HBO’s soaring, inventive miniseries “Olive Kitteridge” begins with the image of an old woman preparing to kill herself. Deep in the Maine woods, Olive Kitteridge lays down a wool blanket and loads a gun. The story then flashes back twenty-five years, to when she was middle-aged, but the marital landscape feels nearly as bleak. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Ollie,” Henry Kitteridge says, holding a heart-shaped box of chocolates. “Yeah, you, too, Henry,” Olive replies. Her voice is robotic, she won’t make eye contact, and she doesn’t take the box.
These early scenes hint at something caustic, like the cartoon-realist satire sometimes favored by the directors Alexander Payne and Todd Solondz. In such stories, ordinary Americans—Midwesterners, small-town types, losers and go-nowheres—are held up for mockery, as if the director were using the lens to sizzle ants. But “Olive Kitteridge” has different aims. It was made by Lisa Cholodenko, the director of loose, humane, reflexively California dramas such as “The Kids Are All Right” and “Laurel Canyon,” and adapted, by the acclaimed screenwriter Jane Anderson, from Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-winning book. In the course of four hours, the miniseries casts a West Coast spell on scenes of Yankee repression, treating its crabby heroine, a self-proclaimed “beast,” with the generosity she often has trouble showing those who love her. It respects misery without succumbing to it.
The source material is a set of thirteen taciturn, elegant short stories. Olive, a retired teacher, is the main character in some, while in others she appears only briefly. Depression and the urge to end it all are repeated motifs; there’s an unsentimental sense of late life as a period of retrenchment and regret. Cholodenko and Anderson find humor and even joy within this pungent material, heightening plot turns as they go—lost love is made central, while oblique crises take place onscreen. Henry (Richard Jenkins, underplaying wonderfully) becomes as important as Olive (Frances McDormand), while other main characters in the stories appear merely in cameos in the series. Cholodenko has assembled a remarkable ensemble, among them an affecting Zoe Kazan, as Henry’s meek assistant; Martha Wainwright, as the pianist Angela, whose songs inject episodes with emotion; and Peter Mullan (of “Top of the Lake”), who, as Olive’s teacher colleague, makes apple peeling sexy. The effect is something like a great cover of a Neil Young song: there’s a fresh verve to the lyrics, an openness as valid as the original’s blunt and mournful mode.
The relationship between literary fiction and modern TV drama has developed a disconcerting air of sibling rivalry. (“You may be the popular one, but I’m the smart one!”) At the turn of the century, novels became patronizing shorthand for ambitious cable drama: “It’s as good as Dickens.” More recently, certain networks have gone on a gold rush, bidding to turn brand-name novelists, from Salman Rushdie to Jonathan Safran Foer, into showrunners—a gambit that has produced a lot of publicity but few actual shows. Binge watching has only confused things further, since absorbing a season-long story can feel very much like reading a page-turner, chapter after compulsive chapter.
“Olive Kitteridge”—along with Damon Lindelof’s innovative version of Tom Perrotta’s “The Leftovers,” also on HBO—is evidence that even the most daunting adaptation can work, without displacing its source material. Unlike “Game of Thrones,” whose plot twists settled naturally into the form of TV cliffhangers, “Olive Kitteridge” is a densely psychological story, whose main character, played by McDormand with radical intelligence, is not merely cranky but passive. She’s an acerbic observer who was hobbled by early tragedy, a high-standards grade-school teacher who is vulnerable and passionate but rarely acts on either quality. “Sap” and “ninny” are her brand of insult; she’s clearly terrified of being one herself. Her eyes snapping with disdain, McDormand doesn’t skimp on the character’s cruelty, but she’s also a sharp, even seductive presence, a force of candor among the mealymouthed and modern. When Henry gazes at her rump, wagging toward the kitchen, you get what he sees in her. Their marriage isn’t easy, and it’s often unenviable, but it has gravity, in both senses: Henry and Olive are defined by each other’s orbit.
The miniseries’ masterpiece is the second of its four episodes, which braids several of the book’s plots into a complex story about a mentally unstable young man, a near-drowning, and a wedding. The wedding is for Olive’s son, who is played by Devin Druid, as a teen-ager, and by John Gallagher, Jr., as an adult. Cholodenko, her camera nosing through rooms like a curious guest, evokes the awkward wedding dinner (a joy for Henry, a misery for Olive), then the glorious outdoor reception near their Maine house, in which pain seethes beneath every cheerful image: we see Olive’s shy pride in her homemade dress, then the moment she snaps at a flower girl, causing her to burst into tears. Much of this is straight from the book, but the HBO series seamlessly links Olive’s disorientation with that of several other characters. In so doing, the creators honor the laws of adaptation, which are so easy to make fun of. Cholodenko “opens it up” and “raises the stakes.” Without ever being a sap, she forges connections between characters who are intractable isolates.
At this point, I’ll be spoiling something significant, so, if you feel like not knowing, skip a paragraph. As the opening scene suggests, “Olive Kitteridge” is haunted by suicide; in both versions, one of Olive’s students, Kevin (an indelible Cory Michael Smith), lives with his mentally ill mother, who kills herself. When he returns to the town, planning to do the same, his plans are disrupted by Olive, who joins him in his car, where she tells him about her own troubled history. In the book, as they talk, he imagines his teacher as a gentle elephant. In the TV show, she literally turns into an elephant: it’s a hallucination, not a metaphor, strongly suggesting that Kevin is schizophrenic. Rather than feeling clumsy, the moment suggests that anything is possible—and, as the story proceeds, Anderson’s ingenious screenplay slices in flashbacks to Kevin’s childhood, and builds a bridge between two characters with a reference to a John Berryman poem (“save us from shotguns & father’s suicides”). There’s a passage in the book in which Kevin imagines hope first as a cancer, then as plants growing: “He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer.” In the show, this idea is reinterpreted with dazzling visual surreality: as Angela sings “Close to You,” slender stalks twine up from the piano lid, as bees are buzzing, a sound at once alarming and titillating, impossible to ignore. It’s Cholodenko’s method in a nutshell: she sees beauty as an aggressive force in the world, a presence that can hurt as much as it helps.
“Jane the Virgin,” a new hour-long series on the CW, has what sounds like an unworkably goofy premise. A young virgin, Jane (the adorable Gina Rodriguez), is on the verge of getting engaged. Then, one day, Jane’s ob-gyn—distraught because of her own romantic drama—mixes up two patients. As a result, Jane is impregnated with the frozen sperm of a hotel magnate, who is recovering from cancer treatment; it is his final chance to conceive a child. The magnate’s marriage is also on the verge of collapse. Jane’s detective fiancé is investigating crimes linked to the magnate’s wife. Meanwhile, Jane’s hot-to-trot mom, who got pregnant when she was a teen-ager, is confronted by Jane’s long-lost father: it turns out that he’s the star of a telenovela.
This plot, of course, sounds like a telenovela itself, and—like the much missed ABC series “Ugly Betty”—it’s based on one: the Venezuelan hit “Juana la Virgen.” That genre, like melodrama and the much mocked soap opera, embraces the irrational: one expects high emotion, outrageous twists, and escapist fun. Instead, “Jane the Virgin” takes a forthright approach, allowing its characters to respond with logic and empathy, even when confronted with the most absurd events. The life-force-mother/cautious-daughter team is a winning combination, with echoes of “Gilmore Girls.” In a lacklustre fall season, this sweet surprise of a pilot, with its shrewd narration and likable cast, made me cross my fingers that the show can maintain its charms. When “To Be Continued” appeared, I signed up for a season pass. ♦
