The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 5 Review: Even More Irony, Even More Transgression, Even More Maisel
Cast: Rachel Brosnahan, Michael Zegen, Alex Borstein, Tony Shalhoub, Marin Hinkle
Creator: Amy Sherman – Palladino
Streaming Platform: Amazon Prime Video
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 5, the TV series written and directed by Amy Sherman-Palladino and out on Prime Video from April 14, 2023, with a total of 9 episodes, reaches its epilogue. If the fourth season was already feeling a certain tiredness, the fifth and last definitively agree with Ornella Vanoni when she sings that “you have to learn to break up” Before. The fifth and final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is about to air on Prime Video. Indeed, on April 14, the epilogue of this long adventure officially begins with the first three episodes released simultaneously. It all started in November 2017 when Prime Video audiences were drawn into Midge’s colorful and vibrant world for the first time. But who is Mrs. Maisel? Rachel Brosnahan plays a young middle-class Jewish housewife in New York with Joel to her credit, an indecisive ex-husband, two children, a noisy life, and a sense of irony that is as pervasive as it is natural. The same that, after being left for the usual relationship with a secretary, she takes her on the stage of a stand-up comedy club to express all her bewilderment about the predictability of her life Of course, in a comedic way.
The ironic tone, as well as the dense dialogues consumed at great speed, are the personal and recognizable touch of the style of Amy Sherman Palladino in partnership with Daniel Palladino. Names that, to TV series fans, are more than known for giving birth to the Gilmore Girls. That is a mum for a friend. To this characterizing element, then, is added the often sarcastic description of a social class that is too cemented in its role and the condition of the female world, destined to have a purely decorative role. The Sixties, however, are coming to change the schemes, and women like the talented Midge contribute to the evolution. Let’s analyze these elements in more detail in the review of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 5. In the fifth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, we say goodbye to another piece of history, this time streaming, a worthy heir to a journey made up of fantastic names and products.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 5 Review: The Story Plot
Midge Maisel has a sense of irony and manages, like a few others, to elicit more than a laugh in others. But will this talent be enough to finally bring her back into the spotlight? The question is essential. Especially for her who, after a period of defeat, feels that the time has finally come to claim her place. To carry out this evolution with her is the inevitable manager, Susie. However, the woman does not seem to fully understand her desire to make it and demonstrate to everyone how a woman can have a sense of irony. Around her and her impeccable outfits, a family gravitates as noisily as it is modern and out of any context. A young, divorced mother with two children, Midge thus finds herself managing the friendly relationship with Joel, her ex-husband, the possibility of an extended family, her mother Rose, often dissociated from the practical reality of life, and a father obsessed with genius. The picture is completed by two former in-laws who, although divorced, continue to live in the same house, fascinated and captured by that mysterious object represented by the television.
New York, 1961. After Shy Baldwin’s dismissal from the tour and the choice never to go on stage again as a sidekick or opening number, Midge took refuge in the reassuring anonymity of a Burlesque club. On the Walford stage, Mrs. Maisel brings her own irony to the stage without, however, accepting the risk of a second failure. Despite the fear of falling again, however, things are changing. Thanks to her relationship with Lenny Bruce and the awareness of her talent, she feels that she is ready to return to the spotlight again. Her watchword today is Don’t. The same that she finds written by a young and unaware Midge on a piece of paper inside a dusty bottle. In that way, then, she understands that she doesn’t want to be many things. Especially invisible. And to make sure that this doesn’t happen she can only count on how her brilliant mind interprets the outside world and her ability to see the ironic and irreverent side of life.
To support and, at the same time, moderate it is the inevitable manager, Susie Myerson. Her mantra is “one step at a time,” one “chapter at a time.” This time, however, Midge feels held back, has waited too long, demands her moment, and demands that Susie also dare to fight for her. On the other hand, the role of author for a well-known television program by Gordon Ford does not offer her the hoped-for opportunities. The only female presence within a male group, she must work with great refinement and an infinite dose of patience to leave the rear and earn a place in the meeting room. Despite this, however, her success and affirmation are not far off. Because the world will know and adore the talent of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 5 Review and Analysis
However, something in the fourth season seemed to have broken and, it will be that by now, although affectionate, the characters seemed all too familiar to us, to get to the end, we trudged: we were only repaid by the dissolution, finally, of the erotic tension in eternal maceration between the heroine protagonist and Lenny Bruce, a fictional character modeled on a real character, comedian, cabaret artist, and playwright who, in the 1950s and 1960s, satirized American society and its obsessions with unparalleled ruthlessness, often ending up in prison for obscenity. Thus, we would have expected the fifth season to pick up where the fourth left off and follow the solar Midge and the lunar Lenny in exploring the consequences of this meeting as long-delayed as sublimely consummated.
