Television Review: “Big Little Lies” is mean as hell, quite funny, totally shallow and kind of a great time… for now.
You know those paperback novels you buy at the airport right before a flight? You’re not looking to get sucked into a compelling story, really: you just need something salacious and pulpy to carry you through the next few hours and take your mind off the drudgery of airport travel.
Then you get on the plane. Whatever your qualms or individual pretensions might be in that moment, you cannot put the book down. You find yourself lost in a world of backstabbing, sexual intrigue and high-stakes chicanery. Of course, the second you deboard, it’s like you totally forgot about the book you just read. If someone asked you to recall pressing or important details, you might recall the sleazy thrill of turning that first page, but you might be hard-pressed to recall the main bad guy’s first name.
“Big Little Lies,” a new drama on HBO created by David E. Kelley and Jean-Marc Vallee, is kind of like that. It’s the small-screen equivalent of beach reading: a show that toggles the line between highbrow junk and just plain junk. Much of the time, I found myself strangely hooked. Perhaps it’s because there’s an undeniable appeal to watching beautiful people behave badly in exquisite beachside mansions. Perhaps it’s because “Big Little Lies” adopts a coy, not-entirely-serious tone in its first episode, turning what could otherwise be a placid relationship drama into a serrated power-girl bloodbath with echoes of Gillian Flynn, Mike Nichols’ “Closer” and Vallee’s own filmography. The show is just as ridiculous as I’ve made it sound — sometimes even more so.
And yet “Big Little Lies,” for all its shortcomings, is also exceedingly well made. Vallee is a sharp and intuitive filmmaker and here, he’s assembled a fine cast of (mostly) women — some of whom he’s worked with before, like Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern — to bring this remarkably twisted tale to life. I would never make the case that “Big Little Lies” is good for your brain or anything like that, but in its gripping pilot episode, the show reveals itself as a pungent smack to the face of HBO’s normally more self-serious programming.
I don’t’ think I’m the first person to compare “Big Little Lies” to an airport novel. And to be fair, some female critics have taken issue with some male critics describing the show as “trashy” or “breezy” or using reductive shorthand terms such as the ones I’ve just mentioned. To be fair, I’m sure there’s a distinct line between how male and female viewers are going to watch this show. To the showrunner’s credit, “Big Little Lies” gives us three memorable female protagonists with agency, even if their concerns never seem to extend beyond the beautiful coastal California bubble in which they live. The pilot also hints at some not-so-subtle but nevertheless intriguing subtext regarding domestic violence, so it’s entirely possible that many critics’ assessment of the show (mine included) might come across as having been conceived in haste. As of now, we have an entire season of television to find out.
Series director Jean Marc-Vallee has proven himself, over the last few years, to be a director drawn towards parables of redemption and debasement. His best film so far has been 2014’s “Wild,” which subverted the Oscar-weepie formula and turned Cheryl Strayed’s often-harrowing account of her one-woman trek up the Pacific Coast Trail into a fractured, hypnotic kaleidoscope of a woman’s broken life. “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” the film for which Vallee is probably best known, is a nobly earnest dramatic work that’s only marred by some tonal atrophy in the second and third acts, not to mention a “look at me” supporting turn from everyone’s favorite gimlet-eyed showboat, Jared Leto.
Even “Demolition,” Vallee’s much-maligned Jake Gylenhaal-starring flick that came out last year, managed to imbue a creaky, cliché-addled script with a deftly fluid visual language. He’s quite a fine filmmaker, even if he rarely transcends the limitations of what’s on the page. And yet I dare say that Vallee has never attempted anything as blackly comic as “Big Little Lies,” which makes no bids for it’s characters redemption, though I suppose there’s still plenty of time in the season left for it. Instead, Vallee uses his well-honed directorial skill set to guide these ferocious mama lions into a moneyed Northern California abbey that nevertheless resembles a blue-blood war zone. Like any good airplane novel, you might feel slightly ashamed about enjoying “Big Little Lies” as much as you do, but there’s no doubt that the show has a certain toxic charm.
I suspect the milieu in which “Big Little Lies” unfolds may be enough to turn off some viewers. Even by the standards of shows like “Girls” and “Entourage” — shows in which characters seemingly never have to struggle financially, where money may as well actually grow on trees — “Big Little Lies” takes place in an environment so removed from most people’s day-to-day reality that it feels like a wildlife exhibit. I’ve been to the Monterey Bay many times — it’s a beautiful, secluded slice of the bucolic California coastline — though I’ve never seen interiors as opulent as the ones presented in the first hour of this new show. The principal characters of “Big Little Lies” are defined by their possessions, their houses, the parties they attend, and, perhaps most importantly, where their kids go to school. Almost like catty teenagers, these fabulously wealthy adults can’t seem to stop gossiping about each other: obsessing over what others might have, casually sniping at each other in public and not-so-casually brandishing metaphorical claws when it involves their children.
