Biggest surprise in 'Big Little Lies' finale? A lesson in female friendship
Spoiler alert: This story contains details from Sunday night's season finale of Big Little Lies.
You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes, you get a satisfying TV show ending and a good reminder of what’s important in life. What’s not important, as Big Little Lies finally clarifies in the last episode of it’s limited HBO run, are the petty critiques that women can use, and are often portrayed as using, to rip each other apart.
After spending so much time on this type of infighting in the first six episodes, Sunday night’s finale, titled “You Get What You Need,” had a lot of ground to cover. Not to mention wrapping up that whole murder mystery thing.
Despite the complexity of the characters, the cattiness bordered on trite toward the middle of the series, though with a wink-and-nod promise that something more thoughtful was coming. After all, the casting was too good to be squandered on rich women bickering all the way to the grave.
Laura Dern played stereotypical, high-powered Renata — part victim, part tormentor to the stay-at-home moms — to perfection through the end.
“Why would you be the one to get vilified?” poses clueless husband Gordon Klein (Jeffrey Nordling) as the couple gets ready for the school’s trivia-night fundraiser, the scene of the murder and culmination point foreshadowed in Episode 1.
“Because I’m a working mom, I’ve told you. Worse I’m a CEO,” she laments, launching into a monologue any woman in the “having it all” era can understand. Skip the awkward fundraiser? Get labeled as heartless. Attend? Become the object of scorn.
Her most touching moment comes as she admits that Jane (Shailene Woodley), whose son she previously blamed for bullying her daughter, is the only mother she’d like to see. It's a continuation of a scene from the penultimate episode that forces Renata to accept what's truly bothering her about the bullying: her lack of control.
Jane finally gets to confront the man who raped her years ago, though it’s not the scene she imagined. It is, however, what she needed. As push comes to shove, quite literally, at the Audrey Hepburn / Elvis Presley-themed bash that looks nothing like school events in the rest of the country, it’s Renata and the gal gang that has her back. Including Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz), who finally ingratiates herself with Madeline (Reese Witherspoon), her husband’s ex-wife.
The high-strung Madeline, who teeters on the brink of blowing up her idyllic life, feels tailor-made for Witherspoon.
“I think maybe, sometimes I’m just holding onto this idea of perfection so tight, and something has to give,” she confesses to her daughter in a moment of brutal honesty. It's the admonition her daughter was waiting for, and indicates the two will be just fine.
It’s Celeste, though, who finally learns to open up to her friends. Played as the stoic face of abuse by Nicole Kidman, she waits until it’s almost too late to tell anyone that her husband, Perry (Alexander Skarsgård), has been violently attacking her.
But it’s not that revelation, nor the reveal of who was murdered, that’s the zenith of the show. It’s the union of these five women, playing with their children on the beach.
The caliber of the female talent together in one scene is striking — how often have so many award-winning actresses been in the same shot in a television show? To say more than a handful would be a big lie.
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