HBO’s new miniseries I Know This Much Is True might cheer you up, but only by comparison.
I Know This Much Is True, a six-part series that premieres at 9 p.m. ET Sunday, portrays a bleak world where decent people struggle to survive.
It’s the kind of show where viewers feeling a little melancholy about being isolated in their homes for the last six or seven weeks might say things could be worse.
They certainly are for Thomas Birdsey (Mark Ruffalo, top), to whom life dealt a bad hand.
Thomas has an identical twin, Dominick, meaning Ruffalo has the grueling task of playing both. He handles it impressively.
Thomas is a blue-collar guy who runs a painting business and would live an ordinary blue-collar life, except Dominick is a paranoid schizophrenic.
When we join the story, Dominick lives in a group home where Thomas regularly visits him. But after their mother, Ma (Melissa Leo), dies, Dominick’s condition takes a serious and disturbing turn.
When he commits a grisly act of self-mutilation in a library, his relatively calm life becomes nightmarish, and now Thomas has become his only real advocate, so Thomas is pulled into the nightmare with him.
They have a stepfather, Ray (John Procaccino), who unfortunately has been more a part of the problem than any solution. His philosophy of raising Dominick was to relentlessly criticize him for all the things he couldn’t do as well as the other kids.
Ray is still around and has a functional relationship with Thomas. But he’s not much help.
One of the problems, it turns out, is that Thomas and Dominick’s mother never told them who their birth father was. To the end, she keeps the secret, and given Ray’s lack of warmth, it becomes more and more of a torment to the boys as the years roll on, and they wonder about their story.
Ma does give Thomas a potential clue. Her father, it turned out, wrote his life story. Hand-wrote it. In Italian.
So Thomas goes to the local university to find someone who can translate it for him. Naturally, in keeping with his standard luck, translator Nedra Frank (Juliette Lewis) has some serious issues of her own, and the translation transaction goes bad.
Things seem to take a slightly more encouraging turn when Dr. Patel (Archie Panjabi, above) enters the picture at the facility to which Dominick has been transferred.
The larger question, as explored in the Wally Lamb novel from which the miniseries was adapted, is whether Dominick can come to any sort of relatively normal and stable life, which in turn will help address the same question for Thomas.
Ruffalo earns his salary here, capturing Thomas’s desperate attempts to figure out what is best for a brother who can’t articulate many of his own needs or wishes and often behaves in ways that seem irrational. When Dominick can’t process something, he shuts it out, even when that means ignoring his last chance to say goodbye to his dying mother.
It’s easy to understand why many people like Ray would just get exasperated in that situation and call Dominick an idiot, without acknowledging that Dominick isn’t wired to make that kind of decision the way Thomas is, or Ray is.
I Know This Much Is True paints a stark and depressing picture of mental illness. It doesn’t promise or deliver any magic solution. It does suggest that understanding and hard, hard work can lead to a path with a bit more light.