I sat through all four episodes last night, drawn in by the two leads - McDormand and Jenkins are of course worth watching in anything. All the performances in the piece are excellent,in fact, beautiful casting across the board. I haven't read the book (nor do I plan to), but the biggest hurdle for me to come to terms with in the story is why such an exquisitely compassionate man like Henry would fall for and marry Olive in the first place.
He's not actually portrayed as a masochist, so that couldn't have been his underlying and perhaps subconscious reason for teaming up with this repugnant and relentlessly horrific sociopath; maybe when they were younger he saw something in her that appealed to his compassionate nature, who knows. I just had a problem accepting it. And it wasn't like she was mean and unappreciative just to him (as some spouses are, or come to be - they treat everyone outside the relationship relatively decent and save their ugly side for the one closest to them, because that's the only person who would put up with it). Nope, she was an equal-opportunity abuser who caused serious pain - or at the very least, horrendously negative vibes - to everyone in her path, including her son Chris, who finally told her to take a hike after relaying how miserable and utterly worthless she had made him feel his entire life.
I had very little sympathy for this worm of a woman, even though I understood that she was apparently 'clinically depressed' and she was shown with glimpses of humanity, cracks in the stoic facade. On some level she did care about others, like when she helped save someone from drowning. And toward the end, her interactions with Bill Murray's nearly-equally-bitter character were at least bordering on something human, so perhaps there was hope for her - again, who knows.
It was sort of superficial, the teleplay, in that it never delved into why she was like that and of course why Henry chose to marry her. They just laid it out for us with a take-it-or-leave it attitude, and at the end, I was relieved that it was over. There was one really good black-humored line: ~-~ SPOILER ALERT ~-~ It came toward the end, when Olive grunts to Bill Murray's character, 'I'm just waiting for the dog to die so I can shoot myself.'
He's not actually portrayed as a masochist, so that couldn't have been his underlying and perhaps subconscious reason for teaming up with this repugnant and relentlessly horrific sociopath; maybe when they were younger he saw something in her that appealed to his compassionate nature, who knows. I just had a problem accepting it. And it wasn't like she was mean and unappreciative just to him (as some spouses are, or come to be - they treat everyone outside the relationship relatively decent and save their ugly side for the one closest to them, because that's the only person who would put up with it). Nope, she was an equal-opportunity abuser who caused serious pain - or at the very least, horrendously negative vibes - to everyone in her path, including her son Chris, who finally told her to take a hike after relaying how miserable and utterly worthless she had made him feel his entire life.
I had very little sympathy for this worm of a woman, even though I understood that she was apparently 'clinically depressed' and she was shown with glimpses of humanity, cracks in the stoic facade. On some level she did care about others, like when she helped save someone from drowning. And toward the end, her interactions with Bill Murray's nearly-equally-bitter character were at least bordering on something human, so perhaps there was hope for her - again, who knows.
It was sort of superficial, the teleplay, in that it never delved into why she was like that and of course why Henry chose to marry her. They just laid it out for us with a take-it-or-leave it attitude, and at the end, I was relieved that it was over. There was one really good black-humored line: ~-~ SPOILER ALERT ~-~ It came toward the end, when Olive grunts to Bill Murray's character, 'I'm just waiting for the dog to die so I can shoot myself.'