'The Madison': the series to redeem women
The Madison is a series that seems to have premiered for Easter with the purpose of redeeming us, especially women living in urban areas. Starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell, it has a plot that the SkyShowtime menu already explains more than enough. It is created by Taylor Sheridan, the architect of the contemporary western. But if you like series about rich people, luxurious settings, and extraordinary landscapes, The Madison will not disappoint you. A woman from New York will be forced to rebuild her life far from her world. The title of the series already determines the importance that the landscape will have in all of this. It takes its name from the most emblematic river in Montana, which crosses areas near Yellowstone National Park. Nature and territory will be so decisive that they will become moralizing devices for the protagonists. The river environment will become a kind of silent arbiter as an activator of family drama.
The Madison has great pretensions, but is extremely simple. In the final credits, the first chapter is dedicated to the memory of Robert Redford, as a tribute to the cultural and ideological icon of these landscapes. Beyond finding a direct reference to the film The River of Life, the visual allusions to part of the actor's cinematography are evident. The small plane flying over the green meadows with emotional music, fly fishing in the river's meanders, or horses as interlocutors of the characters' intimacy will remind us of scenes from Redford's great films, without the series achieving the same narrative results. The series is visually extraordinary: the light, the colors, and the landscapes filmed with the camera gliding through the sky are fascinating, almost hypnotic.
The argument plays with contrasting the more glamorous but dehumanized New York with the more virgin and wild Montana. But everything turns out to be almost offensively obvious. The big city, hostile and aggressive, is the place to which women feel especially attached, with an addiction they themselves cannot explain. They are the symbol of consumption, capitalism, and frivolity. The male characters, on the other hand, are the ones who feel an almost prophetic relationship with nature, defined as that which is authentic, spiritual, and revealing. They connect with the truth of life. It will take a trauma for women to redeem themselves and discover the deceit in which they lived. Madison will return them to the value of simple, transcendent, and pure things. The river becomes a metaphor for this existence in constant motion, which transforms the characters. Through an almost sepulchral voice, the men will guide women in the possibility of connecting with a truth they had not known how to see. All this is sweetened with deceptive dialogues and the humor provoked by the difficulties of urbanites in adapting to the wonders of the rural world, even giving up the comforts of the most privileged Manhattan. But everything is so beautiful that you almost forgive everything for the simple pleasure of surrendering to contemplation.
