Huff - The Complete First Season
by Dan Lerner, Daniel Attias, Ellen S. Pressman, Mark Piznarski, Martha Coolidge
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Andy Comeau, Anton Yelchin, Hank Azaria, Kimberly Brooks, Paget BrewsterDirector: Dan Lerner, Daniel Attias, Ellen S. Pressman, Mark Piznarski, Martha Coolidge
Brand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; Portuguese (Dubbed)
Format: Box set, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.78:1
Running Time: 695 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-03-21
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Huff - The Complete First Season
Movie Review: candor prevails
Summary: 5 Stars
This show prides itself on presenting characters who not only speak their minds but also articulate their feelings with courageous (or sometimes catty) candor. This makes the program compelling and endearing, if not quite true-to-life. It's rather like the best of Bergman's b&w '60s dramas, which for me resembled O'Neill's STRANGE INTERLUDE: people voicing non-communication in a language not familiar to me, while their actual thoughts were spelled out at the bottom of the screen. Surely few Americans could expose their thoughts in such spoken frankness, I imagined back then.
An advantage of this narrative method is that we become engaged in the characters at several complex levels; hence the compelling nature of the series as a whole. It's also nice to see that a creative force behind THIRTY SOMETHING before this HUFF project has grown up enough to treat elders as something more complicated than the shrill dufuss parents who got blamed so often for the main characters' problems. The commentary says they wanted Huff's in-laws to illustrate a good marriage, but they couldn't resist replaying the "parents' affairs in the past" card that had cropped up with Mel's "good marriage parents" in the anniversary episode. In any case, it's nice to see Blythe's bridge friends aren't dismissed as a coven of geese.
The series prides itself in dodging cliches--mid-life crisis affairs being one that threatened to flirt with predictability but pulled out in time. The brainy son is involved in another minor plot knot of this nature, about peer pressure; it, too, is resolved in a surprising and pleasing way, though one might expect some sort of mean-spirited retribution from the other kids. Frankly glad not to see them again, but they were a dark force that could make for an unpleasant plot development.
The yin and yang of the series are Huff the Compassionate (to a fault) and his best friend, the master of self-destruction and amoral pragmatism (is it redundant to say he's an attorney?). The in-our-face intimacy with this jerk (including toilet paper use) is sometimes hard to take, raising in me at least the same queasiness I felt with the gamblers' impulsiveness in Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT. By the last few episodes, however, these plot points appear less arbitrarily sensationalistic.
And by the time one reaches those last three programs, admiration and caring have been established for the bitchy mother, her institutionalized son, even the ever-skeletal Ms. Doyle (who never looked more beautiful and genuinely vulnerable than in her final un-mascara'ed scenes), and the entirety of the climactic final episode. That season ender is relentless!
Summary of Huff - The Complete First Season
HUFF:COMPLETE FIRST SEASON - DVD MovieDr. Craig Huffstodt (Hank Azaria, Shattered Glass) has it all--beautiful wife Beth (Paget Brewster, Andy Richter Controls the Universe), cute son Byrd (Anton Yelchin), sleek golden retriever, silver BMW, and tastefully-appointed model home. In the pilot, an inconsolable teenager pulls a gun out of his bag and shoots himself--right in the middle of a therapy session. Suddenly, Huff starts to question everything: the job, the marriage, life. Created by Bob Lowry (Any Day Now) and produced by Scott Winant (thirtysomething) for Showtime, Huff combines drama, comedy, flashbacks, and dream sequences to examine one "rich, guilt-ridden white man's" struggle with the Abyss. Sometimes it's Frasier, sometimes The Sopranos--sometimes American Beauty.
Appearances to the contrary, Huff's well-constructed façade is not without its fissures, and as Byrd ominously quotes in episode eight ("Cold Day in Shanghai"), "If you gaze for long into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you--Nietzsche." Live-in mother Izzy (Emmy winner Blythe Danner) is a judgmental busybody, younger brother Teddy (Andy Comeau, Providence) is a sympathetic schizophrenic, and best buddy Russell (Oliver Platt having the time of his life) is a pill-popping, cocaine-snorting, booze-guzzling lawyer whose moral compass has been missing "ever since my daddy's sperm hit the egg." Then there's psychotic patient Melody (Lara Flynn Boyle, The Practice), smart-talking office manager Paula (Kimberly Russell), and homeless Hungarian musician István (Jack Laufer) who keeps crossing his path. (Does he really even exist?) Other recurring characters include Huff's estranged father, Ben (Robert Forster), and Beth's terminally ill mother, Madeline (Swoosie Kurtz). In its first year, Huff garnered seven Emmy nominations and was renewed for a second season. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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