Audio By Carbonatix
When we first meet the title character in Olive Kitteridge, she considers the revolver in her hands and looks up at the cloudless sky above the woods one last time. The 25-year journey (and the accumulation of mistakes and bad luck therein) that leads the elderly Olive to that moment of despair unfurls in director Lisa Cholodenko’s (The Kids Are All Right) two-night, four-hour HBO miniseries (airing at 9 p.m. on Sunday, November 2, and Monday, November 3).
Olive’s played by Frances McDormand, who optioned Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-winning novel and, with Cholodenko, has created one of the most captivatingly complicated screen characters in recent memory: a small-town wife, mother, and math teacher with a zealotry for frankness that accelerates her undoing. In possession of an acid tongue that could corrode steel, Olive wears her intelligence like a crown. She even holds up her family’s history of depression to her adoring husband, Henry (Richard Jenkins), and resentful son, Christopher (Devin Druid as a teenager and John Gallagher Jr. as an adult), as a badge of superiority: “Happy to have it. Comes with being smart.”
The miniseries allows us to indulge in the unkind pleasures of Olive’s truth-bombs, but it’s also keenly interested in exploring the inevitable results of her callous honesty: her social isolation, her self-importance and self-doubt, and the eventual erosion of her ability to feel compassion. Olive is no simple lovable curmudgeon like the one co-star Bill Murray plays in the current theatrical release . her tragedy lies not in imperious mistreatment of others but genuine bafflement when told she intolerably cruel even if assessments are wholly correct.>
