What Doth A Villain Make: The Empathy Of Good Girls’ Rio
Mexican-American actor Manny Montana invokes the pulse of his bone-tingling, sexcar-driving, laser-grinning, intelligent Detroit crime boss Rio in NBCUniversal’s crime comedy-drama Good Girls, airing its fourth season. Montana’s Rio smashes any potential of stereotyping a Latinx man, a gang member, a Latinx man gang member, or portraying a one-tone human.
Rio is the series’ villain in classic character terms. A criminal and bad boy, with the bald eagle, American freedom, tattooing his svelte neck. The tattoo signifies his gang — Rio is the boss. He gets involved with Beth (Christina Hendricks, the series’ protagonist), her sister, Annie (Mae Whitman), and Ruby (Retta), when the women rob a grocery store involved in his business. Good Girls is described as Breaking Bad meets Thelma and Louise: the women live in Detroit’s suburbs and are “mothers first” entering crime life.
In episode one, Rio waits for Beth on her kitchen counter, casually gorgeous and threatening. He moves nimbly towards her when she arrives, flirting from feet away. In early scenes with Beth, Annie, and Ruby, he lopes through humor, charm, and intimidation, as Annie and Ruby are, at turns, direct, hilarious, and fearful, knowing the reward in working with Rio. His ability to get wealth is the womens’ mutual turn-on.
The lynch pin drops in the second episode in Rio’s money laundering warehouse. The women, seeing the money rolls, are mind blown. Recalling gangster film energy (Donnie Brasco, GoodFellas) and scored by the riveting “La Ciudad” by ODESZA, the scene thrills for the magnitude of Rio’s enterprise. We overhear him with a crooked DEA-type. Rio is measured, explaining what he needs done. He talks firmly with his workers but is kind and encouraging, letting through a smile.
After settling their debt, Beth wants back in. As a housewife and mom of four, with little help from her husband, she is an expert organizer and operates in a triage mindset. These skills could benefit Rio’s high stake operation, also in selling drugs. The three women begin working for him. Beth thrives off the crime and grows her attachment to Rio, parts fear, lust, and intrigue. She wants to learn from him, be like him, earn his affirmation. Rio sees her, challenging and exalting her bravery and limitations. Rio is not unaffected by Beth. Their pairing, or perhaps collision, becomes “Brio” in the Good Girls fandom.
The traditional responsibility for minor, supporting characters is supporting the central narrative and main characters responsible for carrying it forward. It may seem unlikely for Rio to become a villain-but-also, someone to root for and have an emotional experience with, but Montana cares about him. He goes into Rio’s skin and blows him up.
Empathy is different than compelling interest, but Rio does both, making us feel and fascinate for him. Schitt’s Creek is a good example of a series whose storyline reconceptualizes when a minor character shows up with surprising depth. Once Patrick (Noah Reid), serenades David (Dan Levy), the showrunner (also Levy) realizes Patrick would be a force in David’s life. They develop as the series’ central love story and marry in its finale.
The song that scores their scene in Beth’s kitchen to close the third episode, when Rio asks her, “So, what do you want to talk to me about?,” after she leaves her pearls in his warehouse, is the haunting “Strange Game” by Jess Ribeiro.
It’s a strange, strange game
Love will never be the same
I wonder, will I be sane again
Even though, I know I know, everything
Thought I knew, I saw you
Now I know, I know nothing at all
Montana and Hendricks’ chemistry as Rio and Beth was undeniable to fans and production. Showrunner Jenna Bans made changes to develop their relationship, also introducing sex. Rio can be read as a supporting character from the standpoint of screen time and technical designation, but his resounding effect on the protagonist and fandom is clear. A significant portion of the online fandom supports Beth and Rio exploring some sort of relationship. Rio becomes half of what nearly immediately is the show’s central tension and interpersonal (love) story.
