Television review: OLIVE KITTERIDGE

An already-impressive group of veteran writers, directors and actors soars beyond belief in HBO’s stunning miniseries Olive Kitteridge, whose mammoth ambition and seamless execution will likely remain unmatched by anything else on screen – big or small – in 2014.

In the hands of indie-film director Lisa Cholodenko (Oscar nominated for The Kids Are All Right), Olive is emotionally exhausting, caustically comedic and gently sardonic. It's also breathtakingly beautiful, with the shatteringly poetic words of writer Jane Anderson (she adapted from Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) set against an evocative coastal Maine landscape. The power of Olive Kitteridge is derived from its radiant beauty, funny and downright painful as it may be.

The miniseries keeps the spirit of Strout's novel, which spanned 25 years and, with the depression-addled, excessively-sarcastic Ms. Olive Kitteridge at its center, expressed the role that time and change plays in our communities, in our families and in ourselves. The book was comprised of vignettes, some more focused on Olive than others, but together they built chronologically and thematically, eventually coming together as a piece of literature that startlingly exposed the human condition.

It’s an unusual concept for a miniseries, but Anderson deftly tackles the material. The book is compressed into four hours of content here, with individual stories shuffled around but the journey and the character work of the same consistency and depth. The miniseries opens, for instance, on an elderly Olive (Frances McDormand) waddling through the woods with a shotgun; it’s a “teaser,” if such a playful term is appropriate here, darkly indicating where our protagonist will end up after our 25-year journey with her. It’s a haunting opening that lingers, mercilessly, over this tragicomic production.

**

Olive lives with her husband, Henry (Richard Jenkins) and son, Christopher (Devin Druid younger, and John Gallagher Jr. of Short Term 12 as an adult) in the small town of Crosby. Olive is a math teacher, Henry the town pharmacist – the town is tightly-knit and the Kitteridge family, irritated as Olive may be by this very fact, is fully-integrated. Surrounding them in the film’s early hours are Denise (a terrific Zoe Kazan), a young widow Henry is hopelessly falling for; Rachel (the wonderful Rosemarie DeWitt), the pill-popping mother of Olive’s brightest student, Kevin (later played by Cory Michael Smith); and Mr. Casey (Peter Mullan), a morbidly down-to-earth English teacher who Olive finds herself attracted to.

Anderson hones in on the duality Strout mines in the novel. The first hour, “Pharmacy,” elegantly cross-examines Henry and Olive’s silly flirtatious exploits; they're introduced not in a loveless, miserable marriage, but as two people searching for the new, finding comfort in opposing forces. Again, it's dichotomous in the writing: Denise is sweet as Olive is salty, Casey as damaged as Henry is content. But Henry and Olive – and Jenkins and McDormand – share remarkably subtle moments of love and understanding. Cholodenko finds a way to compensate for the absent internalizations that only a novel can provide with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments that profoundly detail her characters and her world.

This first hour is also an indication that watching Olive and looking for an overarching idea or driving theme is to completely miss the point. The underlying pain of Henry’s hopeless crush and Olive’s craving for difficulty both speak grandly to human nature, true. But in Olive Kitteridge, the expression is specific: it’s more these characters, at this time in their life, as they are. Anderson’s dichotomous method of storytelling continues through the entire miniseries – the fourth and final hour focuses on the perspectives of parenting and growing up, and how they sorely differ between Olive and Christopher – but it never feels structured or deliberate. In choosing to focus so greatly on the commonalities and the distinctions between relatives and friends and acquaintances, Anderson and Cholodenko establish a tone that is strikingly resonant and impressively understated.

This is a film that values long silences and actively avoids artificial drama – but it’s never less than gripping. Decades into the story, Olive and Henry get a call from their now-estranged son: he’s getting divorced. Olive and Henry just sit; she’s unmovable, stoic and unsure, while he is inexplicably angry. There are so few words spoken as he paces around the kitchen table, uncharacteristically upset. It's a quiet but gripping scene, reflective of Olive's nuanced ability to engross despite the valuing of long silences and authentic drama. 

In this moment comes the realization for Henry that he will not have any grandchildren, that his son will not be returning home, that he’s left with Olive. And for Olive, it’s all about regret. In not forsaking the scene's deep pain, Cholodenko handles this marriage with remarkable sensitivity and grace. Between Henry's passive-aggressiveness and Olive’s coldness is an intimacy, a love and a life shared. When Christopher later accuses Olive bitterly of giving Henry a miserable life, Olive responds in outrage. “You have no idea,” she tells him, “What it means to spend a life together.” We know how crotchety and unbearably distant Olive can be, but due to the careful work that builds up to this passionate declaration, we know exactly what she is talking about.

