Tales Of The Unexpected

Top of the Lake star Elisabeth Moss says we should savour every nuance of her latest project. The actress, who plays a detective in Jane Campion's drama on Sundance Channel, relishes the detail of a story that reveals itself, much like her character, in very unexpected ways...

It's a sun-soaked afternoon in Los Angeles, but Elisabeth Moss is shivering. Sitting in the back room at the Pikey on Sunset Boulevard, Moss recalls how cold the water was in New Zealand, where she filmed Top of the Lake, the hotly-anticipated miniseries created by Jane Campion that premieres Monday on the Sundance Channel. "The lake is the same temperature all year round: freezing," says Moss, wearing a loose white cotton dress, her short brown hair tucked neatly behind one ear. "My makeup artist had this black plastic bucket and they would fill it with hot water and I would go sit in it fully clothed to warm up."

It's an odd detail, but it's in keeping with the making of the moody crime drama, writes Jessica Gelt in the Los Angeles Times. Filmed over a five-month period against a staggeringly beautiful natural backdrop of soaring mountains, rugged bush and the omnipresent lake, the setting plays a natural foil to the darkness of the plot, driven by the disappearance of a pregnant 12-year-old named Tui. Moss plays a confused and hardened Sydney, Australia, cop who gets wrapped up in the case during a visit to her cancer-stricken mother.

The mystery reveals itself in unexpected ways during seven hour-long episodes. The length of the series allows delicate subplots to push to the surface, including the story of Paradise, a desolate refugee camp for lost, mostly menopausal women, silently lorded over by an enigmatic visionary named GJ, played by Holly Hunter. Then there's the taut drama surrounding Tui's father, a criminal named Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan) who rules the town and its police through the sheer, rabid force of his violent will. "I think this is Jane's best work. She really thrived in the miniseries genre," says Moss. "It's in the details for Jane. It's all about the secondary characters, the locations and all the weird moments — all the extra things that make Jane a genius. If you cut it down to two hours you'd make an awesome detective story, but you'd lose all that great stuff."


Making a miniseries did, indeed, give her room to play, agrees Campion. "My favorite form is the novel," she says, "which I think adds up to six or seven hours of something beautiful. That's what I was trying to create." Campion recalls how watching the salty HBO drama Deadwood made her realize that modern television was the place for her. "I thought, 'My God, this is so brilliant, I can't believe someone in television is financing this,'" she says. "How wild, what a revelation!"

In contrast, another of the chief draws of the "terrific" Top of the Lake is knowing that it will actually end, thinks Maureen Ryan. Writing in the Huffington Post, she notes that it's not that you're likely to get sick of this atmospheric mystery tale, it's just that it isn't padded in contrived ways to fill out a 10- or 13-episode season. The story dictates the length, not the other way around. "There's a lot of talk these days about the future of television, and that's certainly something we need more of: Creators who figure out what they want to do and then find a format, a venue and a running time that make sense for the specific story they're telling," writes Ryan.

The premise of Top of the Lake is not terribly original, but Campion, who also wrote many of the episodes, puts her distinctive stamp on the miniseries' core ingredients. There's the missing child, a community full of secrets and a driven detective with a fiance she's largely forsaken, but the similarities to AMC's version of The Killing (thank the gods) more or less end there. "Actually, the pilot of the U.S. version of "The Killing" did a fine job of establishing a melancholy tone, an intriguing mystery and pleasingly ambiguous characters," admits Ryan. "The show ran off the rails soon after that, but Top of the Lake, which has a similarly moody start, only becomes more fascinating over time. That's not to say Top of the Lake is free of idiosyncratic digressions and the occasionally odd segue, but it does a critically important thing very well: It draws you into a specific world and it quickly makes that world's textures, relationships and stakes matter."

Moss plays Robin Griffin, who returns temporarily to her hometown, nestled in some of New Zealand's most gorgeous scenery. The workaholic Griffin does some consulting for the local police department between visits to her mother, and you get the impression that Griffin would rather be working a local missing persons case than dealing with family issues or her past. In this beautiful backwater, one clan seems to have cornered the market on thuggery and black-market activities, and as "Lake" unfolds, we learn about Griffin's connections to the rough Mitcham family and about the secrets that have kept her psychologically tethered to the close-knit town. As she gets more involved in a case involving a child, it doesn't take long for Griffin to meet G.J., the American guru who has set up a new commune for women on the edge of the town's lake.