More than a “romantic influence” on Beth—their connection is also parts chemical, emotional, and intellectual—Rio is the impetus that drives her series’ arc. Each part of Beth’s experience with Rio crazies her sense of self. The rearranging and potentials of rebuilding for the protagonist’s moral and existential identity happen because of Rio’s insightfulness—the way he is and the way he is with her. While this does not assure our empathy for Rio, it gives us reason to study him. Rio is self-understood and controlled. His stability shows through his organized home and sharp, understated black attire appreciating time in the late Steve Jobs vein. We rarely see him lose his temper nor be menacing (for too long), yet the world plays in his hand.
Barry Jenkins’ precious Moonlight builds empathy for his protagonist, Chiron, by structuring the film in three eras to show his bildungsroman (respectively, Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes). In the film’s last epoch, Chiron is a gangster, similar to the one who influenced him growing up, Juan (Mahershala Ali). Backstories, if done well, fill up pathos, but a character’s present needs to compel us towards their future. In season four, episode six, we meet Rio’s family for the first time. The empathy work Rio carries to get us here is a tour de force.
As a multifaceted person — with magnetic energy who knows himself — Rio reveals a depth of possibility for individual and social experience. We want for Rio’s being and bossing and his interacting with anyone, specifically, loving his son, Marcus (David Miranda), bantering with Ruby, Annie, and his comrade, Mick (Carlos Aviles), and anything with Beth. Talking to Beth, listening to Beth, perceiving Beth, consenting to Beth, ravishing Beth, intimidating Beth, testing Beth, supporting Beth, gifting Beth, teaching Beth. And yes, smashing Beth’s artdec and mirror with a crowbar, while she masturbates to him in her mind.
In this excerpt from a 2018 interview on The Angie Martinez Show between Montana and Martinez, they address hood and gang member stereotypification on screen, and how Montana pivots with Rio:
Martinez: …You’re not really a gang member, you’re more like a crime boss [kind of guy]—but anybody in that way, sometimes people overplay it, and it’s like, they’re over being, like, over-tough—
Montana: That’s what I mean—
Martinez: —over street, and you were like so easy with it, it’s just really, really good.
Montana: Thank you, and that’s what I mean, I’m from Long Beach, and I’m sure you guys are from everywhere around here. Like, any hood dude you know, are they mean all the time? Every hood dude I knew was funny, laughing…
Montana: Cuz’ nothing was serious to them—
Montana: Right?…Yea, it was fun. So, that’s what I wanted to bring to him, and I was wondering if people were going to get it because I’m always assuming people are like, no, you gotta like…We’ll have certain directors or writers…Can you be a little tougher, can you like, like, you know, like grrummm, I’m like, what does that mean? Why do I have to be, like, just growling all the time?
Martinez: Cuz’ that’s not really how it is—
Martinez: Yea, no I get that. So good.
Rio’s screen time is around five minutes, on average, per each forty-five minute, on average, episode, expectedly less than the main characters but often less than other supporting characters. Montana becomes Rio completely, his improvisation moving Rio’s individual and shared storylines forward. Zaldivar at En Fuego writes, “He [Montana] pours himself into his craft of creativity. It all stems from growing up bearing a shield, one he doesn’t mind taking down now.”
Humanity is a spectrum, and, ironically, impartial. Rio at LegoLand. Rio threatening a money launderer. Rio biting his lip when Beth dumps him. Rio ordering a hit. How someone holds, is, disparate parts in one personhood is fascinating only if we care about that person in the sum of their parts. Montana comments, “Rio…is this gangsta but not really a street dude. He’s just all about his money.” He works for his son’s future, like Beth does for her kids. Industry formula wants our empathy with the protagonist, who operates from a different set of morals than the villain. Rio refutes this design.
His love for Marcus is profound, but Rio’s screen time centers on his story with Beth. Rio’s vulnerability for Beth is perhaps the biggest vehicle for his humanization, what creates empathy. Particularly striking is his ability to hold their complex, volatile relationship while, at his Achilles’ heel, lean into her with tenderness and respect. Rio is empathetic with Beth. Rio often shows his “love experiencing,” which opens space for off-screen conversation about men and vulnerable expression.