Perhaps the most formidable of all these Type Capital-A personalities is Madeline Martha Mackenzie, played by Reese Witherspoon, here returning to the Vallee fold after “Wild”. With the unrelenting lilt in her voice and her perk factor that occasionally tips over into full-tilt hysteria, Witherspoon is having a blast playing this ferociously ambitious character: she’s like a more sociopathic version of “Legally Blonde’s” Elle Woods, or perhaps “Election’s” Tracy Flick if she had given up her political ambitions and joined the upper crust of hedge fund managers and tech wizards. Madeline is married to an agreeable, almost suspiciously mellow businessman named Ed (played with his typical acerbic restraint by the wonderful Adam Scott), but her oldest child resents and mocks her, even at the dinner table and before bed. There’s also Celeste Wright (Nicole Kidman), a gorgeous woman who is the envy of everyone in town, and whose home life is more sinister than any of her perfect friends might begin to imagine.
Things take a nasty turn when a new, younger woman — a kind-hearted single mother named Jane Chapman (Shailene Woodley, giving the show’s most human performance) — arrives in town with her two children. Early on, Jane’s youngest son is accused of strangling a female classmate. The girl’s mother (Laura Dern) insists that Jane’s son apologize to her daughter. He does not, insisting that it was not him who choked the girl. This provokes ire on both sides of the fence, with Dern’s pissed-off mom lamenting her dwindling social status more than she cares to comfort her own child. Meanwhile, Madeline and Celeste take the woman’s defensive actions as an outright affront. In the eyes of these Monterey moms, who have nothing but time on their hands and money in their pockets, this is war.
By the end of the first episode of “Big Little Lies,” someone has been murdered — though technically, we see this act at the beginning of the show, orchestrated by Vallee in his typically variegated fashion as a phantasmagoric smattering of red and blue police lights. We don’t know who has died, however, which leaves more questions than answers at the end of the show’s fitfully compelling first hour. This last question left me both curious and also a mite unsatisfied. It feels as though the creators of “Big Little Lies” are still figuring things out as they go along: unlike other popular small-screen murder mysteries such as “Twin Peaks” and “True Detective,” “Big Little Lies” hardly feels planned out rigorously from the start. This could turn out to be the show’s chief asset, or its undoing. Already, there’s a discord between the very traditional, very plotted nature of Kelley’s script and the typically impressionistic nature of Vallee’s direction, though the show is never boring, even when it struggles to reach the purpose of a particular scene.
Vallee has always had a knack for small moments of everyday texture and detail, and he has a particular way with music: there’s a killer use of Janis Joplin early on, a choice Charles Bradley cut (“Victim of Love”) to introduce one of the pilot’s most disturbing subplots… why, there’s even a Frank Ocean tuned buried in there (though the title of the song, “Super Rich Kids,” makes one wonder if the music supervisor simply saw the name and exclaimed “let’s have the song play diegetically in a scene that features, like, literally super rich kids”). He is also, as evidenced by “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” “Wild” and yes, even the problematic “Demolition,” an actor’s director first and foremost. Vallee clearly enjoys letting his actors off the leash, which is liberating for us, since he clearly trusts them so much. My favorite performances came from Witherspoon and Woodley: the former twisting her signature All-American cheer into something deeply ominous, the latter imbuing a somewhat under-realized part with a sense of mystery that’s simply not on the page. The men of the show also fare well, with the normally more laid-back Adam Scott acclimating himself with ease to the show’s creepy-funny tone, while Alexander Skarsgård (“True Blood,” the recent “War on Everyone” and the truly dismal “Legend of Tarzan”) adds a frightening shade to the proceedings as Celeste’s outwardly perfect husband who harbors some violent and territorial fantasies of his own.
“Big Little Lies,” it must be said, is not without its conceptual setbacks. The show often has a difficult time balancing its brittle, gallows humor with the growing intrigue of the murder mystery at its center. There’s also an unwieldy marriage of genuine feminist theory at work here with misogynistic clichés that are so musty they could have only come from the mind of a male screenwriter. The show’s real-time action is frequently interrupted by a kind of Greek Chorus of Monterey private school parents, all of whom get to shed some light on the contradictions and cruel habits of our central trio (it’s also a chance for the showrunners to trot out some thankless turns from some strong character actors, including Sarah Baker from “Louie” and P.J. Byrne from the network’s recently-axed “Vinyl”). While it struck me as an admittedly clever note to play in the pilot episode, I can’t see it working as a consistent stylistic device throughout the season. The idea, I think, is that these secondhand recollections will color in our individual perspectives of these women after the fact, but what Kelley is really doing is undercutting the drama that he and Vallee are building with their principal story. You want to tell both Kelley and Vallee to ease up and tell the story, but alas, that’s not what’s happening in these scenes.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed “Big Little Lies” for what it is, and I look forward to seeing where the creators are taking this juicy story in the remaining episodes. I don’t think HBO has another show resembling “Big Little Lies” on-air at the moment — and to be honest, I’m not sure they ever have. While this singularity undeniably makes Vallee and Kelley’s show something of a novelty item, novelty alone does not make or sustain a great season of television. For that you need great acting, inventive direction, engaging world-building and plot that is engrossing without being overly schematic — all things that “Big Little Lies” is hinting at without displaying outright. While there’s something perversely addictive about this first hour of “Big Little Lies,” I remain curious to see whether or not the show’s creators will stick the landing. Stay tuned.
Grade: “Someone’s Dead,” B-.
