Olive Kitteridge: Season 1 (2014)

In some ways, Olive Kitteridge plays as a riposte to the 2005 HBO miniseries Empire Falls. Like Empire Falls, it’s a four-part HBO miniseries set in a small town in Maine. Like Empire Falls, as well, it’s based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel – in this case, Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 collection of stories and vignettes revolving around the life and times of Olive Kitteridge, a high school Maths teacher, played by Frances McDormand, who was so drawn to the role that she optioned it immediately after reading the book. However, where Empire Falls was nostalgic for the lost Wasp world of New England, Olive Kitteridge is more interested in the late Wasp world – a world in which all the eccentricities that were once the hallmark of Waspy charisma have calcified and hardened, just as Olive’s endearing tics and traits feel as if they’ve been weathered over the years into a semi-senile intractability and inflexibility, even when she’s barely middle-aged. Less a sympathetic character than the residues of a sympathetic character, she feels too decentred from even her most charismatic impulses to be accessible to the viewer in a conventional way, which works perfectly with the decentred structure of the series itself - four more or less discontinuous and dissonant vignettes, in keeping with the structure of Strout’s novel, which actually generated some controversy about whether it even qualified as a novel at all, at least in terms of the Pulitzer critieria, just as the adaptation itself sits at an unusual cusp between miniseries, telemovie and cinematic release (all four episodes are directed by Lisa Cholodenko). Across that unusual sprawl, there are some common characters – most notably Olive’s husband, played by Richard Jenkins, as well as a pair of almost-lovers in Peter Mullen and Bill Murray - while Rosemary DeWitt, Zoe Kazan, Martha Wainwright all put in memorable cameos. Nevertheless all the people who come and go over the years finally blur into the background of Oliver’s irreducible, inscrutable isolation, which only seems to be compounded by the fact that she’s more or less single-handedly responsible for it. In the end, it feels as if Olive really does nothing but survive, or practice the art of survival – and yet that’s the art of melodrama as well, which seems even more urgent and necessary in the lingering, late world that haunts this oddball vision.