Barry's starting point was absurd: a war veteran with mental health problems and turned hit man, in order to take advantage of his prodigious ability to kill, decided from one day to the next that he wanted to be an actor. The project made sense to see who was in front of and behind the cameras: Bill Hader, a comedian known in the United States for his work on Saturday night live for eight seasons, who created fiction with Alec Berg, a screenwriter in comedies as applauded as Seinfeld, Curb your enthusiasm and Silicon valley. And, between absurd situations, bleeding and post-traumatic stress, Barry became a drama.
It is one of the ideas that goes through the viewer's head when seeing his return with a fourth season, which both Hader and Berg and HBO have announced as the last. Barry Berkman, the character played by Hader, is already behind bars, trapped by a past he always wanted to run away from but never could. This unsettles and shatters those who crossed his path as he sought redemption, especially Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) and Sally (Sarah Goldberg).
Cousineau seems to be anesthetized after participating in the arrest of his student, to whom he opened the doors of his house and Barry, in return, murdered his police girlfriend because he was about to discover his involvement in different crimes; and Sally has an anxiety attack when she discovers the truth. She was just beginning to get over a physically abusive relationship from her past when she realizes that her last partner, that Barry who worshiped her, was a murderer. Of her It doesn't enter his head, in fact, that he got up in the middle of the night from her shared bed to go kill a woman and sleep with her again.
The striking thing about the return episode, titled yikes and directed and written by Hader, is how dramatic it is. With the exception of the scenes starring Anthony Carrigan, who always seems to live in a spin-off within the series to give weight to the criminal spheres and above all because of the actor's charisma, both Hader and Winkler and Goldberg face their scenes. no hint of comedy. They are the representation of post-traumatic stress, loss and anxiety. One even feels pity for that Barry who is still a broken doll of the war industry, who trained him to be lethal and carry the weight of dozens of lives when he returned from Afghanistan.
Barry, as a series, may have always had trouble fitting its different identities: the black comedy around crime, the commentary on the precariousness of Hollywood from within, the ravages of violence on the psychology of the individual. But the flashes of genius force us to be expectant, whether it be because of his way of laughing at an audiovisual industry that says it buys authenticity when it buys smoke, the development of the main character that usually annihilates any feel-good expectation, the filming of memorable action scenes or the creation of surreal prints.
How can Barry present himself in such a run-down, desperate and existentialist society? Never cohesive, often repellent in its eccentricity but always coherent, it has a primary ingredient in its farewell letter: the suggestiveness of the path traveled by the characters, the unpredictability of the writers' room and the feeling that Barry (the bully, the actor , the good guy, the victim) has the potential to finish off an unpleasant dramatic arc.