Rio with Beth offers a poignant perspective of a man in intimacy with a woman for the American screen. Rio orients his body towards Beth in a way that conveys he understands her and respects her boundaries. Their three sex scenes, each initiated by Beth, are a fascinating study in a man following a woman’s lead and prioritizing a woman’s pleasure. The profound conceptualization of these scenes and precise execution on Montana’s part are important for positive representation of consent in sex and the centering of women’s desire.
These sex scenes are particularly meaningful since Montana is a POC actor playing a POC character, who is also presented as a “criminal,” a “bad guy,” and a “gang member.” Replace your discriminations—all of them—with how Rio is with Beth. When he asks, “What am I doing here, Elizabeth?,” when she invites him to her house for sex, he indicates he is following her lead. That he calls her Elizabeth, a Montana improvisation, deepens their intimacy: nobody else uses her “full" name.
Of course, there are scenes where Rio threatens Beth. He is who he also is, a crime boss, and looks after business first. Rio’s love eyes for Beth in season four begin to suspend our belief in his priorities. A man in love is human — but a man who stands to lose his empire in that love? Unrequited love is an old-as-time tale. The cruelty that comes with it. The downfall it can bring.
In season one, Beth asks Rio if he is going to kill her. He strokes her hair out of her face, which he regularly does, and says, “I am going to teach you.” This moment pivots Rio threatening Beth with his gun before (he never hurts her with it). Here, he posits the gun as a passage to self-empowerment. In fact, Rio gives her a gun early on, initiation for the crime world, but she does not kill her “assignments.” The irony is Beth later shoots Rio.
Our capacity to empathize with Rio intensifies because he knows himself, allowing us to know him. This is an interesting form of empathetic provocation. It explains the judgement aimed at third season Beth in the online fandom, after she shoots Rio. She largely represses the shooting and never talks to him about it. We are challenged to empathize with Beth over her part of the experience while Rio pulls our empathy, even though he kidnaps her violently to start that scene. There are fans who say Beth is not good enough for Rio, pointing to her continual attempts to jail and kill him. A recent YouTube comment read that Rio should find “a nice gangster lady.”
The protagonist might not deserve the villain.
A Good Girls meme points to Beth’s cheating, patronizing husband, Dean (Matthew Lillard) as the “actual” series villain. Rio can be read as the “story villain” because of his crime, but is he a villain to Beth? The complex baddie or antihero is popular in television and film — Assane Diop in Lupin, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, also Nancy Botwin (Weeds) and Walter White (Breaking Bad) of the thematic predecessors to Good Girls. Could Rio be the antihero of Good Girls? His hero part could be catalyzing Beth’s existential crisis because isn’t that sort of a gift? Moreover, do villains and heroes get equal chances at becoming antiheroes? Diverse cast and production communities can expand the possibilities for telling these and other cross-genre stories.
Yet, “Only 5% of the speaking roles in last year’s [2019] top 100 movies went to Latino actors even though that demographic group represents 18% of the US population.” Montana tells Zaldivar, “We could be the doctor if you just put us in that position, make people see that we’re this way, too, and it’ll just kind of level out the playing field.” According to this year’s UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, “films with casts that were made up of 41% to 50% minorities took home the highest median gross at the box office [in 2020],” while noting among directors and film writers, people of color are still underrepresented. Zaldivar reports that Montana is writing “his own narrative for the screen, something that’s more indicative of the Mexican-American experience.”
In a season three money drop, Beth dresses up for Rio. Rio, by folding one hand behind his back and hinting at something between a smile and grimace, communicates respect, restraint, arousal, desire, regret, sadness, and acknowledgement of another. Experiencing empathy for someone imagines that person could also experience empathy, that empathy is a causal (multiplying) experience.
If understanding the complex living of someone means seeing their humanity—and this inspires empathy—racist narratives label groups of people “not human” to validate an argument of inhumanity. When people flood the internet with photographs of the late, murdered George Floyd with his younger daughter, Gianna, this matters. Blow-up racist narratives with truth. Montana breaks open a Latinx crime boss to show us who that person is. The result is one of the most compelling character studies on modern network television. Montana’s Rio represents what focused character work imparts for understanding human experience.
Note: When this article was written, the series’ first three seasons and its current season through episode six had aired.
original publication in Cine Suffragette here
