FX's Fosse/Verdon is either a masterpiece or a disaster

Vox

On the one hand, the limited series on choreographer-director Bob Fosse, played by Sam Rockwell, and dancer-actress Gwen Verdon, portrayed by Michelle Williams "is a deeply fascinating portrait of Fosse/Verdon, a third person formed out of the two of them, who has shaped our modern world," says Todd VanDerWerff. Yet, he adds, "there is clunky stuff scattered throughout." VanDerWerff that the main issue with Fosse/Verdon is casting a #MeToo perspective on Fosse. "The show is just so narrowly focused on the Fosse and Verdon partnership, its main attempts at underlining how bad Fosse could be mostly amount to Verdon and Fosse’s later girlfriend, Ann Reinking (Margaret Qualley), telling him he’s not a great guy," he says. "This has the curious effect of turning them into the long-suffering wives of a cable drama antihero from the 2000s, even as the show clearly longs to afford them perspective equal of Bob Fosse’s, more than it wants to show what these women have in common with Breaking Bad’s Skyler White. Now, on a series about a fictional antihero, I’d say this is the point — the audience is supposed to be morally mature enough to realize that what the hero does is wrong. But the very real legacy of Bob Fosse, the way that you can see how his steps influenced essentially any music video or stage musical you might stumble upon, the way that both Cabaret and All That Jazz are among my favorite films of all time, makes it harder to commit yourself (or maybe just myself) to the idea that his corrupting appetites somehow influenced his greatness...If you know that Fosse did all of this stuff, it becomes so easy to simply write it off as the cost of creativity, of making something great. That may be inherent in the very genre of the biopic, and wrestle though it might, Fosse/Verdon can never quite escape its deteriorating orbit, plunging closer and closer to the black hole that is its central subject, because it knows, deep down, how essential he is to American art. That could have tanked the whole project. And yet ... it doesn’t. Because, deep down, this is a fantastic show about a marriage."

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