tone. Her scrunched-up pudding face keeps commenting on what's going on as if she were providing subtitles to convey her thoughts. The graceless way in which the show has split up Abby and Luka is a disappointment. Luka's behavior in the break-up scene and even his dialogue seemed to belong to some other character - not because his conduct was ugly (after all, this is a man who, in one episode, beat a mugger to death) but because it was oddly crude for this refugee Heathcliff. You couldn't fault Mr. Visnjic's acting or Ms. Tierney's, though; you never can. It's hard to say how their characters will relate to each other now that they're on the outs, or even if they'll stay that way. The only expectation we can reasonably have is that, given the story lines, these two actors will continue to find new and surprising layers underneath the ones the show peels away. distributed by CROWN (Croatian World Net) - CroworldNet@aol.com
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