The first episode of “Big Little Lies” is a heady mix of style, beauty, and mystery. Vallee and his regular cinematographer Yves Bélanger shoot Monterey like it’s the French Riviera. They love sunsets and gorgeous architecture and expensive fashion and kitchens that cost more than your entire house. It is a series dripping with opulence; the premiere in particular is intoxicating. And yet they waste no time to highlight the insidious dissatisfaction of this world. Almost every person in this series is what I like to call a “Grass is Greener Person.” Even in these lives that would make most people jealous, they’re itching for something else, trying to find that elusive thing that will truly make them happy—always talking about moving, changing jobs, cheating, finding a new school, etc. And they’re often pinning their happiness on the success of their children—so the drama at school, even though it’s just first-grade, becomes an amplified vision of their own insecurities. Their self-worth hinges so much on how other people see them that even a drama involving their children sends them spiraling.
Of course, gender roles also play a major part in “Big Little Lies,” from the controlling husband to the relatively useless one to the insecure one. These are men often in constant need of attention, as childish as the first-graders (arguably more so given how mature these kids are presented). They can also be violent and horrible. And the show sometimes feels like it’s pushing against a trivialization of domestic violence, but that’s from the source material, and something the cast here does everything they can to avoid, bringing truth to melodrama.
About that cast—it’s hard to know where to begin in terms of singling people out because everyone here is so remarkably good. Belanger’s spectacular cinematography—few people have ever used California sunlight this well—is the element of the show that will be underrated, and Kelley’s gift for dialogue has rarely been this sharp, but it’s the ensemble that makes “Big Little Lies” an event. In smaller roles, Dern, Kravitz, and Scott are fantastic, but it’s the trio at the front of the show that keep it fascinating, particularly Nicole Kidman. She finds something heartbreakingly real about a woman who everyone thinks is perfect to a degree that she feels she has no one with which to share her pain. It’s one of Kidman’s best performances (and I could say the same about Witherspoon and Woodley).
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