Arson, and all its symbolic fiery rage, is an unspeakable crime. But when committed with purposeful incendiary malice, it’s an unimaginably personal agony and intimate loss for victims. This is the emotional catastrophe where Hulu‘s new series “Little Fires Everywhere” concludes. But like so many framing devices that exploit and tease their climax, it’s the catalyzing spark where it begins— an arson, as suburban mom Elena Richardson (Reese Witherspoon), watches in horror as her beloved home and all it symbolizes in her affluent community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, burns to the ground. But the eight-episode limited series, as it flashes back on the roots and triggers of the conflagration, quickly suggests this blaze is of Elena’s own making.
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The story behind the cause of these blisteringly personal and emotional flames is much more complicated than that, and it’s not. Self-righteous, type A, busy body Elena Richardson is meddlesome, patronizing, and believes she can control everything and everyone—and yes, there’s echoes to her supercilious and domineering mother character in “Big Little Lies,” which is somewhat the design. And at times, Elena’s loathsomely petty, indelicate and detestably insensitive to her powers of privilege. Does “Little Fires Everywhere,” suggest she deserves this inferno? No, not really—not exactly— but given where some of the story goes, and the emotional transgressions and betrayals she commits in the name of a deeply misguided sense of morality and insincere empathy, you might not only find yourself contemptuous of her fraudulent self-sacrifice but rooting for that mother*cker of a mansion of hers to burn to its bedrock.
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And yet, she’s flawed like the rest of us. This is all to say, “Little Fires Everywhere” attempts to be a complex humanist drama which features a lot of terrific emotional and social commentary about race, motherhood, and the overwhelming advantages of privilege, but lord, its proclivities towards suburban mom soap-opera-y melodrama in favor of something as thoughtful as its topics are so undermining and blazingly frustrating at times.
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Based on Celeste Ng‘s eponymous novel, “Little Fires Everywhere” centers on the intertwining fates of two very different families and the idyllic bubble of the wealthy and affluent Richardsons—lead by the intrusive Elena, a local journalist, and her prominent lawyer husband, Bill (Joshua Jackson. Their facade is upended and eventually burst upon the arrival of the struggling and rootless Warren family lead by the proud, defiant, and mysterious single mom and artist Mia (Kerry Washington, a co-producer, along with Witherspoon) and her teenage daughter Pearl (Lexi Underwood).
The Richardson family is overloaded with the emotional drama of many teenagers too; the popular and self-important eldest Lexie (Jade Pettyjohn), the clueless, jock-ish asshole Trip (Jordan Elsass), the sensitive Moody (Gavin Lewis) and the little black misfit sheep, and budding emo-Goth/Lilith Fair lesbian rebel Izzy (Megan Stott), who is bullied at school.
Whether its conscious or not, prejudicial ambivalence—a very white psychological phenomenon, triggered by the uncomfortableness some people feel when others occupy their spaces and make their privilege that much more unmistakable—feels like a very real cognitive dissonance felt by Elena. When the Warrens move to town looking for an apartment—and Elena notices them sleeping in their car—she quickly rents them their nearby second house, inordinately dropping the price in doing so to “help.” It feels like do-gooding generosity on the surface, but as Elena’s emotionally withholding and self-absorbed personality begins to become more clear, the intentions begin to appear less and less benevolent.
And just as the prideful, mistrustful, and rulebreaking Mia hesitantly accepts and soaks this new situation in—Elena’s evident phoniness putting her “proceed with caution” antenna on high alert from the jump—the families become inextricably entangled, the Richardsons seemingly completely drawn to the Warrens. The quiet and vulnerable Moody ingratiates himself to the shy Pearl, but she soon takes a shine to the older, more bad boy, Trip. Lexie and the rebellious Izzy aren’t quite as involved at first—the former dating a Black football player at school which has its own set of massive problematic blind spots and the latter struggling with her sexuality and a fallout with her best friend—but soon, but find themselves in Mia’s orbit in an alternate motherly capacity.
