There’s drama in divorce, but virtually all of it is ugly, unpleasant, and depressing, shining a spotlight on the greed, heartlessness, and cruelty of people who once professed to be in love. HBO’s War (October 1) mires itself in that muck via a fictional high-profile split and the legal battle that ensues. And to be sure, it mines its characters’ nastiness for tense, cutthroat conflict. What it doesn’t do, however, is say anything about divorce (and those engaged in it) that isn’t obvious and unoriginal.
Paling in comparison to the likes of Marriage Story, whose realism it can’t touch with a 10-foot pole, it’s merely a cornucopia of truisms in service of a painfully predictable tale about noxious characters doing noxious things for angry, selfish ends.
Despite its best efforts, War features not a single character deserving of empathy, either because they’re cretinous or, in the case of married lawyers Serena (Phoebe Fox) and Nicholas (James McArdle), cornball bores. The founders of the Taylor & Byrne firm, Serena and Nicholas have been hired to represent movie star Carla Duval (Sienna Miller) in her legal separation from billionaire husband Morgan Henderson (Dominic West), who’s amassed his fortune by developing a responsible, non-toxic social media platform.
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