Big Little Lies, season 2 episode 6 review - Nicole Kidman delivers one of the performances of the year
Warning: contains spoilers for episode 6 of series 2.
If series one of Big Little Lies was ultimately the Reese show, then series two has been the Nicole show. Although both series have been very much ensemble pieces - with the emphasis even more on this in series two - each has had their standout Hollywood star. Even though Nicole Kidman’s character, Celeste, had the strongest storyline in series one, it was Reese Witherspoon as the infuriating, endearing Madeline, around whom everyone seemed to orbit. Witherspoon shouldn’t really achieve the impact she does: her performance has a busy-ness that feels a tad try-hard, really shouldn’t be sexy, and is very reminiscent of her most famous role, the pushy Elle Woods in Legally Blonde. And yet we hurt along with her at her confusion with life; and feel her disappointment as her attempts to control the events and people around her end in inevitable failure.
Still, she matters less in the new series than the last because Kidman has moved centre stage, playing a sometime-battered wife about to lose her children with an utterly contrasting style. Where Witherspoon shimmers and jitters, Kidman seems transparent and still, laying out Celeste’s soul before us to devastating effect.
In episode six, The Bad Mother, Celeste took the witness stand to defend her character as her mother-in-law Mary Louise (Meryl Streep) tried to win custody of her twins. Kidman gave a performance so naked and so vulnerable that it felt voyeuristic to watch. As Celeste, this flawed, tortured woman, tried to articulate the messy reality of how a victim of abuse becomes its abettor, while the malign Mary Louise looked on, the series suddenly became about good versus evil. Not the tussle you find in superhero movies or James Bond, but the sort of moral conflict right there in normal life. The sort we could actually encounter.
It is odd that series two of Big Little Lies has not become the talking point that series one did. It is just as good, and Kidman is delivering one of the performances of the year. May prizes rain upon her.
Elsewhere in the episode, Madeline and Bonnie (Zoe Kravitz) both teetered on the edge of confession, each with their own reasons to tell another that Perry Wright never did fall down those steps, that he was pushed. We journeyed furthest with Bonnie, whose distracted manner and impossible sweetness finally made sense: a child battered by her own mother, she’d spent her life playing goody-two-shoes because her parent had convinced her she was good-for-nothing. Bonnie’s unravelling, hauntingly played by Kravitz, has provided an echo of the Perry/Celeste storyline. It has offered a narrative of abuse in the minor key, shall we say, but all the more plausible for that.
Can Celeste get her revenge on Mary Louise? There was a gratifying suggestion she might at the episode’s end, when she found a steeliness hitherto eluding her, and Kidman reared to her full height. And thus we ended on a note of hope, in what may have been the most distressing - and moving - instalment of the series so far.
