The fourth and final season of HBO’s “Barry” returns with its title character, the ex-Marine turned hitman (turned actor, turned abusive boyfriend), behind bars and about to go down for at least one of his crimes. Everything’s come to a head. Or has it?
The show’s co-creators Alec Berg and Bill Hader (Hader also stars) keep us guessing while exploring a larger, tantalizing theme: Can you ever really start over — whether that means mending a toxic relationship, or going legit, or simply running away from your past? Maybe it’s an impossibility in the end. We are who we are. You can never right these kinds of wrongs.
Barry has always been an elusive character, both self-hating and entitled, and one of the show’s strengths is how well it captures that inner chaos and shame. He’s incapable of real honesty, even with the man in the mirror, which has led to all kinds of erratic behavior. He thought acting might give him something — truth, relief, a sense of self — but like everything else in his life, that was a lie. Throughout the series, his release valve has consistently been aiming a gun at human targets.
It doesn’t help that he’s had a couple of destructive father figures leading him down this path, including his acting teacher, the hilariously aggrandizing Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). Theirs is a twisted relationship rooted in fear and selfishness and also unexpected moments that almost resemble tenderness. Cousineau may be a manipulative blowhard, but that’s nothing compared to Barry, who murdered the guy’s girlfriend.
And yet once Barry is in prison, his first call is to Cousineau: “Are you mad at me?”
It’s a child’s question uttered by a stone-cold, fully adult killer. Barry’s arrested development has always been as much of a weapon as any firearm. Even so, the show’s attempts at introspection about mental anguish and the ways that cruelty and neglect can cut you down to the bone have, for me, always come up short.
The new season picks back up with Barry’s ex-girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg) fleeing Los Angeles after a damaging viral video tanked her career and reputation. The sunny Chechen mobster NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) has also left town along with his boyfriend Cristobal (Michael Irby) to live a placid ex-gangster existence in Santa Fe. Barry’s lousy excuse of an uncle/hit man “manager” Fuches (Stephen Root) is in prison as well. Events will conspire to bring them all back into Barry’s orbit, each experiencing dramatic changes to their status quo that, ironically, do not actually change their baseline circumstances. Everywhere you go, there you are. When you’re that broken, maybe it becomes too familiar a state of mind to abandon altogether.
Or not. Decisions rarely make sense on this show. (Critics were provided with seven of the final season’s eight episodes.) Also: Life outside of L.A. is too dreary — too boring — for these characters to ever leave the city for good.
The show’s real strengths lie in its satirical punches and jabs, specifically when it comes to Hollywood egos and show-business striving. Winkler is so good — so funny — as Cousineau. He receives thunderous applause when he introduces himself to a theaterful of students, and quietly takes it all in with a faux-bashful “aw shucks” grin. His false modesty is fascinating and Winkler plays it just so. Cousineau never lets an opportunity for a one-man show pass him by and now that Barry is presumably out of the picture, that manifests itself in a truly remarkable moment of comedy.
Also, Cousineau gets all the best lines: “And then one day, like Siegfried or Roy, he turned on me like an ungrateful tiger,” he says, describing one of Barry’s many moments of duplicity.
Hader directs all the episodes this season, which are suffused with plot. Probably too much plot. But the show is going out on its own terms. The season also includes a hilarious riff on multilevel marketing sales pitches, which Hank and Cristobal enthusiastically present to a group assembled inside a Dave & Buster’s. It’s absolutely bizarre but bang-on in its rhythms and sense of the absurd.
That wonderful energy never lasts. It can’t. It shouldn’t. Every interaction in “Barry” is a zero sum game, driven by false loyalties and constant betrayals. Dreams are quashed. People will disappoint you. Everyone is a monster. Everyone is a victim.
Surreal moments are ladled in without much explanation, but violence is the lingua franca and I’m never sure to what end. But end it will indeed.
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'BARRY'
2.5 stars (out of 4)
Rating: TV-MA
How to watch: 10 p.m. ET Sundays on HBO (and streaming on HBO Max)
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