Making matters more complicated, Elena condescendingly offers Mia a job as a maid—they use the euphemism of house manager to make it more bearable to both of them. And against her better judgment, and so she can keep tabs on Pearl, so she tells herself, anyhow, the enigmatic artist accepts. Their tentative friendship soon becomes a brittle, awkwardly polite frenemies dynamic laced with toxic passive-aggressiveness.
“Little Fires Everywhere” gets even more combustible when the dark secrets of Mia’s past begin to surface (and eventually explode everywhere), teenagers involved in the intermingling lose their virginity to one another, quiet heartbreaks occur, a different adolescent gets pregnant and has to have an abortion, etc. etc. And I haven’t even mentioned the subplot concerning the Richardson’s family friends who attempt to adopt an Asian baby—that turns out to be the same Asian baby that Mia’s co-worker, Huang Lu (Bebe Chow), at a Chinese restaurant abandoned in a post-partum spurt of despair and is now trying to relocate.
Suffice to say there’s arguably too much going on in “Little Fires Everywhere,” and the melodrama and contrivances of the writing really challenge the good empathic and social/cultural texture addressed. The series, really, is an emotional mess, both in ways that feel extremely authentic in its thoughtful contemplation of the complications of motherhood, adolescence being a woman, being Black in America—and extremely soapy in some of the strained and hokey plot manipulations and twists. That said, even some of that convincing relationship layers becomes overwrought when tensions between the moms spills into something that resembles a kind of cattiness you might see on network TV (think “Scandal” or “The Affair,” shows that started out ok at first, and then went quickly south with trite and hammy histrionics).
Set in the late ’90s—good from a dramatic point of view since it allows everyone to be less woke and way more problematic, even though the series seems to pain itself to not be too problematic—this presents its own set of problems (“Fiona Apple was right, the world is bullshit!” is a real, and hilariously silly line of dialogue delivered from an angsty teen). Primarily directed by indie filmmaker Lynn Shelton (“Touchy Feely, “Laggies,” plus plenty of TV work like “New Girl,” “Glow, “Love,” Maron“) who helmed the pilot, the finale and is also an executive producer on the series, plus Nzingha Stewart (“For Colored Girls“) and Michael Weaver (“Super Troopers“), much of the series, unfortunately, doesn’t have much of an authorial stamp to it and feels fairly anonymous. If there’s one directorial choice that appears in nearly every episode—and it’s a deeply unfortunate one—it’s the inclusion of a moody trailer music-like cover (read: butchering) of a classic ’80s or ’90s song (Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, The Cure, etc.) that ends the episode in an angsty montage of where everyone’s at emotionally. It’s cringeworthy, for certain, but otherwise, “Little Fires Everywhere” doesn’t have the visual or musical cinematic zest that “Big Little Lies” did.
And that’s apt because “Little Fires Everywhere” feels like sister series in some ways, or at least trying to continue that same track (and success) of Witherspoon’s resurging mature career path that started with 2014’s more emotionally sophisticated and brave “Wild” (tellingly, also directed by the “Big Little Lies” director Jean-Marc Vallée).
It’s hard to say whether a better filmmaker would have helped the series any. There’s a good cast here, and Ng’s novel is well-regarded, but the story and emotional treacheries are just so theatrical and never convincing enough, it’s hard to see how even Vallée’s expressive filmmaking could have dialed this back.
Maddeningly, there’s quite a bit of good stuff in here about the painful weight of secrets, the ferocious demands of motherhood, and much more. For Witherspoon’s character; the dangers of perfection, the obsessive futilities of trying to carefully plot a life and holding on too tight as a parent. For Washington’s character, well, everything about Black female identity and lack thereof; the agonies of not being valued, not being understood, and all the accumulated fury that comes with not being truly seen in life. Still, for all the intense and scalding emotional infernos in “Little Fires Everywhere,” its tendencies to lean into the hot agitation of blood and thunder just becomes too sweltering to bear and averting the disasters in overplaying drama becomes impossible. [C]