Big Little Lies: A polished affair with an intriguing mystery

WITH a cast including Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley, what excuse do you have for not watching this?

Who’s hiding what?

REVIEW

WHEN a TV series boasts a cast including Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern and Zoe Kravitz, you sit up and pay attention.

These are actors you haven’t found on your small screen in a long time, if ever.

Taking on Australian author Liane Moriarty’s best-selling book, the adaptation of Big Little Lies was initially conceived as a feature film. But then Witherspoon and Kidman, who both produced, realised that the time constraints of a movie meant you couldn’t flesh out the characters in the way they wanted to.

By the time the series went into production, the project secured David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, The Practice) as its writer and showrunner and Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club, Wild) to direct all seven episodes.

Consequently, there’s a stylistic cohesion to Big Little Lies that’s not always present in a medium that usually changes directors from episode to episode.

The school pick-up is fraught with controversy.

Set in upscale Monterey, a seaside community just south of California’s Silicon Valley, Big Little Lies starts with a murder and flashes back to how it got there. The mystery here isn’t just who did it, but also who’s dead, the identity of the victim obscured from the audience.

Witherspoon is in her element as Madeline Mackenzie who’s taken up single mum Jane’s (Woodley) cause after Jane’s son is accused of choking classmate Annabella on their first day of school. There’s a touch of the Tracy Flick in Witherspoon’s intensity as busybody Madeline.

Annabella’s mum (Dern) is a high-powered alpha woman who’s used to getting her way and won’t take the slight against her daughter lightly. The battlelines are drawn and the whole community is forced to take sides.

Despite its picturesque location and upper-middle class fortunes, there are secrets lurking under the shiny facade, behind every closed door. One such secret keeper is Kidman’s character, former lawyer Celeste, an almost ethereal creature with a cloud of sadness floating about her. Statuesque and calm, her marriage with the younger Perry (Alexander Skarsgard) is passionate and violent.

Another enigma is Jane’s move to Monterey — why is she really here, and what’s she running from?

Some marriages hold dark secrets.

Told almost entirely in flashback, the story is punctuated with bursts of the present-day murder investigation while interviews with teachers and other parents in the interrogation room function as a gossipy Greek chorus.

Big Little Lies scatters crumbs of the central mystery deftly enough that it hooks you in, demanding your return week after week to ruminate on these questions of parenthood, relationships and power.

It’s a polished, high-end production with accomplished performances from an excellent cast. And it’s going to be the big talking point in TV drama over the next seven weeks.

Big Little Lies starts on Foxtel’s Showcase channel tonight at 8.30pm.

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