At the film's core is a deep, unshakable sadness. It gives you that ache, that sensation of your heart sinking the way a tear-heavy episode of Six Feet Under could. When Olive reunites with Kevin at an older age, severely damaged as a result of his mother’s eventual suicide, we spend 10 or 15 minutes in the car with them. We listen to them speak: we see Olive’s easiness with another irreparably damaged soul, and we feel Kevin’s unending pain. They’re at the water, grey skies and strong winds and almost no one around: like they’re at the end of the world. There’s such inescapable emotion in this moment, observing Olive so abstractly connected to this person for so long due to that shared experience of practical numbness. And this scene, long and still as it may be, is simply eruptive: Olive is always funny and always heartbreaking, no more so than when she’s next to a person that she can bear her deepest self to.

**

It's that sort of balance that renders Cholodenko ideal for this job; indeed, this is far and away her greatest directorial accomplishment to date. In The Kids Are All Right, she possessed a curious ability to wring great humor out of luminous character moments – think of Annette Bening belting out Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” – and in general, had a terrific handle on balancing comedy and drama. Those qualities would be imperative for any director of Olive Kitteridge – along with the messy, complex and dark family dynamics of a movie like Kids – and Cholodenko again hits those notes. But what stands out – what surprises – is her eye, her attention to detail, her simultaneously wide and narrow vision. 

In our first present-day scene, Henry instructs Rachel to keep her house brightly lit, for, in his mind, it’ll make her happier. Such an innocuous initial conversation is representative of Olive in the obvious sense, but Cholodenko focuses so much on light throughout –  on the dimness of family dinners in the early hours, on the sunlight finding its way through trees in the woods that Olive eventually ends up in, on the brightness of her homemade, oft-mocked wedding dress. There’s an intoxicating sensory flow to Cholodenko’s work, and whenever Olive is out looking on the water, the director attains visual poetry: a person without a place to really belong, standing still and alone.

Even more notable is the fact that this is a high point in the career of Ms. McDormand, an Oscar- and Tony-winner. This might be the best role she’s ever had, showing off every element in her canon of abilities. She can be funny, with impeccable comic timing as in Burn After Reading; she can be gloriously impatient and snarky, as demonstrated in Friends with Money; and she can express deep humanity and authenticity with utmost consistency, most notably in Fargo. Here, it’s all on display: she is acerbic, she is tragic, she is fearsome, she is brilliant. She filters Cholodenko’s many ideas – about the mundane, and depression, and marriage, and aging, and parenthood, and regret – into a wholly believable creation. It’s the kind of performance that leaves you in awe – this is connective work, in the purest sense of the word.

Henry is just as crucial to this story – and, if I can say it a third time, it’s a career-defining performance for Richard Jenkins. His work has always seriously impressed, from funny turns on Six Feet Under and in Burn After Reading to a wowing dramatic role in The Visitor. But here, again, he’s able to show off everything that he can do; he’s playful with Henry’s idealism and reserved nature, but never judgmental. And his chemistry and work with McDormand is a sight to behold; in speaking about how Cholodenko conveys so much with so little, it really comes down to the actors to deliver it. The affection that Jenkins is able to bring to Henry and to the marriage is absolutely critical. And on the other hand, there’s the sad truth – the pain – that Olive can be so distant so often. Jenkins finds an emotive center that doesn’t go pitiful or maudlin.

**

There’s a moment when Olive Kitteridge sort of breaks its own rules, when a robbery at a hospital leaves Henry and Olive fearful hostages. Initially, it’s puzzling – there’s a creeping worry that this, like everything it’s tried not to be, has descended into easy conflict. But just the opposite happens: Olive and Henry are finally stripped of their guards, and they scream at one another, mocking each other for being too simple (Henry) or too mean (Olive) and for chasing after a girl that’s predictably young (in Henry’s case) or a man that’s predictably damaged (in Olive’s). It’s cathartic – and eventually, they just laugh, hysterically. The affairs wouldn’t last, they tell each other; Henry needs that salty side, while Olive needs a person just kind enough to take her crap.

This aside puts so much into perspective for the miniseries, and allows the difficulty of Olive having to care for a dying Henry, for instance, to really translate. Much of this narrative is about depression – though Olive is happy to be depressed, she tells her young son, because it “means you’re smart” – and aimless regret. Characters live their lives in this town, not really going anywhere and wishing for something, anything, to be different, even if they don’t really admit it to themselves. Olive is the Larry David figure in all this – she tells you when it’s bullshit, when things are going to go horribly wrong, when you’re behaving amusingly predictably – but she, too, is a victim of this town’s, of the world’s, syndrome.

After Henry passes and she’s left alone, she momentarily lies in bed with a fellow widower, played to perfection by Bill Murray. There’s light shining through the window, there’s a man in pain beside her, there’s the sound of the water outside – there is life in this moment. She had a marriage that was never quite right, if always filled with love; she parented from a distance and sometimes poorly, if always with the best intentions; she lived in a town that mostly irritated and frustrated her, even if it accepted her and even if she stayed for decade after decade. Olive is in pain, Olive is a loner, Olive is a smartass. And she always was. But when she looks out the window, clinging to her sheets with a man beside her, she just takes a breath. She reflects – she lived a life. Sun shining on her face, she finally admits it to herself: “I find it baffling, this life, but I don’t want to leave it.”

Grade: A