"Night Finds You," the second episode of True Detective season two, kicks off with the most Pizzolattoan moment of Nic Pizzolatto's career. Vince Vaughn's entrepreneurial criminal Frank Semyon lies half-naked in a dimly lit bedroom. He stares up at a leaky ceiling, looking the audience square in the face, and tells a horrific story. As a kid, Frank's dad locked him in the basement. Days went by. The light bulbs burnt out. He drowned in darkness. When his father finally let him out, Frank had mangled a rat with his bare hands. "What if I'm still in that basement?" Frank wonders. He looks back to the ceiling. "It's all papier-mâché."
It was weird.
Out-weirding Vaughn ain't easy. This is a guy who's delivered lengthy speeches on under-table handjobs. It's all by Pizzolatto's design—whether it works or not. Think of the highfalutin writer like a fisherman: instead of baiting a hook and casting it out for consumption like his competition, Pizzolatto skims the thematic pools with a big frickin' net. He waits patiently, hanging on every syllable. Only when the audiences' thoughts rush in do words have meaning. The flowery machismo is a tactic and an art—Kid Frank didn't simply kill his rodent roommate, he smashed it "until it was goo," a wonderfully sick detail. There's only one drawback: it leaves Pizzolatto's actors vulnerable. Vaughn wants the hook and worm. Pizzolatto hands him the net. This is not how comebacks work.
Vince Vaughn has a way with words. Like a cross between your High Life-guzzling drunk uncle and Langston Hughes, the actor takes "dialogue" and gives it a badgering, percussive voice. In Vaughn, Hollywood found its favorite motormouth. When dramas needed a fast talkin' supporting player, they called Vaughn. His breakout role in Swingers prompted Spielberg to hire him to pep up his Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World. He wasn't a seasoned comic, but became a keystone of the "Frat Pack," show business' comedic heavyweights. Old School still clicks with incoming freshman. Dodgeball filled a sports comedy gap and filed $100 million profit. Wedding Crashers revitalized the R-rated comedy. In the early 2000s, Vaughn kept talking and the work kept coming.
So did the clout. Vaughn spent the 2000s starring in his own movies, launching the Wild West comedy tour, and gobbling up television IPs to reboot (he's been attached to both Rockford Files and Brady Bunch projects for years). But the Wedding Crashers wave broke early. Back-to-back failures of Fred Claus and Four Christmases darkened holiday seasons. The Internet nearly burned his movie Couples Retreat (or as dissenters called it, Comedians Take a Vacation) to the ground. 2013's The Internship, an attempt to resuscitate his Wedding Crashers mojo with costar Owen Wilson, left audiences even colder. Vaughn's latest comedy, Unfinished Business, followed the same downward path. That movie came out this year, by the way. You didn't see it.
Like many idiosyncratic performers, Vaughn's strengths decayed into shtick once stardom entered the picture. As a number two, writers could feed Vaughn the snappiest lines and phase him out whenever the story demanded attention. When he became a leading man, the writing wasn't there to support him. Sitcomy writers penning in-the-box comedies couldn't write enough. The man could talk. He needed words. Movies like Couples Retreat and The Internship didn't have enough to say.
For Vaughn, True Detective offers a chance to metamorphose. What does a spitfire do after a string of misses? The gut says change, and in Vaughn's case, it's about getting serious. When HBO announced his involvement in the second season of Pizzolatto's uber-serious detective series, the rebound strategy became clearer. As Quentin Tarantino's foul-mouthed poetics and grisly behaviors had done for the likes of Harvey Keitel, John Travolta, and Uma Thurman, so could True Detective for Vaughn. In theory.
The thing is, Pizzolatto isn't a Tarantino. The Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction writer-director fishes with a hook and worm, his pages overflowing with cultural references and character quirks. It's writing that would suit Vaughn quite well. The actor's brief appearance in 2004's Anchorman forged one of the movie's most quotable lines: "Dorothy Mantooh is a saint!" Vaughn takes the odd soundbite and gives it history, empowers it with legitimate anger. Whether improvised or not, the writing supports him, referencing an unseen character whose life story would do Mother Teresa proud, apparently. Vaughn can do so much with so little when that little is an insufflated speedball of character gold.
It's hard to imagine True Detective gifting Vaughn his own Quarter Pounder with Cheese moment. Pizzolatto takes himself and his broad strokes seriously. In this episode's opening monologue, the actor complies. Unlike Matthew McConaughey, who slid down Pizzolatto's dialogue like a 10-year-old on a railing, Vaughn takes every word as law. This is not the funny actor we knew. Frank is stoic. His problems are grave. Youth, manhood, and modern capitalism are on the table. And you're just waiting for him to go Vaughn on the speech, indulge in the absurdity. He's done it before. Imagine True Detective's Frank as his equally diabolical mobster Reese Feldman from Starsky & Hutch:
Vaughn can act. He has range. He also has a mode. Movies (or cinematic television shows) can utilize him. And should, after True Detective ends its eight-episode run. If True Detective is a comeback moment for the actor, it's a helpful reminder of what Vaughn can, and can't, do. The actor can roll with a serious groove, but resists a serious tone. He can ramble into eternity, but crank him down to half-speed and the words fall apart. He's capable of spoken bravado. Silent portraiture stifles him.
True Detective gets it right later in "Night Finds You," in a scene where Frank grills a pawn in his urban planning scheme after he steps out of line. The show lets Vaughn off the leash. It's not funny, but it's close. In that moment, Pizzolatto lets up his chokehold. Not every True Detective scene can be the monologue equivalent of Hopper's Nighthawks. Not every scene can cast the net. Plotting this windy mystery requires a few hooks and worms. Vaughn takes full advantage. The man can talk.
