Boardwalk Empire Recap: The Face and the Finger

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In the opening moment, young Al Capone is sneaking up on Jimmy Darmody, who’s in bed, asleep, with a prostitute named Pearl. Capone aims a pistol at Jimmy’s head and pulls the trigger. But the gun’s loaded with blanks—this is a sociopath’s idea of a prank. Capone laughs it up. Jimmy’s freaked out. His ear is bleeding. As Pearl comforts him, Jimmy defends Capone, sounding a lot like Henry Hill making excuses for Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas.

Played by Emily Meade, Pearl works at a brothel that is part of Johnny Torio’s Chicago fiefdom. She expresses an interest in the book Jimmy has been reading, Free Air, a fluffy road novel written by Sinclair Lewis; its title refers to the signs that used to be common at gas stations in the days of bumpy roads and iffy automobile tires. When not weighing in on the future Nobelist, Pearl tries to get Jimmy to sample opium with her down in Chinatown.

Jimmy is in Chicago to keep away from the trouble he has brought on himself back East after he and his new buddy Capone held up and murdered a band of Arnold Rothstein’s whiskey-runners. In scene after scene, Capone, proves himself more of a genuine gangster than the sweet-tempered and overly thoughtful Jimmy. Brutal and fast, Capone takes pleasure in thug life, while Jimmy remains a sensitive onlooker, a gangland Nick Carraway to Capone’s Gatsby.

Capone decides to muscle in on Greek Town. He beats a Greek restaurant owner in an effort to persuade him to change his booze supplier from Sheridan to his own boss, Johnny Torio. Later in the show, Capone mouths off to Sheridan’s boys, while Jimmy just sits there, polite and diplomatic. Not surprisingly, toward the end of the episode, a Sheridan goon retaliates not by going after Capone, but by targeting Jimmy, who showed weakness in the meeting. The goon does this by hiring Pearl and slashing her face.

The camera doesn’t blink during the slashing, but remains focused on Pearl as she undergoes the disfigurement. Interestingly—or strangely—this episode’s other scene of over-the-top violence takes place off camera: back in Atlantic City, Chalky White, the black crime boss from the north side, is allowed a special audience with the Grand Cyclops of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter. This little tete-Ã -tete is a favor granted Chalky by Nucky and his brother, the sheriff, after the lynching of Chalky’s driver. We see Chalky take out a set of tools—they belonged to his father, a skilled carpenter, he explains—but we don’t see what he does with them. It’s only later in the episode that we see Chalky unwrapping a handkerchief that contains one of the Grand Cyclops’s fingers.

Also in the episode: crime boss Nucky and saintly widow Margaret Schroeder continue their flirtation, dancing together at his big birthday party. And when Nucky’s ditzy girlfriend, played by Paz de la Huerta, leaps out of a cake, his eyes are fixed on Margaret, who’s looking on from a distance. And then there is the budding romance between the gonnorrheaic Lucky Luciano and Jimmy’s mom, burlesque babe Gillian, played by Gretchen Mol.

This was a transitional episode. You can’t say Boardwalk Empire is a bad show, but I won’t exactly be racing to the TV next Sunday night. I don’t know why, really. For what it’s worth (maybe nothing), Goodfellas is one of my favorite movies of all time. I love it and trust it. For all its violence, I believe it’s a serious and moral piece of work. But, so far, I can’t tell if Boardwalk Empire’s heart is in the right place.