I Know This Much Is True

Derek Cianfrance, who made Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, has turned Wally Lamb’s novel into six hours of television about two brothers and everything that has ever gone wrong for them. Mark Ruffalo plays both. Dominick is a housepainter in Three Rivers, Connecticut, divorced, tight-mouthed and angry at almost everyone; Thomas is his identical twin, schizophrenic, and in the first minutes he walks into the town library and cuts off his own hand. The rest of the series is Dominick trying to get him out of the locked hospital he is sent to, while the family’s past comes open a drawer at a time. It is well made, acted about as well as television gets, and a punishment to sit through.

The two Ruffalos are the reason to go. Thomas is heavier, slower and gentler, his voice pitched up, his eyes drifting to some point over your shoulder; Dominick keeps his jaw shut and cannot sit still. They share the frame, with Gabe Fazio credited as the acting double, and within minutes we had stopped looking for the join. There is a scene early on, in a visiting room at the hospital, where Thomas explains to his brother, patiently, as if to a child, why the hand had to go, and Dominick has nothing to say back. It moved us more than we expected. The ill twin is the calm one, and the well twin is the one coming apart.

Around them is a cast that would carry a lesser show alone. Melissa Leo’s Ma is seen mostly in the past, soft, watchful and frightened of the wrong man. John Procaccino plays Ray, the stepfather the boys grew up afraid of, without asking for our sympathy. Rosie O’Donnell’s Lisa Sheffer, the social worker, is the one person on screen who seems to have had breakfast. Archie Panjabi’s Dr. Patel listens, which in this family is a radical act. Kathryn Hahn does a great deal with almost nothing as Dessa, the ex-wife, and Michael Greyeyes gives Ralph Drinkwater, who knew the twins as boys and now mops the hospital’s floors, a stillness that says more than his lines. Rob Huebel’s Leo supplies the only jokes.

It looks like an American film from the seventies. Jody Lee Lipes shoots on grainy stock in the brown and grey light of a Connecticut autumn, handheld and close, so the faces fill the frame and the town is a blur of wet leaves behind them. Inbal Weinberg gives the hospital locked doors and thick glass, and Ma’s kitchen a look of not having been touched since the twins were boys. Kasia Walicka Maimone puts Dominick in paint-spattered work clothes he never seems to change. Harold Budd’s score is a few piano notes with long silences between them, and often there is no score at all, only a fridge humming.

The trouble is what the show takes drama to be. Cianfrance and his co-writer Anya Epstein lay grief on grief: the hand, the dead mother, the divorce, the stepfather, the hospital, and then more we will not describe. Each is written with care, and each arrives as the last one lands, and by the fourth hour we noticed we were bracing rather than feeling. Dominick wants one thing from the first episode to the last, and the obstacles simply queue up. Five editors are credited, and the cutting between 1990, the brothers’ childhood and the life of their grandfather Domenico (Marcello Fonte), whose memoir Dominick has had translated, is deft moment to moment and shapeless over the run.

Blue Valentine had two people and one marriage, and Cianfrance found everything he needed in their faces. Here he has a town’s worth of misfortune and not enough of that pressure. Four episodes might have held it; six lets it sprawl, and the grandfather’s story, which has a pull of its own, keeps stopping the one we care about.

See it for Ruffalo, who is doing something we have not seen him do before, and for a supporting cast that never lets him down. Take it an episode at a time, with days between, and with someone to talk to afterwards. The certificate is 15, and it is earned in the first ten minutes.