StemCell Therapy

It would be nice, as America lurches into a coronavirus shutdown, to immerse in a simpler time say, maybe the late 1990s, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a place where keeping your lawn below six inches is seen as a pressing concern. In this idyllic suburb outside Cleveland, appearances are paramount, and talking politics taboo. Its not a far cry from the insular, subtext-laden Monterey of Big Little Lies, in which Reese Witherspoon navigated an all-star cast of highly competitive mothers for a greater, if troubled, cause of female solidarity amid domestic abuse.

Little Fires Everywhere, Hulus confident if ultimately limited adaptation of Celeste Ngs 2017 bestselling book (Ng also serves as producer and co-writer), will no doubt draw comparisons to Big Little Lies. Its also produced by and starring Witherspoon as sharp-eyed queen of a town with its own code of wealth and sanitized language determined to unravel a central, disturbing mystery though it doesnt have as much to say beyond a personal melodrama backlit by an impression of an archetypical wealthy American suburb.

The series, adapted for television by Liz Tigelaar, starts, like the book, with said mystery: Elena Richardson (Witherspoon) stands stricken on her lawn, watching her slate-roofed house go up in flames. Shes quintessential Shaker, a planner and image upholder, married to a defense attorney (Joshua Jackson) and the type to send her children (four kids in four years, all in high school) to school with letter-shaped pancakes and a directive for extracurriculars. Her three eldest, senior Lexie (Jade Pettyjohn), junior Trip (Jordan Elsass), and sophomore Moody (Gavin Lewis) suspect their youngest sister, black sheep Izzy (Megan Stott) of arson a hunch their mother refuses to accept. Shes likely to suspect the enigmatic tenant of her parents old duplex, nomadic artist Mia Warren (Kerry Washington) and her teenage daughter Pearl (Lexi Underwood).

The show backtracks four months to August 1997, and unspools the drama over eight hour-long episodes (seven of which were available for critics). In the waning days of summer, Elena battles with Izzy, who, unbeknownst to the family, is bullied at school for an unknown transgression. Elena rents to a reasonably wary Mia, who makes ends meet with cobbled together server jobs and artwork, and naive Pearl. Their presence sets off a chemical reaction between the two families: Pearl entrances Moody with her quiet intelligence, but is attracted to Trip; Lexie magnetizes Pearl with her thoughtless popularity; Mia draws in Izzy with her nomadic artist life, a rejection of all things Shaker; Mia and Elena fascinate and repulse each other Mia wheedles into the Richardson fray to protect their daughter, while Elena, her journalism career thwarted by children, investigates Mias past.

The series sticks, for the most part, to the book, with one major difference: Mia and Pearl, whose race is not specified in the book, are black characters in the show, adding a fraught jolt to the polarity between the two families. The decision contrasts the mothers even more starkly, and illuminates the bold prejudice and self-righteous blindness of Shaker Heights and its ilk. Suddenly, Elenas offer for Mia to be her house manager has wider significance, as does Lexies use of Pearls story for a college application essay. Some of the Richardsons dinner table scenes read more as compendiums of various micro-aggressions than actual scene of people at dinner, but the point gets across.

But whereas the book traced the knotted threads connecting two families, especially its high school characters, the shows center of gravity is Mia and Elena their differences in worldview, race, and privilege, their fierce codes as mothers and eventual obsessive crusades against each other. Washington and Witherspoon anchor such a fixation; their lines are heavy with sometimes clunky monologues but its a thrill to watch, for example, their uneasy tolerance, even understanding, evaporate in real time in a standout second episode scene (with wine, naturally). Their fault lines rupture further over an explosive parental rights case. Mia takes the side of her coworker at a Chinese restaurant, Bebe Chow (Lu Huang), an illegal immigrant who left her infant by a fire station in poverty-strained postpartum fog. Elena supports her infertile best friend Linda (Rosemarie Dewitt), who is finalizing the adoption of Bebes daughter and is desperate not to lose another child.

Both Mia and Elena insert themselves into the case intimately and insensibly, and the second half of the series diverts from Shaker into their pasts to justify why each woman responds to the case so intensely. Little Fires Everywhere becomes, ultimately, a referendum on motherhood filtered through middlebrow drama the choices mothers make, the worlds they do or do not provide, the secrets they keep, the control they want and increasingly cant have.

Like The Morning Show, yet another show produced and starring Witherspoon, Little Fires Everywhere throws a lot of fraught themes at the wall the myth of color-blindness, sexuality, motherhood, abortion, transracial adoption. Not all of them land, and the combination of so many in one series can sometimes feel chaotic, especially when some of the younger characters remain opaque. But its compulsively watchable, a portrait of two combustible women anchored by magnetic performances which, in these times, works in its favor.

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Little Fires Everywhere review Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington square off - The Guardian

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