…and if I was playing charades I would be miming it’s both a book and a movie. ‘Big Little Lies’ is the 2014 bestselling book by Liane Moriarty and also the highly acclaimed HBO Mini Series created by and starred in by some heavy hitting Hollywood power.
I read the book years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, but was really impressed and fascinated seeing the story come to life on screen. The tale is albeit slightly reimagined by David E. Kelley’s writing, Jean-Marc Vallee ‘s directing and the portrayal of personalities by some of Hollywood’s best. Truth be told I had tried to watch this series when it first came out but the incredible toxicity of a number of the relationships portrayed scared me off. I was dealing with cancer at the time and the fact that people could behave so badly when they have so much was too difficult for me to handle. That was my own stuff though. When I came back to the series now, I can really savor and appreciate the brilliance of the portrayal of the trail of destruction this story unveils. After all, the dynamics between families portrayed here is not at all foreign to me, and I’ve witnessed and been a part of the exact kinds of emotional drama this series conveys (minus, thank goodness, the murder part!)
The cover image for Season 1 of Big Little Lies features an image of the 3 main female characters played by Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley and Reese Witherspoon. All 3 women have a secret they harbour and lie to protect. I think it’s best to leave the mystery for those who’ve not yet watched the series but let’s just say although the subjects are all things we’ve encountered before, the tenor of them becomes as dramatic as the rugged coast in which the series is set. In the book, this story takes place in a small fictional beach town in Australia, but HBO’s version is perfectly poised on the ragged Pacific cliffs of Monterey, California.
I think this story can be appreciated by parents and non-parents alike, and the suspense is addictive as viewers watch the mayhem and mystery unfold and try to figure out not only ‘who done it’ but who gets murdered. In an usual plot arc, the victim and killer are not revealed until the last few minutes of the first season. The male and female archetypes are so convincingly painted that I was drawn into making comparisons to people I’ve experienced in real life. The story features the quintessential Queen Bee type, who has herself convinced of her do-gooding, despite being as judgmental and as flawed as kids’ birthday parties are long. She has one of my favorite lines in the season: “I love my grudges! I tend to them like little pets.”
In this story we also have a highly capable female tech CEO who is referred to as a bulldog in business editorials but we see frequently in a tearful heap trying to find resolution with domestic challenges and because she feels she is being judged by the ‘non-working’ moms. There is a nice portrayal of a hipster type dad who has a passionless marriage and works from home at his stand-up desk while simultaneously cooking dinner. We have a younger second wife who is annoyingly relaxed to the other A-type moms. She is a natural earthy type who teaches yoga, encourages harmony and is perceived as being very sensual and appealing by the men in the community. We have an incredibly smart ex-lawyer who quits her practice to raise kids and struggles with missing the fulfilment her work brought her (and the guilt about recognizing that.) We have a very sexy and financially successful dad who isn’t around much but he wanders into scenes in well-cut suits and seems affable and charming. And we have a traumatized single mom whose arrival into the community with her son is precisely what lights the fire beneath this dry pile of tinder.
In this small beach community what brings these women and men together are their children. They all have children at the quaint local elementary school and the series opens at the end of the grade 1 orientation when a little girl reveals she has been choked by one of her classmates. The plot takes off at a brisk pace with accusations being thrown at the newcomer’s son, and tempers flare enough to make instagram-worthy s’mores for all. Each of the three main characters are played SO brilliantly by Witherspoon, Kidman and Woodley and you can’t help but become enthralled as the tension of the journey toward rage and murder unfolds.
In a seemingly Hollywood type ending, season 1 concludes in a celebration of female solidarity which is something I wasn’t expecting from a group of such obviously vicious competitive women. Curiously in the book, this celebration of sisterhood doesn’t exist. In the book, the murderer admits to police what happened. In the tv version, there is a cover-up: one more not so little lie as it were. And so, what the tv series does cunningly is trail off leaving the viewer wondering what’s coming next. In the season’s final scene we see the group of women on the beach being observed through binoculars by the police detective who we know doesn’t believe what she has been repeatedly told about what happened that night. It’s the perfect jump-off for season 2 which introduces the formidable Meryl Streep as the mother of the murder victim who arrives to presumably take matters into her own hands. I expect things will heat to the next level of incendiary when this alpha female of the previous generation steps into the ring.