For 'Suspect,' a poignant and brilliant conclusion
Toward the middle of "Prime Suspect: The Final Act," kneeling by a man who has just been shot, Chief Inspector Jane Tennison screams out "Help." But as the now-shaky detective, actress Helen Mirren also turns that yell into Tennison's cry for her own recovery -- from regret, from loneliness, from debilitating alcoholism. In this seventh and last installment of the riveting PBS series, Tennison herself is the prime suspect -- in her own self-destruction.
The "Masterpiece Theatre" two-parter, which begins Sunday at 9 on Channel 2, is more a character study of late-career Tennison than a procedural about the murder of a 14-year-old girl. While the series has tended to keep the sociologically rich cases in the forefront, with Tennison's drive and obsessions as a strong supporting arc, "The Final Act" fully abandons itself to Mirren. And Mirren doesn't disappoint (she never does). As a woman bitterly sliding into oblivion, Mirren is a miracle of shrewd and yet intuitive acting. She bids farewell to TV's most unsweetened female detective with breathtaking, devastating pathos.
The Jane Tennison we meet here has climbed the Scotland Yard ladder, but she lives in quiet desperation at the top, and may be ready to jump. Mornings she wakes up on her couch, her forehead bruised and her memory clouded, and she downs a glass of vodka to get out the door. Her father (Frank Finlay) has end-stage cancer; her colleagues are nudging her into retirement; Alcoholics Anonymous looms. But, of course, Tennison is a detective above all; she finds her only purpose in finding killers, and catching whoever left young Sallie rotting on a heath has become her raison d'etre . The rest -- her life -- will have to wait.
Once she shakes off the hangovers, Tennison is still sharp as she picks through London's trashy neighborhoods, her ear always listening for inconsistencies. But she's childlike in her lost hours. Drunk alone in her father's house, Tennison puts Dusty Springfield's "Stay Awhile" on a record player and dances alone in her old bedroom. The scene could have been tinged with the gothic camp of Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane," but Mirren makes it so deeply private, so unfreaky, and so sad, it just feels tragic.
Later, at Scotland Yard, Tennison is conducting one of her brutally clever interrogations, this time of Sallie's working-class father, played with bite by Gary Lewis (the dad in "Billy Elliot"). She accuses him of smelling like booze. But he says the smell is hers, and you can briefly see her sink like a teen who has been busted by her parents. That Mirren can give such a smart, proud woman the heart of a reckless kid is just more proof of her virtuosity, if, after "Elizabeth I," "The Passion of Ayn Rand," and "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover," we needed any more. Mirren can play grand, and grandiose, with regal bearing , but "The Final Act" shows her full mastery of the wear and tear of modern anxiety.
With drinking loosening her boundaries, Tennison becomes too close to Sallie's confused classmate Penny (Laura Greenwood, in one of the series' many gritty supporting performances). Even Tennison can see that Penny is her surrogate, that by helping Penny she's trying to rectify her own early choices. Tennison can barely tolerate her own niece; the girl belongs to her sister. But Penny could be her project, her buddy, her savior. When Penny is questioned at Scotland Yard and refers to Tennison's abortion (from an earlier "Prime Suspect"), Tennison answers her as she might another adult, or as she might answer herself: "I have spent my life in rooms like this," she says in the weary tone of T.S. Eliot's Prufrock.
Writer Frank Deasy twists together Tennison's psychodrama and the homicide case with remarkable ease. There's nothing forced about the way the search for Sallie's murderer unearths Tennison's dormant issues. Many American procedurals -- " Without a Trace," the "CSI" series -- also try to make crime-solving into a metaphor for a detective's inner life, but rarely with such dexterity. Our crime shows have so many leading characters to showcase, less time to reveal their private struggles, and, most important of all, no Mirren.
