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The Honorable Woman tells a story massive in scope with great wit and tremendous confidence. Over eight weeks, the BBC/SundanceTV limited drama plays with structure and maximizes its medium’s advantages, laying out groundwork in early episodes and providing character-focused chapters in the middle before racing at a breakneck pace to the finish.
Created by Hugo Blick, the miniseries stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as Nessa Stein, heir to the Stein Corporation, her father’s company which manufactured and provided weapons to Israel in the fight against Palestine and anti-Semitism. In his opening chapter, Blick introduces us to a composed Nessa, confident in her plan to reform her father’s company into one that promotes stability, economic growth and peace in the region for all sides of the war. A victim of his own nationalistic work, her father was murdered in cold blood by an extremist Palestinian group; Nessa makes it her mission to right his wrong, to not make that same mistake.
Nessa’s brother, Ephra (a solid Andrew Buchan), responds to their father’s murder with a desire to continue in his work, and to avenge his death; her Palestinian interpreter from Gaza, Atika (Lubna Azabal), weighs her dedication to her people against the ugliness of revenge; and Secret Service Agent Hugh Hayden-Hoyle (Stephen Rea), who becomes involved as a mystery unfurls and a body count quickly ratchets up, sifts through the various actors striving to achieve their lofty ideological goals. Here, Blick's character work quickly reveals a more encompassing backdrop: a multi-faceted engagement with ideology and idealism.
The series is driven by a mystery, broadly involving a trip Nessa and Atika took to the Gaza strip some years earlier, as well as Ephra’s secret dealings with the Israeli government and his relationship with a shady ambassador between the English and the Americans (Eve Best). Episode four takes the action back several years to detail Nessa’s tragic secret and the ideological divide between her and her brother. Before and after this episode, Blick threads a tangled web of complicated relationships and secrets; while sometimes bogged down by the sheer magnitude of the mystery, enough comes into focus where major plot points progress with clarity.
Eventually, Nessa is revealed to be out of her depth. She's carrying the baggage of her father’s heinous crimes in Palestine; working too hard to not play a side; straining to tell herself and the world she is not her father, she is not a partisan, and that she can make a difference. It’s a character study balanced by the fact that Nessa proves herself willing to make extraordinary sacrifices to enact change, and with Blick and Gyllenhaal making it clear that her heart is in the right place.
The cold truth of The Honorable Woman is that in such a conflict, which is themed so greatly by historical atrocities and by resilient ideological differences, a person of Nessa’s means and familial roots cannot be the arbiter of peace. Contrarily, she represents just how complex it is. As that revelation is uncovered, Blick hits his stride both in the intensifying plot and the rich thematic undercurrent.
In a fine scene from the finale, Nessa confronts the extremist leader spinning her entire plan out of control. In a wrenching moment of clarity, he explains to her that every one of his actions came out of a thirst for vengeance: her father was responsible for the deaths of too many friends and family. Calm, steadfast and brittle, Nessa’s adversary comes off less as a cold-blooded murderer than a representative of the painful history that keeps their conflict practically unsolvable.
In general, The Honorable Woman wants you to think about loyalty – familial loyalty, religious loyalty, national loyalty, and the conflation of these various identities. Nessa, an Israeli, struggles to be loyal to herself, to her father, to her people, and to her values, for each act of “loyalty” is fundamentally at odds with other aspects of her character. When Atika learns that her nationalist group ordered Nessa to be raped, she cannot justify it as a strong woman with a clear moral code. Ephra’s reckless infidelity parallels the lies he told to, and the secrets he kept from, his sister, in the name of avenging his father. It's through this prism of identification that these characters come so fully alive, and emerge so truthfully complex. The questions asked of them are substantial, but Blick rarely offers an answer. His ambitious concern with humanity, and what motivates us as red-blooded individuals, is always kept in check by a distance. Blick doesn’t want to tell you what he thinks; he wants to know what you think.
Blick's narrative is gripping, his canvas wide and ideas fully-formed. He doesn’t exactly provide resolution to every theme he touches on in this series, but he hits the important notes with consistent force. He's also aided by the spellbinding actress at the miniseries' center. In a year of great television performances, Ms. Gyllenhaal towers above what came before her in a breathtakingly career-defining achievement. Her Nessa alternates between sexy and drained, balancing her loyalties and goals with insecurity and fear. She projects her character's shaky confidence with careful precision; in the closing hours, as Nessa's life and work hang in the balance, Gyllenhaal wears her heart on her sleeve, going boldly emotional and then tragically lifeless. Even in an ensemble work like this, she wows as the production’s center. What she brings to Nessa – from a sublime English accent to an orchestrated walk so perfectly complimenting this utter embodiment – puts her character in empathetic, respectable and finally devastating perspective.
Streaks of humor texture this work, most of which come from the delightful wordplay between two giants in British acting, Mr. Rea and Janet McTeer (who plays his boss, Julia Walsh). In the third episode, the two appear for a single minute: Julia wakes up only to remember that she had slept with Hugh the night before, and between the pair is one word, courtesy of Julia: “…Fuck.” As the actors tasked with putting the series’ mystery in perspective on an episodic basis, they often bear the bulk of the expository duties; Blick astutely injects personality and specificity into their characters and their dynamic. (Plus, Rea finds great humanity, humor and strength in the curiously odd Hugh.)
Of other highlights: though initially in the background, Azabal ends up leaving the most lasting impression. She plays Atika’s moral crisis, her playing both sides and her repressed love for Nessa with delicacy before a stupendous emotional implosion at the series’ end. And as for Blick’s contributions, it’s hard to say enough. The undertaking on this visually adventurous, densely plotted drama was likely enormous; yet this is probably the most impressive piece of auteur television in 2014 (the year in which it suddenly became a fad). As mentioned earlier, his scripts are sometimes marred by the plot’s many complexities, and early on Blick hits that “secrecy” theme a little too hard and a little too obviously. But otherwise, his dialogue is gorgeous, his plotting exacting and his direction astonishingly beautiful.
In that regard, while it's easy to watch The Honorable Woman chiefly for its narrative, this is very much a story told through its imagery. The series’ opening shot, of the wavy white curtain behind which Nessa’s father’s murderer later appears, is constantly called back to. In the final scene, Nessa simply looks up, broken, in front of the curtain; she's emerged in front of the drapes concealing so much ugly history and repression. Unlike what television conditionally opts for, The Honorable Woman uses visuals rather than expository dialogue to single out major motifs and themes. It's a piece of storytelling that demands not only attention, but thought: to hear every word and to see every image.
Grade: A-