What’s Good and Bad About “Big Little Lies”

Available on Showmax.

I confess that I don't love the HBO series Big Little Lies, though I watch it with fascination, and find it really interesting and somewhat entertaining. Much of what there is in the show that I don’t like comes from television conventions. The story is spun out in ways that are designed to luringly drip information onto viewers just too slowly for us to stop watching, and the emotional tension is kindled misleadingly until the conclusion reveals that the point of the suspense doesn’t even matter to the story. The approach to and execution of the plot’s structure are dismayingly manipulative and overdetermined. Conversations are cut off; the characters get many good chances to hurl their feelings and barbed comments at one another, but conversations only go so far and characters exist only so deep as the plot requires, and don’t develop into a fuller story lived out by fuller people.

What I do like about it are unique and specific to the show, and come to the fore in Season 2, which, as my viewing companion Sizo agrees, is much better than the first season. Season 1 depended on flashbacks and artificially stoked suspense and intrigue to deliver viewers from the story’s beginning to its tragic (yet supposedly cathartic) end. Season 2 jumps off of that, and observes the characters as they navigate the aftermath of the homicide that closed Season 1. There’s no longer a specific end point to which we’re being ushered, and (again, as Sizo perceptively pointed out) the development of the characters is now the very substance of the plot. What they think and feel, and what it leads them to say and do, is what takes the story from the start to end of each episode.

Maybe what viewers also find refreshing is that the characters’ development hardly ever means their improvement. Every single character on the show has long moments of immaturity and insanely bad sense, and nothing is resolved or fixed so far in Season 2 (this after seeing four episodes). Perhaps, in Season 1, Celeste is the least so, and her character seems to bear the closest resemblance to a real-life situation, obviously because her story arc is the most serious one to be dealt with, and the one that the showmakers want taken most seriously by viewers. However, in Season 2, Celeste makes a good deal of her own very bad choices. The rest of the characters’ poor decision-making is part morality tale, and part Hollywood concoction. It’s only the small part that remains that gets to be the kind of meaningful expression that turns a product (and a PSA) into an artwork. And, as is the norm with television, the brunt of that burden of expression falls on the actors.

Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Zoey Kravitz, and Laura Dern are excellent actors. Nicole Kidman is a great actor. Meryl Streep is a highly accomplished actor, the kind that showrunners can easily rely on to do exactly the kind of work that a television actor needs to do in the absence of authoritative directorial creation. (A note on the directors’ authority later.) Streep is always 100% in control of what she looks and sounds like, and every single tic, mannerism, and inflection we see is a result of a conscious decision she has made. To me, in Streep’s many performances, each of her choices, which are made to devise a performance of believable naturalism, either come off as blandly predictable and unrevealing, or conspicuously artificial and unnatural. I wrote last year that she always conceals the human that she is: there is no Meryl Streep performance where it seems that Streep has allowed some of her actual self to escape into the persona she’s crafted. She has a single moment in Big Little Lies where she deliberately cuts loose as she screams at the dinner table; this is a moment when Streep is aware that her character is momentarily giving up control, and she decides to do the same. The result is shocking to her dinner companions, and surprisingly freeing. More of this, please, Meryl.

In her Big Little Lies performance, Laura Dern is on the opposite end. She swings across the screen with abandon and recklessness, and her loose-cannon, enraged-lionness swagger often comes off as ridiculous. This, also, is not great expression and great insight, but I look forward to her scenes with glee, because I love to see how crazy she’ll get, how loudly she’ll suddenly shout, how aggressively she’ll turn on everyone else in the room, especially her useless, scummy husband.

Nicole Kidman is the golden mean. In real life, we know her publicly as a tightly controlled, tight-lipped porcelain goddess — someone who presents a carefully cultivated persona that’s designed to conceal any personal vulnerability or recklessness. As Kidman plays her, the character Celeste presents a similar front to the world, even to her friends. In private, with her husband, she lives out a messy life of abuse, codependency, and outright physical danger, that she folds into a neat tale of excitement when she tells her friend Madeline (Witherspoon) about it. But, when Celeste shows freer emotion, Kidman rips through the facade with a pointed fierceness, or she cuts loose in a maddened fury, or, in some terrifying moments, does both. Kidman’s usual appearance of tight control emphasises her real lack of control  in her performance; her connection to her character’s emotions and the story being told through the character precludes a steady grip on things — in many moments, she can't even keep a hold on her American accent, and its fakeness doesn’t detract from her performance one bit. It’s not the most daring and uninhibited she’s ever been, but it’s by far the best thing about the entire show.

The therapist (played by Robin Weigert) is the character I like best, because she speaks sense and is always right, even though she’s way out of line with every single thing she says to her patients. She appears to serve as the showmakers’ direct line to the audience: someone has got to say something and behave in a way that we can agree with, and, when she gives practical advice to Celeste on how to collect evidence of her husband’s abuse, it seems like an audiovisual manual being passed out to viewers, to help anyone watching who may be in a similar situation.

Part of my dissatisfaction with the show, and television in general (as well as many feature films, especially the kind that gets exported from Sundance), is the habit of filming scenes just to illustrate the story that’s on the page; images are devised and executed without any extra meaning, insight, or emotional power than the showrunner and writers have instructed for. Season 1 was directed entirely by the French director Jean-Marc Vallée, whose films Dallas Buyers Club and The Wild I’ve seen before and similarly found to be heavily reliant on a plot structure to stoke emotions as well as visually uninteresting. He has a recognisable visual schema, which mostly depends on natural, existing light, hand-held cameras, and a casual focus on the actors’ performances. Yet it doesn’t give rise to an artist’s stamp of personality on the show’s images.

A lot of the shooting and editing is done in service of the plot’s heavy flashback structure, which is, in fact, a kind of reactionary constraint on audiovisual storytelling and expression, because it binds the showmakers unalterably to a script, and tightens the reins on an already restricted means of storytelling. The flashbacks are triggered by simplistic associations and details that further narrow the scope of the show’s story, and further reduce the psychological lives of its characters, and the intercutting between flashbacks and flash-forwards isn’t revealing or really meaningful.

There’s a particularly disheartening story about the direction of the show that just broke in the news last week, involving Vallée and the director of Season 2, Andrea Arnold (the British director of Fish Tank and American Honey). According to the story on Indiewire, which I encourage everyone to read, the fiercely independent Arnold had been hired to direct the entire new season, and had been told that she would have autonomous directorial control over the entire product. After shooting wrapped, it turned out that the show’s producers would rather have Vallée taking over the production for the sake of “tonal and stylistic unity”. Indiewire’s reports from Arnold’s shoots indicate that Season 2 would have been very different (and make it sound to me like it would have been a remarkable improvement over Vallée’s Season 1) without the domineering, (to put it bluntly) male interference in Arnold’s hard work. The story is one of an uncountable number of artistic and corporate conflicts in the entertainment industry that play out to the detriment of an artist’s creative vision; it’s made more unfortunate (but not more surprising or uncommon) by the fact that it was a female artist who was duped and overridden, and on a project that was meant to be orientated towards women’s experiences and their power over their expression.

Note: After the season’s wrap-up, the perceptive writer Doreen St. Félix has written an engaging comment for The New Yorker’s website, which you may be interested in reading.