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Why can’t women stay friends?
That’s a trick question, of course, but also one that British actresses Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells lifelong pals in real life attempt to
answer earnestly and honestly in their new HBO cringe comedy Doll & Em. In the sixepisode series, Mortimer and Wells play sitcom
versions of themselves as a thriving Hollywood thespian and her bestfriendturnedpersonal assistant, respectively. One has reached just about
the highest level of success a middleaged film actress not named Meryl Streep or Cate Blanchett can; the other is so lost any opportunity looks
like a step up. They reside in the same rented house, but live in entirely different worlds.
As the series’ creators and writers (the latter with Azazel Jacobs, who directs every episode), Mortimer and Wells blame the mildly acidic but
frighteningly fast corrosion of their characters’ decadeslong friendship on a familiar culprit: female competition. Dolly and Emily’s passive
aggressive conflicts about men, career opportunities, and money are framed as an acknowledgment of a bitter truth: Close friends often make rivals of each other. Where this moderately ambitious show best succeeds is in justifying the competition between the two friends in the
show’s particular context. Their rivalry is dirty and ugly, but also makes emotional sense.
Set largely on a film set in Los Angeles, where attention, kindness, and dignity are scarce, Doll & Em frequently resembles a struggle
between two fundamentally affable dogs over a bone. Whether that bone’s just made of hardpacked dirt or something truly meaty is anybody’s
guess. Dolly and Emily are selfaware enough to know they shouldn’t be bitches to one another, but they’re both afraid that that bone might be
the last one they ever lay eyes on.
By necessity, Doll & Em takes the outsiderlookingin perspective of Dolly, who moves from London to Los Angeles after a bad break
up, hoping to find solace in her best friend’s arms. For the few months that Emily is filming a movie away from her family in New York, Dolly
agrees to help her out. “What does an assistant do? Do I make you breakfast?” she asks on her first night. “Do I wash your clothes?” Both are
too sleepy from their bonding wine to figure out the basics.
Dolly, then, is set up to fail. She’s also not the hypercompetent type she has trouble adjusting to the leftside driver’s seat and accidentally
gives the small boy she’s babysitting (Susan Sarandon’s toddler son, in a joke that doesn’t quite work about the sixtysomething actress’s eternal
youthfulness) a minor injury at a castandcrew party. When Dolly’s impatience gets the better of her, she takes it out on her friend she’s no
picnic or pushover. Emily is sweet but obliviously spoiled and quietly needy in her own way, especially when other women in the industry
knowingly wag their brows at her age.
The friends’ mutual insecurities build to a hilariously awful bout of oneupmanship in the second episode, when they compete for the
affections of a skeezy player in his hot tub. They recount how they met as kids their dads were friends and then transform their compellingly
heartbreaking relationships with their deceased fathers into a game for sympathysex points. “My dad died last year,” volunteers the married
Emily. Dolly, not to be outdone, says of her own father, “I didn’t realize he was my dad until I was about 11. I thought it was someone else
entirely.” The tragic details pile up to an absurd denouement in which Emily declaims a poem in Russian in memoriam of her father. When the
guy is suitably impressed, Dolly storms out of the hot tub. Whether she’s jealous of her friend’s education, worldliness, or artsiness, it’s clear that
the roots of their currently rivalry were sown long ago. No crop grows faster in Southern California than envy.
From the third episode on, Doll & Em digs its heels into showbiz satire by taking on an All About Eveesque storyline. Dolly
impresses the director and other cast members with her freeflowing tears when Emily can’t produce them on cue. Dolly tells Emily she just
thinks of her dead father, natch. (The reallife Wells has three dozen screen credits to her name, but her fictional counterpart isn’t at all interested
in acting until she’s “discovered” on set.) It’s not long before Emily is threatened by her friend’s new aspirations, though her substantial anger and
feelings of betrayal are tempered by her loyalties.
Doll & Em arrives amid an epidemic of sororal dissolutions onscreen. Over on Girls, Lena Dunham is distinguishing her more naked,
less erotic show from older sister Sex and the City by incrementally and painfully separating its central quartet. But Dolly & Em
is more comparable to last year’s Blue Jasmine and Enough Said, two films that exploit postrecession blues to explore how adult
women compare themselves to their sisters or female friends and find either themselves or others lacking. (Why this theme comes up so much
more regularly in stories about women than men remains a mystery.)
All three works share a common yardstick: money. In Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett’s Ruth Madoff–like protagonist expresses
her class anxiety by mercilessly haranguing her workingclass sister (Sally Hawkins) to date better, i.e., richer, men. Nicole Holofcener tackles
the same premise from a different perspective and genre in Enough Said. Julia LouisDreyfus’s masseuse character begins to question
her perfectly pleasant relationship with her new schlub boyfriend (James Gandolfini) when she discovers that he’s the castoff spouse of a
wealthy, chic client (Catherine Keener).
Dolly and Emily compete professionally and sexually, but of course there’s no competition, really. That tragic undercurrent gives the series its
slightly sorrowful air. Emily may have a lot to lose, but that already means that she has a lot. She never has to give money a second thought,
while in the fourth episode Dolly has to ask her friend for enough cash to buy the coffee it’s her job to fetch. “I keep forgetting to pay you,” Em
confesses. She gives the classic Mortimer sad eyes her sincerity is never in doubt but it’s hard not to be enraged by her apology when it’s
the kind of declaration only a person truly unaware of her privilege is in the position to make.
Doll & Em is an oblique take on that old truism that every successful star pays their friends to hang out with them. But it’s also an
incisive look at how differences in money and power will inevitably poison the closest of relationships, especially in a pyramidal society like
Hollywood’s, where a servant class carries top talent on an organic cotton pillow. Hollywood isn’t the real world, but the distance between the two
gets smaller every day.
