Horse Power
23.05.12
The pilot starts with entrepreneur-gangster Chester Ace Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman, also one of the show’s producers) leaving prison after doing a few years for cocaine possession (the drugs weren’t his). While Ace was in the slammer, he bought a $2 million thoroughbred and registered it under the name of his limo driver and bodyguard, Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina, star of Mann’s great series Crime Story ). Ace and Gus’s relationship has a touch of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s; the boss is the visionary, the dreamer with a violent temper, and Gus is the cool cat who reins him in, saving him from others and himself. Over the next few weeks, we find out whom Ace protected by doing the time and what, precisely, he’s afterrevenge against the business associates who screwed him, exacted in the form of a stealth takeover of the track. Michael Gambon plays one of those associates, a British billionaire who lives on a yacht. Watching Gambon and Hoffman act together is like watching two old lions circle each other.
Source: New York Magazine