But no: Lenny Bruce appears only fleetingly, and Mrs. Maisel takes up the swings with her husband to whom she had accustomed us in previous seasons. Do not take this information either as a spoiler or as exhaustive: everything is prepared early, it reveals itself soon enough, and it gets complicated just as quickly. The reasons why the fifth season was not entirely built on the character by far not only the most interesting but dramaturgically fruitful of the series remain mysterious. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel closes, therefore, a story of emancipation in the sign of initial intuition, screwing rather than expanding and developing she tells us that we don’t need to deny our roots, our home, literal and symbolic, to become Someone – capital letters are not random – or something other than origins or some predetermined destiny.
In the series, and this last season is no exception, things happen – professional and personal identities are constantly remixed, re-overlapping with those of the past or moving away from them, but the family is always represented as a welcoming place, where one smiles, more than he frowns, in the face of existential derailments, to the differences concerning the thought, the foreseen, the programmed. The series symmetrically concludes a journey that began six years ago: Mrs. Maisel has grown up in the profession, ventures into new work challenges, and continues to deal with the difficulty of reconciling motherhood, family life, and career. At her side are all: her parents, the agent Mastiff Susie Myerson, her ex-husband, and her two children Ethan and Esther, not so young anymore. The episodes often begin with singular incursions into the future, leaps forward in the timeline, a novelty in the dramaturgical organization of narrative time, of the relationship between fabula and plot within the filmic device.
Although it is not very productive to reveal some details and the different twists of the fifth season, it is quite clear that Midge will get her chance. This is the right epilogue of a long road dashed by Sherman – Palladino. The creator of the series has given life to a colorful, brilliant, and joyful world by highlighting all the characteristics of her style. Going beyond the ability to manage the narrative through dialogues full of words emitted at high speed, the elements that make her presence recognizable are others. The most important is certainly the pleasure of dealing with the evolution of single women but characterized by a light fortitude and the saving ability to play down. Secondly, the presence/absence of the male figure who, in the end, is acquitted and forgiven as a sort of child still unable to manage himself and his emotional impulses. Finally, then, the tendentially unbalanced family outline cannot be missing despite the certainty of his presence.
Thus, if in Gilmore Girls the audience fell in love with the staid Richard and Emily, in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel one is completely overwhelmed by a rowdy, disorderly, and often dysfunctional Jewish family. The same we find traces of in some jokes by Woody Allan or in the more detailed and certainly more analytical pages of Philip Roth. In this fifth season, therefore, the Weissman and the now ex-in-laws conquer an important part of the narrative. In particular, their attention is shifted to the education of their grandchildren and to the identification of the famous genius ready to express himself at the stroke of the sixth year of age.
But will it be like this, or will Abraham Weissman be forced to revise his theory on the matter? Whatever the answer, Amy Sherman – Palladino has once again managed to stage the generational difference through mild formulas whose representative value, however, is undeniable. The final touch, which many thank, is the return, even if only for a cameo, of Milo Ventimiglia, the unforgettable and tormented Jess of Gilmore Girls. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel does not run these risks, thus deciding to refocus on her thematic heart, her humor, her language, and her interests and bringing as naturally as possible to the final consequences, broadening the horizon, talking about time, changes, generational transitions, games of power linked to genres, without ever choosing to meet the public. That’s why everything goes through the characters. Characters have their path and are believable to the extent that they carry them to the end. They are the ones who remain in the heart of the beholder and they are the ones who, when they are no longer seen, will be missed dearly.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 5 Review: The Last Words
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has come to its end with a fifth season that perfectly sums up the essence of this series. Funny, and sarcastic but, at the same time, essential. Amy Sherman Palladino and David Palladino, therefore, deliver a final chapter that highlights their style and, at the same time, merges with the narrative developed up to this moment, never betraying the essential principle of the project: to offer a character the possibility of having an ironic voice and using it to narrate herself and the world around her is feminine.
