The surreal, nightmarish final season of HBO’s “Barry” marks the rise of Bill Hader as a filmmaker.
It sounds like a sitcom or the beginning of a bad barroom joke: “Burned-out hitman moves to Los Angeles and enrolls in acting class.” Around the time that “Barry” debuted on HBO in 2018, there was a Chuck Lorre show on Netflix, “The Kominsky Method,” that was also ostensibly about an acting class. It is better than you might expect, especially by Lorre’s standards, but shows about acting tend to lead to self-congratulation and shtick and it was no different. And hit men stories have been done to death in the service of every conceivable gimmick and metaphor, usually pertaining to an ironclad code of lonely manliness that flatters the dudes in the audience.
What was immediately striking about “Barry” is that the antihero, Barry Berkman (Bill Hader), wasn’t cool. He wasn’t one of those sleek killers with chic sunglasses, a trim suit, and a very particular set of skills. He wasn’t an elaborate fantasy of playing by your own rules. Instead, Barry bore an uncomfortable resemblance to people who might be sitting in the audience—frustrated, arrested, inarticulate people with emotions that seem to reside permanently somewhere on their chest. When Barry drifts into an acting class while scoping out a target, he suggests a choking man trying to take in oxygen.
Which is to say that Barry is an exaggeration of the emotions that the cool-guy sexy hitman clichés normally allow us to avoid. He’s so emotionally stunted that at times he appears to be on the spectrum, and he’s frequently referred to as a robot by his acting teacher, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). Barry can barely deliver a line on stage, but his stifling motherlode of rage gives even his stiffest line readings … something. Barry’s volatility invests the scenes in the acting class, which are recurrent in the first two seasons and frequently hilarious and poignant, with a charge that’s unusual for the sort of scenes that many films and shows milk for easy comedy. Barry’s baggage is a metaphor for the demons that artists must attempt to corral in order to produce something that matters.
In the first season, before it becomes apparent just how ambitious this show’s long game is, you may keep waiting for Hader to go soft on his characterization of Barry. I was waiting for the moony, evil-redeemed-by-love cliches. Barry’s acting partner, Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg), is awfully cute and don’t they just look so right together? They end up together for a while, but “Barry” is not that kind of show. Rather than completing one another, their neuroses comingle and exponentially multiply. Sally Reed is not a male fantasy of sexual availability and, despite her superhero name, she is not a female fantasy of entitlement and empowerment either. She is broken and unhinged with an ambition for success that she hopes will salve the brokenness. A fool’s errand.
Not only do Hader and Goldberg refuse to go soft, they keep taking their characters further out into the abyss, daring you to follow. Barry turns into a monster, challenging any sane audience member to rationalize him a victim of circumstance or traumatized by his experience as a soldier in Afghanistan. The first season of the show ends with Barry committing a sickening act of self-preservation, and the subsequent seasons have never let us forget it. For all the people that are killed in “Barry,” often as puckish sick jokes, the show continues to circle back to the murder of an innocent. It refuses to let us forget the moral trespass of this murder, and Barry spirals out of control in his own refusal to atone for it.
There’s a sense that “Barry” is more than an assignment for Hader, who cocreated the show with Alec Berg. An outsider can never know of course, but “Barry” feels like Hader’s own acting therapy session. If so, the experiment is a success. Hader has always had an intensely submerged energy that the movies haven’t known what to do with. He’s often superb, but there was always the feeling that there was more to unleash. Locking himself up in Barry’s inexpressibility, Hader has found a method for exorcism. In a recent episode of the fourth and final season, which is currently in progress, Barry explodes into an animalistic rage that feels cathartic, personal, and somehow inevitable.
But the lead story of “Barry” may not be Hader’s emergence as an actor, or the consistently wonderful work offered up by co-stars like Goldberg, Winkler, and Stephen Root as Barry’s handler and first, strained father figure. The biggest story may be Hader’s rise as a filmmaker. Hader has written and directed episodes of “Barry” off and on over its run, including every episode of the fourth season. Under his guidance, the show has grown increasingly nightmarish and stylistically rigorous. It’s as if Hader pitched HBO a dark sitcom as a secret film school.
Hader is friendly with film director Paul Thomas Anderson and that influence shows. The acting classes in “Barry” bear a resemblance to the deprogramming sessions in Anderson’s 2012 film “The Master,” as both suggest therapy in which a mentor hammers away at a student until something submerged arises. Hader also has a propensity for long and fluid takes and a kind of droll and understated staging that can invest banal details with otherworldly menace. Hader doesn’t shoot the anonymous coverage that composes the visual grammar of most TV, and he doesn’t emphasize sound conventionally either. He believes in decisions, thinking in terms of brushstrokes.
In the most famous episode of the second season, for instance, Barry does battle with a preadolescent girl who appears to be supernatural, gliding up and down suburban houses. Nothing is made of this possibility, it just happens, and Hader’s intermingling of the foreground and background images is consistently eerie. In the third season, Hader stages a motorcycle chase that is scored only to the alternating woosh sound as a bike continues to zip past stalled cars on a highway. Once again, a droll touch that becomes comic, then menacing, then existential, as Barry’s little bike determinedly vanishes into the distance. In another extraordinary moment from season three, a fan favorite character, the fey Chechen gangster NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) is kidnapped by a Bolivian rival and imprisoned in a cell. He wakes up to hear one of his cohorts being eaten alive by a lion next door. Hader never shows us the atrocity. Like Hank, we only hear it against the backdrop of the crumbling cell wall, and the unexpected insanity of this flourish invests “Barry” with the lurid pull of a horror movie.
With five episodes left to air, “Barry” has evolved into a catalogue of an artist’s free-floating obsessions, pertaining to everything from the acting industry to the hypocrisy of how we treat our veterans to how self-loathing can lock one off, like a moat, from the rest of society. Each brutally compact 30-minute episode suggests a short film as well as a crime novel in miniature, not to mention a new gallery in a surrealist exhibit that might make even David Lynch chuckle. Barry’s destruction is Hader’s liberation. It’s as if Hader is burning a straw doll to ward off the evil spirits of his nightmares.
“Barry” is currently airing on HBO. Past episodes can be accessed on HBO Max.