Big Little Lies goes beyond the petty and snarky clichés of rich women

Opinion

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This article was published 04/03/2017 (3113 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Big Little Lies (Sunday nights, HBO Canada) seems soapy at first. The title is soapy. The setting — a very expensive stretch of coastal California — is soapy. The prodigious white wine consumption is soapy.

Offering a familiar combination of handsome real estate and horrible behaviour, the series stars Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern as mothers whose seemingly perfect lives come undone over an incident in their children’s Grade 1 class, as parental rivalries and parking-circle tensions descend into murder.

Directed by Quebec filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée and adapted by David E. Kelley from the novel by Australian Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies starts out looking like Real Housewives of Monterey crossed with Mean Girls, but its clichés are blatant because they are there to be upended.

https://youtu.be/nS0UsecjHx8

What first seems like a pot-boiling mystery and satisfyingly nasty schadenfreude-fest becomes — thanks to well-written and expertly played 40-something female characters — a complex, nuanced and unexpectedly affecting drama.

There are a few ways Big Little Lies plays with expectations.

IT’S GOT KILLER BEACHFRONT PROPERTIES

My gosh, the real-estate porn in this show, which ranges from minimalist modernism to neo-rustic farmhouse. Every meal, every outfit, every cedar deck overlooking the Pacific is Instagram-worthy.

Basically everything resembles the well-curated surfaces of a lifestyle blog, except for, you know, that brutal bludgeoning death.

In a related note, the show also suggests that people who live in beachfront properties are miserable

It’s human nature: Most of us — especially those getting by on less than the $150,000 per year that is considered basic subsistence by the Big Little Lies crowd — only want to see the lives of the wealthy if we can be simultaneously assured that these folks are desperately unhappy.

While spoofing elite yoga classes and Burberry children’s clothing, Big Little Lies never overplays that eat-the-rich vibe. It reveals its insular upper-middle-class characters as complex, conflicted and — ultimately — sympathetic

A key scene between Celeste (Kidman) and her investment banker husband Perry (Alexander Skarsgard) takes place in their gorgeous, capacious customized walk-in closet. (Her shoes have their own mood lighting.) It feels at first like a House Beautiful layout, until the scene spirals into an unsettling revelation about their marriage, one that transcends income levels.

IT’S NOT ABOUT CATFIGHTS

Witherspoon’s character, Madeline, is a stay-at-home mother and the kind of pert Type-A maniac the actress excels at playing. Her nemesis is Renata (Dern), a high-powered Silicone Valley executive.

As battle lines are drawn over a mishandled bullying incident, the school’s parents sign on for Team Madeline or Team Renata, but this never devolves into a trumped-up Mommy War. In fact, the smart script suggests that the whole notion of maternal competition is a distraction.

Big Little Lies’ trailer might play up rumours, rivalries and intrigue, but the actual storyline is much more about female friendship.

OK, IT’S A TEENY BIT ABOUT CATFIGHTS

There’s a perfect moment when the usually sweet-faced Dern somehow summons Tony Soprano depths of menace to say to Madeline: “Do not f*** with my daughter’s birthday party.”

I admit it. I was pretty thrilled.

IT’S SOAPY BUT SELF-AWARE

Scripter Kelley, who’s been criticized for his representation of women ever since the Ally McBeal days, seems keen to get out in front of potential attacks here.

The series is structured as scenes leading toward a death — its exact nature still unclear — intercut with the police investigation of that death. In the first five minutes, a witness remarks that “it’s sexist how the women always get blamed.”

She’s onto something there: we fixate on the shoe collection of the kleptocrat’s wife, rather than the brutal policies of the kleptocrat. We focus on the snobbery of the Upper East Side socialite, rather than the unethical profiteering of her hedge-fund manager husband. This is a form of cultural censure that runs from Marie Antoinette to today’s reality TV.

Big Little Lies might seem to be set up that way, with the women as petty, snarky, well-groomed exemplars of entitlement and inequality, but the series is hyper-conscious of the way our culture typecasts these characters. The women themselves play up these clichés and then — increasingly — resist them, first with dark, self-deprecating humour and then with something a little more desperate.

IT’S FINITE

With that catchy but weirdly generic title, Big Little Lies does sound like one of those shows that just goes on and on, becoming more preposterous and played-out every season. In fact, it follows the limited-series model, which is — thankfully — starting to take hold in American TV.

So, seven episodes and it’s a wrap. There will be eventually be some bombshell plot revelations, I’m sure, but for now I’m plenty transfixed by the slow, sneaky revelation of the show’s complicated female characters.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca