The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Review: A Strong Hook That Fails to Dig Deep Enough

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey starts strong but its main character only grows thinner as the story progresses.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
Photo: Apple TV+

As adapted by Walter Mosley from his own novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey opens with a fascinating hook. Ptolemy Grey, played by a clean-shaven Samuel L. Jackson, is dressed in a suit while speaking steadily and confidently into a tape recorder before the series jumps back in time two months to reveal a vastly different version of him, and the contrast is so stark that Jackson may as well be playing someone else. Now with a full beard and wild hair, and wearing wrinkled clothes, Ptolemy speaks at a half-shout as though he can’t hear himself, stumbling over words when he’s not losing his train of thought altogether.

Mosley’s story is based around a bit of light science fiction, an experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease that restores Ptolemy to full cognitive function. The cost of the procedure, though, is rather steep: At its current stage of development, the treatment only works temporarily and will accelerate the man’s mental decline once it’s complete. As Ptolemy recovers, the Faustian nature of this bargain isn’t lost on him. He playfully addresses Doctor Rubin (Walton Goggins) as “Satan,” and he comments on the irony that the treatment requires him, as a Black man, to sign away ownership of his body to a white man.

Consistent with Mosley’s body of work, the series features an unsolved murder at its center. Prior to the treatment, Ptolemy’s great-nephew and caretaker, Reggie (Omar Benson Miller), is gunned down in the street, and living on the treatment’s borrowed time, the old man hopes to find out why. Some investigation is involved, but the mystery is slight, and intentionally so: Rather than any complex twists, the main obstacles are police indifference and the fact that the only person Reggie felt comfortable confiding in was a relative ravaged by dementia.

Advertisement

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey primarily centers Ptolemy’s attempts to set his affairs in order while growing fond of his new caretaker, a 17-year-old girl named Robyn (Dominique Fishback). The pair have a warm, easy chemistry even before the treatment, as Robyn treats Ptolemy like a human being, asking for his input when tidying his home instead of regarding him as a nuisance that couldn’t possibly know what he wants. When Ptolemy changes post-treatment, she’s initially uncertain of whether she still likes him.

YouTube video

We feel the contrast between Ptolemy’s mental states so deeply because, across six episodes, the series takes the time to build relationship dynamics and convey his state of mind. When Ptolemy is at his lowest, the camerawork expresses his condition, blurring the edges of the screen in cramped close-ups that create an appropriately disorienting sense of the environment. He doesn’t always remember to bathe himself, and he hits himself on the head while trying to remember, like smacking a rickety old machine into momentary function. Even in joyful, celebratory moments of Ptolemy reconnecting with people for the first time in a long while, we get a vivid sense of how he once was and how he will be again.

Yet, while the man can recall his entire life without a hitch, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey remains curiously limited in what it chooses to depict. We really only see two periods of Ptolemy’s past: his impoverished childhood in Mississippi, and the time he was in a tumultuous relationship with his wife, Sensia (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams), in the mid-’70s. Sometimes the elderly Ptolemy will move through these memories in the place of an age-appropriate version, furthering the idea that these moments are vivid and immersive in his head. But it also creates a hierarchy of importance, ensuring that all the other memories relegated to mere monologues feel secondary and lack the same tangible, lived-in quality.

Advertisement

Admittedly, the series is meant to be about taking decisive action rather than dwelling on the pain and regret of the past. But in focusing so little on those aspects of Ptolemy’s life, it offers up a character that feels as incomplete as the actions he undertakes. And Reggie, despite his death being the plot’s axis, hardly figures into Ptolemy’s memories at all, while Sensia’s own illness goes unseen in favor of only ever showing her at her most youthful and attractive.

Mosley has a clear gift for the dialogue rhythms of his characters, but as the series continues, it’s often wasted on prolonged squabbles over the vast sums of money that Ptolemy has apparently forgotten. While arguing with Robyn, an aunt remarks that the family had tried to care for Ptolemy for many years, but we have no context to determine whether she’s telling the truth because the series leaves much of that period of his life unexplored. The series misses so many such opportunities to complicate its family dynamic, like the fact that Reggie seemed to genuinely care for Ptolemy yet never cleaned the man’s home or even just unclogged his toilet. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey starts strong but, by failing to probe further into its protagonist’s life, its main character only grows thinner as the story progresses.

Score: 
 Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Dominique Fishback, Cynthia McWilliams, Damon Gupton, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Walton Goggins, Omar Benson Miller, Maury Ginsberg  Network: Apple TV+  Buy: Amazon

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.