Traumas, old, new, forgotten, remembered, unearthed, recently acquired, or otherwise, are quickly becoming cliché in modern narrative. Our collective and personally-scaled PTSDs—recovering, grappling, bearing, negotiating with them—have become our go-to talking point about character development, impulse, motivation, and survival. But if the Emmy-winning “Big Little Lies” has anything to say about it, tremendously doubling down on the idea of trauma in its follow-up second season (allegedly its last), psychic wounds are not only here to stay, they’re still deeply rich experiences to be explored; agonizing scars that continue to scab and bleed with bruising emotional resonance.
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Based on Liane Moriarty‘s book about the deceptively flawless lives of a group of wealthy, privileged, Malibu-based women, who unravel after a murder, and created and written by TV impresario David E. Kelley, “Big Little Lies” was supposed to end, of course; a one-shot mini-series directed by an A-list filmmaker (Jean-Marc Vallée), an A-list superstar cast (Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, et al), seemingly unsustainable for repetition on a creative, scheduling, and financial level. But the show was such a huge boon for HBO, Witherspoon, and Kidman (exec produces who joined forces to option the book together in the first place), petitioned Kelly and everyone to continue. Vallée bowed out (shifting to executive producer), and Moriarty was recruited to write a new novella that Kelly once again adapted the story for TV.
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And frankly, given that we’ve come to learn about these women, their damage, the harrowing events they witnessed at the end of Season 1—shattering them, but also freeing them spiritually (at least temporarily)— it’s familiar, but better. Still dreamy with its windswept, ocean-view vistas, still ominously foreshadowing with its crashing waves, “Big Little Lies” Season 2 is much deeper and resounding, playing with trauma and memory, in an intimately compelling way.
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Hired to take over in the director’s chair is the magnificent U.K. filmmaker Andrea Arnold (known for instinctive and emotionally impressionistic works like “American Honey,” “Fish Tank,” “Wuthering Heights” and even some key episodes of “Transparent“). And while Arnold surprisingly doesn’t transform or radically overhaul the “Big Little Lies” aesthetic template—expressive and well-curated music montages, anguished flashbacks and painterly memory collages— she intuitively understands its language, the distinct visual grammar, the emotional lexicon and the storytelling dialect of suffering from a feminine perspective. Truthfully, if one were to tell you the directors hadn’t changed, you’d likely believe it, but Arnold still seems to make the same material breathe easier and more fluidly.
Perhaps some of it is improved writing too. In the lead-up to the show’s big event, the murder at the end of Season 1, the fibs and falsehoods of “Big Little Lies,” were smaller sized, driven from backstabbing and petty betrayals. Now, post-murder, everything is epic in emotional scale and the stakes are as big as they’ve ever been for this group, now dubbed the Monterey Five by the locals whispering behind their backs, dubious about their story.
There’s a huge sense of unanimity now that the cattiness of Season 1—which initially gave it shallow, soap opera-ish soccer mom melodrama-ish dimensions hard to empathize with— is over and the women have stopped with the bitchy backbiting which was engaging, entertaining, but also at times a little exhausting. Now, the tension is ratcheted up, as the women try and move on with their lives, but living under the specter of their collective lie.
Season 1 ended with the disastrous, tragic, but unifying event when Celeste’s (Kidman) physically abusive husband Perry (Alexander Skarsgard, who still appears in Season 2 in plenty of flashbacks) was accidentally killed, pushed down a set of stairs by Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz) trying to protect her—not long after Jane (Shailene Woodley) realized Perry was the man who raped her years ago.
Season 2 is the aftermath of the big lie—all the women telling the police that Perry slipped and fell and accidentally impaled himself – Detective Adrienne Quinlan (Merrin Dungey), not all that convinced, but having no proof of her suspicions.
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While the women are no longer at each other’s throats, trauma is festering. Bonnie wanders around in a melancholy haze of PTSD and remorse for what she has done. Checked out and emotionally disconnected from her family, Bonnie’s nearly a guilt-ridden Lady Macbeth figure sleepwalking at night, practically confessing to the crime. Second grade has started for the mother’s children at the prestigious school they attend, but Madeline Martha Mackenzie (Witherspoon) is deeply worried that Bonnie is going to crack and take down the whole gaggle with her.
Meanwhile, there’s a new sheriff in town in the form of Celeste’s mother-in-law Mary Louise (a naturally brilliant Meryl Streep), Perry’s mother. She’s been living with her and the two boys ever since Perry’s death and while she’s superficially helpful, she’s really a passive-aggressive, sometimes just politely aggressive inquisitor here to grill all players in this story.
In deep denial about her son—one of the most convincing elements of the show—his monstrous physical and sexual abusiveness, oh no my son could never harm a fly, Mary-Louise is a walking, talking interrotron, here to lure you in with her seemingly sweet, docile charms and then lacerate you with a withering look or hostile, cross-examining word when you least expect it. If Mary-Louise was in the wild, she’d be one of the insidious misleading predators and as you’d imagine, Streep is utterly phenomenal in the role, a woman you want to strangle for her conniving, manipulative behavior, and yet, still empathize with for her overwhelming loss.
And it’s this kind of emotional complexity that truly makes “Big Little Lies” sing in Season 2, immediately (as opposed to Season 1 which took some time to click beyond the gossipy sewing-circle qualities it had if you watched it week to week, aka, it got better as it went along and revealed its depth).
The harmony seen at the end of the empowering Season 1—we’ve vanquished that patriarchal asshole—is really a short-lived victory and this aftershock is shared devastation that ripples throughout every character and then even connects to the invasive force that is the outwardly passive, but the inveigling and scheming Mary-Louise.
Maybe it’s just that everyone’s truly comfortable in their skin, having done it once before, but the presence of Streep, seems to elevate and electrify everything; everyone bringing such compelling A-game performances to the screen.
And there’s a fascinating unraveling that’s happening as everyone tries to keep it together. Renata Klein’s (Dern) family starts to fall into financial ruin thanks to her insider-trading husband, Madeline’s relationship with Ed (Adam Scott) begins to crumble when a lie is overturned, Bonnie is essentially in free-fall, estranged from her husband (James Tupper), Celeste’s nightmares are becoming part confession screamed out loud in the middle of the night, and just when Jane seems to be the only one coping, having met an odd, but sweet young man, she’s sucked into the calculating vortex that is Mary-Louise’s DIY detective work. Elevated, emotionally-charged and amplified thanks to the presence of a legendary force on set, the damage is done and it’s eroding the women, the same way the Malibu waves chip away at those precipitously rocky cliffs. “Big Little Lies” has taken the fallout of trauma and made it the most engrossing thing on television right now and you should definitely be here for it. [B+]
“Big Little Lies” returns to HBO on June 9.