Reactions to G.J. will likely be polarized, thinks Ryan, but Hunter's performance was one of the main draws for her. Her stillness in this role is impressive: G.J. mainly sits in a trailer and drinks coffee, and she occasionally issues blunt advice to her ragged flock in a clipped, distracted manner. Is Campion amused by or affectionate toward G.J. and her gaggle of strange, contradictory women? There's no concrete answer, but the ambiguous treatment of the lakeside encampment - puckishly or accurately called "Paradise" - is one of "Lake's" chief pleasures. Many of the women are fleeing difficult relationships. Griffin, meanwhile, is treated with casual condescension by fellow officers and has her own painful secrets, with a thick skin as a result. As Top of the Lake progresses, however, those barriers start to fall.

Television often tells stories involving oppression and violence, especially violence toward women and children, but it most often uses them to juice up a procedural formula or to launch a melodramatic cliffhanger. "It's rare for a television show to let the consequences of violence and assault play out in complex, nuanced (there's that word again) ways for both male and female characters," states Ryan. "Despite its relatively short running time, Top of the Lake does that. In fact, examining the effects of brutality on those who employ it and those who experience it appears to be one of the reasons for the miniseries' existence."

Campion's feeling that anything goes on the small screen translated to some genuinely brave directorial choices, particularly when it comes to the world of Paradise, the camp by the lake. Here the women live in empty shipping containers and there is a sense of weird, wind-swept desolation that easily conjures Twin Peaks comparisons. "TV is being written, directed and acted for adults," says Holly Hunter, addressing the strange world of the camp. "It's bringing complexity to a lot of different stories, characters and landscapes."

In the case of Paradise, that sense of richness and possibility plays out among women that Campion says are "probably the most unattractive group of women in the world": menopausal and post-menopausal. "But I'm one of them," she says. "And there's a lot of freedom to it. You skip out of all the conventional points of success. You're not hot, you don't have a hot body." Through Paradise we see the vulnerability and power of women, and Tui's disappearance becomes that much more upsetting. The evil embodied in the show, however, is as amorphous as the constantly shifting weather. "Even though there are people who do very bad things in Top of the Lake, those people still get a lot of humanity shined on them through Jane and Gerard Lee, her co-writer," says Hunter. "I think they both love people and they love all their characters."

It had been a long time since Campion had written with Lee, who she says was living on an island off Brisbane in Australia when she called on him to collaborate. His voice was vital because he could awaken the male point of view alongside her female point of view. Sexuality and sex roles are a bit murky, along with just about everything else in Top of the Lake. That's certainly true when it comes to Moss' Robin, who has held onto bleak secrets that have twisted her to hardened extremes. Thanks to her role as Peggy Olson on Mad Men, Moss knows a thing or two about infiltrating male-dominated worlds.

Although Griffin is quite different from Peggy - she's tougher and more physically brave - she shares that character's resilience and intelligence. As is often the case on Mad Men, Moss' role in Top of the Lake frequently requires her to react to others and to experience pain and regret in silence, and we know from five seasons of the AMC show that the actress is a master of those skills. She and the subtle David Wenham, who plays a local detective, are well paired; each actor innately understands the slightly hushed, realistic atmosphere Campion is trying to create. Griffin doesn't particularly want to be liked, but given who's playing her, it's impossible not to care about the toll this case begins to take on the detective.

Campion says Moss wasn't who she had in mind when she was writing the role but that it quickly became apparent during casting that she was the correct choice. "I always want to know more about her," says Campion of Moss. "She's a bit like the Mona Lisa, she shows you something, but there's so much more." For her part, Moss says she was both thrilled and terrified to carry the show. But it wasn't until filming was over that she realized the full scope of what they had made. "They showed this clip they edited together at the end of filming, and by the end tears were just streaming down my face," says Moss. "It was like watching my life for the past five months being played back at me."
Read more on this article...

A Rolling Drama Gathers Nude Moss

"You ever try masturbating? It’s very relaxing and not fattening..."

