Government Cheese: Daniel Oyelowo is a Dad with a Plan in Surreal Period Drama
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Like many limited steaming series, the new 10-part Apple TV+ series Government Cheese strives to thread the needle between the demands of episodic television — offering sufficient addictive emotional and comic hits per episode — and the challenge of sustaining a long-form narrative over the length of two or three feature films.
For the moment-by-moment experience, Government Cheese displays an abundance of spirited creativity, adding up to a disjointed whole.
The title refers to a kind of processed cheese produced in excess due to U.S. dairy subsidies, which was a staple handout provided to welfare recipients, food banks, and school lunch programs through the 1970s and 1980s.
In the series, created by veteran music video producer Paul Hunter and writer Aeysha Carr (The Carmichael Show), cheese stands for the ability to create something special (a beautiful sandwich) from humble ingredients.
That’s the goal of the series’ compulsively optimistic hero Hampton Chambers, played by British actor Daniel Oyelowo, best known for playing Martin Luther King in Ava Duvernay’s Selma. Hampton, too, is a man with a dream.
In the opening episode, Hampton is sprung from Chino, California state prison on a three-year forgery rap. While doing time, he has found God and come up with a business plan for an invention he created in the prison shop, a self-sharpening drill. His plan is to sell it to a nearby aircraft company, earning a fortune that will make his family rich and happy.
The trouble is, Hampton has some baggage from his stretch in the clink, including remorse about having accidentally killed his best friend Rudy (Adam Beach) during a prison riot. His release came thanks to his former partner-in-crime Bootsy (Bokeem Woodbine) and the Prevosts, a ruthless crime family of seven French-Canadian brothers.
Fresh out of prison, Hampton owes the Prevosts $2,000 which he doesn’t have. Though Hampton is loathe to slip back into a life of crime, Bootsy has a promising plan to steal the money from a local synagogue, using the Bit Magician to crack a safe.
The sacrilege carries moral weight. In prison, Hampton read the Bible story of Jonah and the Whale, a parable about sin and redemption. A subsequent encounter with a giant catfish reinforces the personal connection.
Sardonic and lavishly stylized, the series plays like combination of the Coen Brothers crime drama married to Wes Anderson’s fanciful pop-up book visual esthetic. These are filmmakers whose movies tend to focus on quirky white people, which seems pertinent. Government Cheese has just a few passing references to race (though Hampton’s name evokes Fred Hampton, the political activist assassinated by the FBI in the year the movie is set) without making it the focus of the story.
Writer-director Hunter — who has been one of the most successful producers of music videos over the past three decades — has said in interviews that he wanted to show an African American family like his own (his father was incarcerated) that did not fit in any political box.
To subvert what could have been a familiar hard-luck drama, he has leavened the narrative with humour, philosophical digressions, splashes of surrealism and magic realism.
Hampton’s family home — in the Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley — is a middle-class community that resembles the idealized sitcom homes of 1960s. But when daddy comes home, he doesn’t receive the cheerful welcome he expects.
His wife Astoria (Simone Missick) dodges Hampton’s welcoming embrace and quickly downs a drink. Gangly eccentric brainiac teen son Einstein (Evan Ellison) is ignoring college scholarships in favour of an obsession with pole vaulting. Hampton’s other boy, the solemnly resentful Harrison (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) is devoted to Native American spirituality and wears a black hat like the one sported by Tom Laughlin in the Billy Jack movies, about a mixed-race Navajo vigilante.
Astoria has been keeping the family together on her receptionist job at a design shop, and while the interior looks impeccably maintained, the household appliances are falling apart. She tells Hampton he can sleep in the garage. For his penance, he promises to make dinner every night.
For sure, there’s are pleasures to be found here. Oyelowo is charismatic as a paradoxically naïve hustler, and Missick excels as a woman who has determined she needs more in life that being some feckless man’s emotional support human. For eye candy, there’s the extremes of late sixties’ clothing, automobiles and interior décor, the latter of which is important to Astoria’s career aspirations.
There’s also a lot of clever creative clutter here. These include period-specific parodies of movies, public service announcements and commercials, and a lively soundtrack, including a catchy Pharrel Williams theme song that channels the late Curtis Mayfield’s plaintive funk.
What the series fails to do is achieve any cathartic resolution of its big themes, and without reaching a dramatic climax or personal epiphany, it deflates like a circus tent collapsing. The viewer is left wanting more, or maybe less: more gravity, less diversion.
Government Cheese. Created by Paul Hunter and Aeysha Carr. Starring David Oyelowo, Simone Missick, Bokeem Woodbine, Jahi Di'Allo Winston, and Evan Ellison. On Apple TV+ April 16 with the first four episodes, followed by one episode weekly every Wednesday through May 28.