It’s hard not to go into HBO’s “Sharp Objects” miniseries with searingly high expectations given that the series is based on the eponymous novel by “Gone Girl” author Gillian Flynn, directed by “Big Little Lies” helmer Jean-Marc Vallée, created by “UnREAL” showrunner Marti Noxon, and led by the incomparable Amy Adams. “Sharp Objects” has been boiling over with feminist potential since its inception and, as HBO exec Casey Bloys touted in an April interview, stirring the pot of anticipation, “I can’t think of a more complicated female lead.” It is with great regret that I inform you, then, that “Sharp Objects” is just good, but not quite as remarkable as one hoped.
The series follows Camille Preaker (Adams) an enigmatic, self-destructive, brooding journalist with a dark past, a monstrous drinking problem, and a lifetime of emotional and psychological damage she hasn’t faced. When Camille’s gruff, yet sweet boss, sends her back to her hometown, Wind Gap, Missouri, to cover a killer targeting little girls — one recently disappeared and one murdered the year before — this unexpected homecoming acts as a catalyst in unlocking years of painful childhood memories that Camille’s buried deep down inside or cathartically carved out elsewhere.
In her trip back home to investigate the, possibly serial-killer-based murders, she’s forced to contend with her fraught girlhood and her monstrously manipulative, strangely eerie mother Adora (Patricia Clarkson), as the mystery of Wind Gap becomes further tangled with her own family secrets.
As a protagonist, Camille is frustratingly inscrutable. Aimless and alcoholic (to the point where, like Don Draper before her, it should be scientifically impossible for her to speak, much less drive), Camille floats through Wind Gap without clear motivation. Though she is ostensibly there to report on a serious crime, and yes, her empathetic boss does give her tons of leeway, she barely works, instead getting caught up in dubious romances and drowning under an expressive swell of her own memories. (When she does work, it seems a wonder she was ever hired by her paper in the first place — one scene, where she writes and sends last-minute copy in the body of an email, is sure to confound real journalists worldwide.)
Camille’s lackadaisical approach to her job isn’t necessarily unconvincing — fans of the book will certainly argue that this is just a very faithful rendering of its similarly wishy-washy lead — but it doesn’t quite work for a TV show. Since viewers have no access to Camille’s internal monologue the way readers do, her decisions can appear more than just misguided; lazy at best and outright stupid at worst (looking at you, Episode 7). It’s more than fair, and even refreshing, for a show to depict a stunted, older female character frozen under the weight of her emotional baggage, regressing back to the teenage confusion that lingers in her hometown, but “Sharp Objects” does little to sell viewers on that nuanced point of view. Where “Gone Girl” has Amy’s famous “cool girl” speech, her raison d’etre in a storm of antagonistic misandry, “Sharp Objects” offers no such insight into Camille’s confounding intransigence. She is neither protagonist nor anti-hero, and she’s certainly not a villain. She’s just flawed.
This is, of course, a feminist project on its own, and one that Vallée’s team (particularly Vallée himself, with some Emmy-worthy editing) takes great care to pursue. Flashes of ghosts from Camille’s past haunt every episode, imbuing the series with a kind of southern gothic dreaminess like a cross between Amazon’s “Picnic At Hanging Rock” and a V. C. Andrews novel. Even Camille’s memories of her traumatic girlhood come piecemeal, true to the nature of fragmented memory, and for the first few episodes, there’s a pleasing and persistent slippage between her memories and the histories of the disappeared girls. Even Camille’s childhood sexual abuse is handled deftly — it’s implied, with depictions of child rape blessedly kept off-screen.
But where subtlety is the show’s greatest strength, it’s also its greatest weakness. Though Amy Adams is predictably engrossing as Camille (probably gunning for an Emmy after an insane five Oscar snubs), the lack of insight offered into Camille’s mind is glaring, leaving viewers without a real motivation, or even cogent story, to track from episode to episode. Frankly, her state of mind is all told visually, and through Adams’ internalized performance, and while that’s admirable, it’s still far too subterranean to connect.
I’m not demanding that “Sharp Objects” be “Law & Order,” but it is quite difficult to not draw unfavorable comparisons between the series and “Big Little Lies,” which carries its otherwise mundane narrative in a mysterious frame. “Big Little Lies” constantly reminded viewers that its narrative was going somewhere — toward an answer to the question, “Who died?” In “Sharp Objects,” “Who is murdering little girls?” is not so much a vital mystery as a nuisance, keeping Camille somewhere she clearly doesn’t want to be. Furthermore, while the identity of the murderer is the show’s plot mystery and engine, “Sharp Objects” is really about Camille, her state of mind and whether she’s going to make it out alive of her troubled life. Solving the murder itself does take up more space in later episodes, but it’s almost an afterthought the audience doesn’t care about. It’s Camille, we’re interested in, the murder more of a MacGuffin like distraction and story contrivance to justify hanging out with this broken character for an entire miniseries.
Critics were offered seven of the series’ eight episodes, and it’s surprisingly hard to come away from them feeling like you’ve learned something new, even after watching them all back to back. The girls of Wind Gap are shaped by victimhood, or their potential for it, but “Sharp Objects” is oddly uninterested in pursuing this — or any feminist thesis — more deeply. Though Camille’s own experiences with girlhood trauma should make her stand apart from all the other boozing, sardonic detectives in fiction, “Sharp Objects” fails to properly connect past and present outside of its ghostly visuals. Rather than seeing a satisfying link between Camille and the murdered youngsters, one gets the impression that Camille is not like other girls.
Aesthetically, the series can be rather stunning— major props to production designer John Paino and the sprawling makeup department. And though it does feature terrific music cues, expressive, sweltering cinematography and is very well-acted (newcomer Eliza Scanlen, who plays Amma, is unquestionably destined for greatness), “Sharp Objects” is ultimately too slick for its own good.
Though the show takes on such dicey topics as girlhood trauma, the feminine mystique, and self-harm, it doesn’t quite have anything generative to say about them. There are gasps of ingenuity, like when Amma asks Camille, the specter of girl death hanging over them: “Do you ever feel like bad things are gonna happen to you? You can’t stop ‘em, you can’t do anything, you just have to wait.” Likewise, inspired flashbacks in Episode 3, “Fix,” finally give Camille some emotional depth. Still, the show stunts itself with a meandering plot and impenetrable protagonist that limit its groundbreaking potential. It’s not that every series these days needs to hold some lofty feminist ideals, but “Sharp Objects” presents something of a missed opportunity. And that lack of jaggedness that the show promises is tangible enough to ultimately make the series far less lacerating than it out to be. [C+/B-]