TV Reviews, Nicole Kidman in The Undoing and ABC’s Reputation Rehab
Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant are a wealthy couple living the dream in Upper Manhattan until everything starts to unravel this series from the writer of Big Little Lies
‘Perfect love may cast out fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love,” the great crime writer P. D. James suggested, and it might just be the perfect epigraph for the script of The Undoing. This is the lustrous-looking, glamorous production from Nicole Kidman and David E. Kelley following on from their hugely successful Big Little Lies. And while it’s seemingly a much more conventional murder thriller, it appears to have some ideas in common. Again, from the first episode at least, it appears to be about deceit and the way it can create serious delusions beyond our control, often with heartbreaking consequences.
Kelley is now very much in demand after it was felt his talk-driven dramas (Ally McBeal, Boston Legal), so successful in their time, were just too dated in this new high-end streamer universe. He created and wrote The Undoing, the director being the Oscar-winning Susanne Bier, who did such a stunning job on TV’s The Night Manager, for which she won an Emmy.
What they present is a highly cinematic eight hours of domestic noir, a term coined by author Julia Crouch in 2013, but a genre that in cinema has its origins in the marriage thrillers of the 1940s and 50s, those claustrophobic women-in-peril tales of mystery and danger in domestic circumstances.
Adapted from the Jean Hanff Korelitz novel You Should Have Known, which might give you some sense of where this is all heading as a psychological thriller, Kidman and co-star Hugh Grant play Grace and Jonathan Fraser. They’re a couple living a life of seeming contentment and entitlement with their young son Henry – (a nice performance from Noah Jupe) – in an expensive Upper Manhattan apartment. She’s a high-end therapist – “They like you to give them the hard truths, then they fire you for delivering them” – her husband a paediatric oncologist who once featured in New York magazine.
He’s played with all Grant’s mischievous and flirtatious charm as a kind of Woody Allen character, his life characterised he says by existential anxiety, all “slump, sob, dread, despair”. Kidman’s Dr Grace simply seems to dream her way through a perfect New York life, though, as a professional, she obviously has a sharp understanding of the psychological manipulation that pushes someone to act in ways of which they thought themselves incapable. Personally it’s a different story, Grace seemingly the epitome of niceness and kindness.
Their marriage is idyllic until Grace encounters a young woman called Elena Alves, played by the Italian actor Matilda De Angelis, who is not only beautiful – there is some startling nudity – but noticeably younger.
They first meet at a school fundraising committee meeting with other mothers from the expensive inner-city Reardon School, where the fees start at around $50,000 a year. Elena’s son attends the elite college on a scholarship. It’s Elena’s first time and she arrives with a screaming baby which she proceeds to breastfeed, somewhat combatively. “She was passive aggressive about it,” one of the women disapprovingly says later. But Grace is sympathetic, defending the young woman against the condescension of her wealthy friends and a strange, almost magnetic relationship seems to form between them.
Kidman is terrific in this first episode. With subtlety and economy, she briefly finds one emotion and then imperceptibly shifts to the next, her face altering that familiar air of self-sufficient composure to meet the demands of the moment. Few performers can find the depth of feeling expressed in close-up like Kidman. “Anybody who has seen Nicole in anything knows that you only see the tip of the iceberg,” Bier says. “There is so much, which she will never reveal. That makes her eternally charismatic.”
Unfortunately the first episode does take a long time to develop any energy, saved by Kelley’s witty dialogue, the pleasure of just watching Kidman, and Grant’s abrasively charming performance (Jonathan is such a good man that immediately doubts arise about him). But by the end though we are left with a violent death, and the beginning of what will obviously be a tragic chain of events, and the sense that everything has instantly altered for Grace and her husband.
Bier directs with great style, moving her characters around a beautifully photographed pre-Covid Manhattan by Anthony Dod Mantle, Oscar-winner for Slumdog Millionaire, his images featuring a slightly burnished touch somehow suggestive of the opulent lifestyles of the story’s New York upper crust (Bier was fortunate enough to pick up the same crew that had just finished shooting Scorsese’s The Irishman in New York).
The Undoing is a clever title, itself giving several clues to the machinations of this increasingly complicated story. “Undoing” suggests the cause of someone’s ruin or downfall, but “undo” is about unfastening or untying something, and this story from the start is not only about the seeming collapse of a marriage, but of course may not be so, but the untying of multiple plot threads Kelley has established that might just do your head in. (“Choosing to unknow things is a fascinating part of human nature – when and what you choose to believe and what you choose to see,” Kidman said recently of the enigmatic subtext of Kelley’s script and her own character.)
Those though who devour crime fiction will probably quickly pick up various pointers and signs to what might eventually happen to our richly entitled characters. But as the first episode ends, there’s little doubt we are in for a ride as Kelley and Bier confound both our expectations and those of their characters, constantly turning their story upside down.
The ABC presents a rather droll divertissement in a piece of new programming this week, another example how in these increasingly straitened times Aunty needs to find entertaining ways to fill the many gaps in its programming slate caused by the lack of funding. Called Reputation Rehab, it’s a cleverish, if somewhat modest, and at times amusingly ramshackle, interview dash sketch show that tackles the odious notion of public shaming, and the media outrage cycle that accompanies it.
The Checkout’s Kirsten Drysdale and Zoe Norton Lodge, two young women they tell us modestly with “perfect reputations”, centre this factual hybrid. It’s a show that crosses the interview and makeover genres, with the standard psychological dramatic touches nicely parodied. The idea is to break through the new normal of public humiliation, which so easily can become a kind of civil warfare. And they investigate with empathy and humour, along with some robust knockabout comedy; the idea is to find tarnished reputations and “lovingly bring back their shine”.
“Shame” they tell us at the start in graphic form, with a little psychobabble help from Wikipedia, “is an unpleasant self-conscious emotion typically associated with a negative evaluation of the self; withdrawal motivations; and feelings of distress, exposure, mistrust, powerlessness and worthlessness.” And the idea is to each week introduce someone who has been through the outrage mill and discover what happens to them once the scandal passes. Early in the season they explore “reality villains”, those wannabe TV stars who have experienced a torrent of abuse and even death threats from viewers; and the faces behind appalled Covid headlines, the beachgoers and cough shamers.
First up though, it’s the “bad boy” of tennis, Nick Kyrgios, that “national embarrassment” and “disgrace to the game”, who somehow they manage to inveigle into being interviewed in the backyard of his family home. After talking with him, they consult a group of “real people”, wittily cast as it turns out – a touch of Gogglebox here – to discover how the rather hysterical coverage of the tennis star aligns with their own views, and interview various experts, both from the tennis world and that of so-called media trainers.
There are some clever stunts too from director Steven Kirkby and producer Sarah Douglas, a little rough and ready maybe but still amusing. One of their interview subjects is forced through a tortuous media conference, with others they Photoshop a new hairstyle for Kyrgios, and in the best sketch they confront the brilliant journalist and novelist Malcolm Knox about an excoriating story he once wrote about the player.
Kyrgios comes across as someone who in fact doesn’t need to rehabilitate anything, let alone his reputation. He’s engaging, intelligent, and rather wholesome, and quite amused by the situation in which he’s placed for this show.
The logo on his tracksuit might say Freak but he’s certainly not one; in fact he’s the most amiable of blokes. And he makes some good points, without rancour or resentment at the way he’s been treated over his still shortish career, the culture of tennis itself his opponent as much as the Federers and Nadals.The Undoing, Monday, streaming on Binge and 8.30pm Fox Showcase.
Reputation Rehab, Wednesday, 9.05, ABC..