'The Gray House' review: Great historical story suffers from bloat

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The story of a Union spy network in Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War comes to Prime Video in the form of the eight-episode limited series "The Gray House," executive produced by Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman.

Mary-Louise Parker stars as Elizabeth Van Lew, the leader of the real-life network and a devoted abolitionist. Daisy Head ("Shadow and Bone") plays her daughter Elizabeth. Co-stars include the iconic Ben Vereen, Keith David and Christopher McDonald.

All eight episodes are directed by the veteran Roland Joffé, whose credits include the Oscar-nominated '80s movies "The Killing Fields" and "The Mission."

MY SAY These eight episodes span nearly nine hours — a big commitment for any audience and a tall task for any filmmaker in any age of fractured attention spans.

If you're going to ask viewers to stick with you for that long, there had better be a good reason.

But a viewing of the first two episodes of "The Gray House," each of which span well over an hour, reveals an enormous amount of narrative bloat.

We get scenes that stretch on endlessly. Exposition masquerades as dialogue. The show begins on July 4, 1860, in part at a big ball being held at the Van Lew estate, and so we must endure debate after debate about the wisdom of secession versus remaining in the union. 

We meet a host of characters, many of whom don't have immediately apparent reasons to eat up screen time. The story unfolds in a Richmond that feels less like the real city from the period than it does a Hollywood backlot.

We're subjected to performances that lean so heavily into the Southern accents and period affectations that they skew toward seeming like a "Saturday Night Live" parody. Or, perhaps, a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical. It can be awfully hard to endure.

There are, of course, some exceptions. Vereen has a series of strong moments as Isham Worthy, who works for the Van Lew family. David plays the real-life Henry Highland Garnet, a minister and abolitionist, and he gets the best scene of the early part of the miniseries when the character addresses a church gathering. Head finds a way to inject some subtlety into material that desperately needs it.

The story of the Van Lew network has tremendous dramatic promise. There are several subplots within the world of "The Gray House" that would have made for compelling stories in their own right. 

They just don't get a chance to stand out. This is where careful editing and narrative precision can make all the difference. If you don't cut anything, if you're content to pour all you've got onscreen in this sort of wildly maximalist approach, you leave the audience with everything and nothing, all at once.

BOTTOM LINE A great historical story gets wasted in this endurance test for viewers.