From the get-go of Season 4 of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, we are reminded of why there is little else like this on television. It is a nighttime exterior shot, a restaurant in a remote part of America awash in a snowstorm, so lushly designed and framed it might be a Hopper painting. It is just as rich a painting inside, where two cold-eyed types in suits and hats sit at the counter, while a distracted owner listens to barely tuned-in strains of radio. When the bigger, talkier one starts needling the owner, we feel something pointless and violent could happen at any moment, which, along with the sheer cinematic beauty of the production, is the razor’s edge creator Terence Winter treats us to with the 1920s-set crime drama.
Something bad happens, but not, per standard, to those for whom you think the bell might toll. The deformed World War I vet Richard (Jack Huston) is still at large, a loose cannon with a cryptic agenda, taking out gunsels and functionaries of the bootlegging business that has so roiled his life since his return from the war. He left Gillian’s high-end brothel an abattoir at the end of last season, single-handedly taking on a small battalion of footsoldiers of sociopath Gyp Rosetti, a belligerent capo attempting to take control of Atlantic City on behalf of New York mafia boss Joe Masseria (Ivo Nandi). It was just one mesmerizing episode of a full-scale war brought to Rosetti by our central businessman/gangster Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) and his odd ball consortium of allies led by Chalky White (Michael Kenneth William), boss of AC’s African-American ward, and an up-and-coming Chicago hood named Al Capone (Stephen Graham).
With the smoke cleared, Al is back in Chicago, now flanked by his brothers newly imported from Brooklyn. He finds himself in a bit of dutch with boss Johnny Torrio for bringing higher profile rackets of prostitution into the organization, which draws the attention of a young muckracking reporter. This is irksome to Torio but less so than Capone’s comic irk at the papers spelling his name wrong. In another one of those scenes pregnant with tension, the Capone boys pay the reporter a visit – though Al endears himself further by simply pointing out how to spell his name and leaving him a few buddy-slaps to the back of his head.
Back in the AC, things have shifted. Per Nucky’s debt to him, Chalky has begun taking a more hands-on role in the boardwalk’s businesses, notably a new club, where he and his right-hand man Dunn (Erik LaRay Harvey) embark upon some negotiations with a snippy white broker of “colored” talent. The broker’s wife shows some interest in Sweetback, which seems ominous given the still stark racial stratification of the day and turns out to be just so.
Nucky, meanwhile, sets upon making peace with the Masseria organization. In spite of a sophisticated setpiece counterstrike to reclaim his authority over AC – which included both violence and corrupt legal machinations brought against Masseria’s fitful New York allies/rivals Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg), Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza) and Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef) – he has convened a summit with the New York factions, assuring them he has no territorial ambitions and essentially offering the surly Masseria a payoff for the army of gunsels who went down with Rosetti. A grudging truce is established, but where the chess pieces all sit, and to whom they belong, remains a tension-builder.
Gillian (Gretchen Mol), once Nucky’s friend, mother of his onetime right-hand-man Jimmy and smiling engineer of Jimmy’s own coup attempt against Nucky, has hit hard times. Fallen from grace after tenuously getting in bed with Rosetti, she has taken to whoring herself to high-end clientele and hitting the needle to help her deal with it – at least until the arrival of a seemingly straight-arrow new player, businessman Roy Philips (Ron Livingston), who enlists her as a local guide, surely not knowing what he is getting himself into.
Where the tension really begins building, however, is at the operations level, where Eli has resumed role as brother Nucky’s chief of enforcer, overseeing production and payoffs to corrupt Treasury Agents. One particularly bright-eyed/bushy-tailed All-American T-man doesn’t seem to understand the play as he follows his corrupt partner around. That is, until a local farmer assumes he is similarly corrupt, blabs about his plot to thwart hijackers with a shotgun booby-trap, and the kid ushers the supposedly corrupt partner into the trap, soon after capping the farmer as well. It is a babyfaced x-factor that bears watching in this vast scape of corruption.
Eli’s eldest, Will, briefly home from college, begins setting his ambitions upon following in his father’s, or, moreover, his uncle’s, footsteps. He buttonholes Nucky after a family dinner to suggest a career path into, as he puts it, “our business.” This can only end badly.
Dunn, caught (and held at gunpoint) in the web of sex play by the talent broker and his randy wife, murders the broker instead of letting himself be further humiliated. The comely wife flees into cold night, another X-factor haunting the AC, but when the egregious crime of a black man murdering a white man is brought to Nucky and Eli’s attention, however, Chalky reminds them of the new age they are moving into, where Dunn had their back against Rosetti when they needed it, now they need to reciprocate.
Director Tim Van Patten gives us a stark bookend to the episode, yet another breathtakingly symetrical scene of Midwestern winter, a ramshackle farmhouse, Richard approaching it, we assume to undertake another dark endeavor in his vendetta. But he hides his gun in the wood pile before he knocks on the door. Someone has anticipated him, seemingly, with a shotgun at his back. He turns to a lovely but astonished woman. He tells her he’s come home.
If you shivered a little, it is because Boardwalk Effing Empire is back.
New episodes of Boardwalk Empire air Sunday nights at 9/8CT on HBO.
