Selective Amnesia
In the HBO limited series, “Task,” an intense tale of cops (in the form of a small special ops FBI team) and robbers (in the form of a drug trafficking motorcycle gang), Mark Ruffalo plays Tom Brandis, a last-leg federal agent who is running in place inside of himself. When we meet him, Brandis is working a recruiting desk for the FBI at a career fair while waiting for the sentencing of his adopted mentally ill son who is in prison for killing his mother, Brandis’ wife.
The weight of love that looks and feels like anything and everything but is pulling him under.
While bobbing for breath, the aging federal agent and shell of a father for his two daughters—one, an adolescent still living at home—is tabbed by the bureau to head up a task force that needs his seasoned expertise.
The storyline, brilliantly written by Brad Inglesby, runs through a cast of masterfully created characters who each in their own ways wears a noose around their necks not of their own making. Familial love knots—the kind that both sustain and cut the oxygen off—are everywhere within the sticky ring of drugs. Brandis is called in to sever ties, find the candy, and intercept the loot. Which he does, of course, (it’s Hollywood—by way of rural Pennsylvania—after all.) Brandis saves the day for the children caught in the crossfire and in so doing, without necessarily trying to, he finds a way to save himself.
In the final episode, once the gang has been dismantled, Brandis coyly zips up the backpack full of cash that had been thrust upon the young woman he just rescued who had inherited her uncle’s parentless children. At clean-up time, his otherwise copious notes of the bust contained nothing of the money still mysteriously missing. His supervisor asks as she ties up the case, her gut already in the know, “So no signs of the money, huh?”
“You know what they say about wisdom,” says the agent who had unraveled some of his own debilitating knots, “It’s knowing what to overlook.”
Ruffalo’s character, unable to move on, had decided to keep going. He’d figured out how to step over all the parts he couldn’t understand.
What he found when he began to move again was access, through the portal of forgiveness, to the life he had stopped living for a while.
The decision of where and when and on what to dwell is always ours to make.