Amy Adams comes to TV with ‘Sharp Objects’
For a treacherously long while, director Jean-Marc Vallee’s eight-part HBO limited series “Sharp Objects,” based on Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, soaks up atmosphere and points all 10 fingers at a slew of shiftyeyed murder suspects, while Amy Adams (as newspaper reporter Camille Preaker, dogged by a nightmarish personal history) drives around her bootheel Missouri hometown swigging vodka out of a water bottle.
She copes with a serious case of the flashbacks. Vallee, lately of “Big Little Lies” and the director of “Wild” and “Dallas Buyers Club,” lives for this sort of thing — in this case, fleeting, sinister visual memories of the protagonist’s damaged upbringing in the fictional town of Wind Gap.
Adams is terrific, though, even when doing very little. In recent years the actress has revealed and developed a remarkable range, tamping down her surface ebullience (that’s what comes from doing dinner theater in suburban Minneapolis) and tapping into quieter, subtler shadings in films such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival.”
In “Sharp Objects” her technique is nearly invisible, as if by instinct; Flynn’s story, after all, is laden with serial-killer tropes and Southern Gothic flourishes, and doesn’t need much competition. In a tale dependent on tense two-person encounters, Adams pairs off beautifully with Patricia Clarkson, as her highly controlling mother, the richest woman in Wind Gap; Chris Messina, the laconic Kansas City detective on the case, at odds with local law enforcement; and Eliza Scanlen, sharp and taunting as Camille’s young half-sister, roller-skating through her own mess of an adolescence.
Premiering Sunday, the series begins with Camille in St. Louis. In the novel she worked in the Chicago area, for the equivalent of the suburban Daily Herald; the relocation doesn’t help. Her editor (Miguel Sandoval), who knows her secrets, assigns Camille to return to Wind Gap downstate, where a young girl was murdered a year earlier and a second one has vanished. Camille’s mother, Adora, would prefer not to have her estranged daughter back in town, sullying her fastidiously maintained Victorian mansion with her presence.
Camille, we learn, has a reputation as a “fast” girl, given to self-mutilation, as we see in the closing image of Episode 1. Camille also knows what it’s like to lose a younger sibling.
As “Sharp Objects” proceeds (critics got a look at seven of the eight episodes), the adaptation mapped out by Marti Noxon and various screenwriters, including Flynn, delivers the solution to the central mystery. And there’s just enough going on in the psyche and dramatic possibilities of Camille to make it work on something more than pure story level, even when the padding becomes apparent. Adams and Clarkson go to town, exquisitely. Flynn wrote an efficient novel that has been stretched out to roughly seven hours for HBO; few will argue with that choice.
“Sharp Objects” debuts at 9 p.m. Sunday on HBO.