The Sundance screening of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake came with the following warning: "This seven-hour program includes one intermission and one short lunch break." For the first time in its history, the Sundance Film Festival was screening a miniseries (to air on the Sundance Channel on March 18) as a cinematic event. In his introduction, Festival co-director John Cooper said he’d been inspired by his own tendency to binge-watch TV shows as soon as the festival was over. He thought there just might be enough obsessives in Park City to fill up The Egyptian Theater — the town’s classic picture house — and watch the hell out of some good TV like it was their literal 9 to 5 job. Campion took the stage and promised 'I Made It Through Top of the Lake at Sundance' badges would be awaiting viewers on their final exit. On that matter, noted Vulture's Jada Yuan, she lied...

The disappearance of a pregnant preteen exposes the raw wounds at the heart of an isolated southern New Zealand community in this absorbing and richly atmospheric thriller. Centered around Elisabeth Moss' excellent performance as a detective for whom the case uncovers disturbing echoes of her own troubled history, this multistranded crime saga from writer-director Jane Campion and co-creator Gerard Lee is satisfyingly novelistic in scope and dense in detail. Yet it also boasts something more, a singular and provocative strangeness that lingers like a chill after the questions of who-dun-what have been laid to rest.

The opening shot zooms through a devastatingly gorgeous landscape on New Zealand’s South Island to a lake, clearly freezing cold. A beautiful twelve-year-old girl walks into the titular water up to her neck and just stands there until a local woman passing by breaks her trance and pulls her out. The girl is five months pregnant, and refuses to tell anyone who the father is. Enter detective Robin Griffin (Mad Men’s Moss, with an impeccable Kiwi accent), who’s come back to her small hometown of Laketop to visit her dying mother. She’s tasked with questioning the pregnant pre-teen Tui (Jacqueline Joe) who, after again refusing to divulge the name of her child’s father, is sent back to her own dad — local drug lord Matt Micham (Peter Mullan), a prime suspect. Mitcham, it transpires, seems to have fathered half the local population; Tui is the just the youngest of his numerous offspring, his daughter by his third (ex-)wife, a Thai immigrant.

The next day, Tui steals a horse and rides it to an area on her father’s land where a group of damaged, middle-aged women have set up a camp called Paradise. They live in shipping crates and follow the lead of an androgynous oracle figure/truth-teller played by Holly Hunter, who’s reuniting with Campion for the first time since winning an Oscar for The Piano in 1994. The silver-haired guru has come to Laketop to open a camp for abused and/or abandoned women. Unfortunately, the camp has been built on a piece of land that has long been eyed by Micham, who seems to own everyone and everything in town. The Paradise Ladies give the girl refuge for the night. In the morning, she’s gone, and the mystery truly begins after the first hour of screentime.


The mood of the series is so taut and eerie, you can't initially tell if the story will stay grounded in reality or shift into bizarre Twin Peaks territory. (At one point, Yuan was convinced she’d find out that the lake itself had impregnated Tui.) But it also has a uniquely Down Under humor throughout (Campion is herself from New Zealand) that keeps it from easy comparisons to Lost or other great TV mysteries. (Favorite line, from one Paradise woman to another: "You ever try masturbating? It’s very relaxing and not fattening.") Over the course of the remaining running time, the story abounds in the requisite twists and complications: The lake coughs up the body of a local businessman, while suspicion falls on a hermit who turns out to be a convicted sex offender. But these developments are doled out at a measured clip, and the filmmakers seem less interested in sustaining forward momentum than in painting a vivid panorama of this broken community, a town cloaked in a dark and vaguely incestuous malaise.

From the hooligans (Jay Ryan, Kip Chapman) who carry out Mitcham's bidding to the sad-sack women who gather at GJ's camp, there's a pervasive sense of human lives either wasted or forced into familiar and depressing patterns. The wildness of the surroundings informs the wildness of the characters: Parents and children are forever at odds, and acts of violence and violation are distressingly commonplace, to the point where even Mitcham reacts to the news of Tui's ordeal not with outrage, but with a cynical roll of the eye ("She's a slut, like her dad was a slut!"). Amid this, Hunter is often the hilariously frank comic relief, as well as the story’s moral centre; one can only hope she’ll take on more juicy character parts like this (and generally appear onscreen more) going forward.

