'Mare of Easttown' is fun

Adjectives are very conservative and elementary specimens that stick to nouns like barnacles to rocks.

One of the writer's jobs is to force them to say things they don't say, by modifying unexpected nouns.

It is a difficult task that almost always fails.

So when it hits the mark, the effect is bright like fireworks or devastating like a cancer diagnosis.

My friend Isabel Vázquez, a screenwriter and film scholar, said

is fun. Such an adjective, placed in the middle of a series that includes people in tatters, teenage mothers, post-industrial sadness, murders and kidnappings of women, may sound frivolous or provocative, but once thought about it, it is accurate. It scandalizes anyone with a frivolous and moralistic concept of fun. For those who believe that fun is not important or that it is even immoral or sinful, as so many people think, the adjective is indefensible. But if you understand fun as a deep form of joy, which goes beyond joy, laughter and toast, you can take for fun things that, at first glance, seem terrible.

In that sense,

can be more fun than

, by Benigni, although Benigni intends to amuse us and

, to crush every last molecule of hope that remains in our body.

In fact, the fun that Benigni proposes, while banal, is not funny at all.

Mare of Easttown

amuses you insofar as it treats the viewer with due respect and unfolds before their eyes and ears a complex world that vibrates in many layers.

You don't laugh, but you enjoy the touch of something beautiful and subtle made from ugly and waste materials.

I'm going to use the adjective fun more and better from now on.

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