As for Moss, this is the performance that could set a very promising tone for her post-Mad Men career. Despite its narrative breadth, Top of the Lake is first and foremost Robin's story. As the detective rekindles a romance with another Mitcham son (Thomas M. Wright) while flirting erratically with her superior officer (David Wenham), she finds her personal life bumping up against her investigation to a near-ludicrous degree. Much of the third hour is devoted to exploring Robin's past traumas as a teenager, and while the idea that she sees a younger version of herself in Tui represents perhaps the tale's most conventional conceit, it supplies a potent emotional fulcrum that pushes the drama into its moving, startling if not always plausible final hours.

Moss, a long way from Mad Men, brings a gripping combination of pluck, vulnerability and intense anger to the complicated role of a woman who fights for every inch of ground and at one point drives a broken bottle into a man's chest. "It was very hard technically," Moss recalls. "I was bleeding, bruises the next day, my voice was gone." Campion's films have long gone against the grain with their strong, embattled distaff protagonists and daring portrayals of female sexuality, and if Top of the Lake isn't in quite the same neighborhood as 'In the Cut', it nonetheless calls on Moss and others to bare themselves physically and emotionally in a story located at the juncture of sex and violence. Stripped bare, both emotionally raw and literally, Moss says she initially balked at being naked; revealing after the screening, "You don’t want to be put in any position — pun intended — that’s not good." But then she figured that "Jane Campion is the most feminist woman on earth; she’s going to be the last person to take advantage of you. She just made me feel safe. Most importantly, too, she was like, 'You’re gonna look great!'"

The other commanding turn here comes from Mullan, playing the unkempt Mitcham as a rough-mannered scoundrel who is not without a certain gruff, randy charm. Other bright spots in the excellent ensemble include Robyn Nevin, tough and sensible as Robin's cancer-stricken mother; Joe, who invests Tui with a fiery refusal to be victimized; and Hunter, making the most of dialogue that basically consists of a string of gnomic pronouncements.

Campion filmed her story in New Zealand, with the drama revolving around a stunning location near Queenstown. But by far the material's most distinctive element is its setting, a wooded region of stunning natural beauty and surpassing human ugliness that lends a uniquely bleak and bitter tang to an otherwise well-worn genre format. Adam Arkapaw's lensing of this unspoiled and unruly landscape is one of the production's chief pleasures, and composer Mark Bradshaw supports the action with a melancholy score that sounds entirely endemic to the setting. New Zealand, of course, is primarily known for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films so it was important for the people behind Top of the Lake to show a different side to the region. "It's the most comprehensive documentation of modern New Zealand that's ever been done at such a large scale," Moss said. "We show a very different, much more modern, much grittier, much more raw side of it. By the end of production, we couldn't pass a place we didn't shoot in."

Filming took roughly five to six months, primarily in Queenstown and a town about 40 minutes outside of it. Moss, who left for New Zealand days after finishing season five of Mad Men, reminisced about the off-the-cuff rehearsals in a shed with no heating ("it was cold") and production having one satellite phone so they call into town. For Hunter, who - at first - was hesitant to take the job after reading the script, praised Campion's take on the haunting story, saying it had an "incredible maturity" to it. The series, directed by Campion and Garth Davis, was co-written by Campion and Gerard Lee, with producers including Philippa Campbell, Emile Sherman and Iain Canning. Campion annouced ahead of the screening: "I was doing something I'd never tried to do before. It felt crazily ambitious at the beginning to control a six-hour story but sharing it with Gerard was probably the easy part."

Much of the cast and crew had flown in from all around the world, not just New Zealand, but also the U.K. In the Q&A, we learned that newcomer Jacqueline Joe, who plays Tui, had been discovered at an Auckland swimming pool; that Moss had to fight for the part because it was hard for anyone to see her as a strong, tough detective after playing Peggy for so long; and that Hunter’s first reaction to being offered the part of GJ was, "Jane, why don’t you get Ben Kingsley to play this?" Pretty much every person who stood up to ask a question spent at least a minute congratulating himself and the rest of the audience for having made it to the end. 'I felt a lot of love for all the audience because we’d been through the winter together," Campion said. We’re all still waiting for our badges of honour, though.
Read more on this article...