Gilded ... and toxic
Strong performances help, but mystery series remains disappointingly superficial
Nicole Kidman is unparalleled in the art of playing a woman who's equal parts flinty determination and distraught pain. When her face falls in shock, her character is likely to fight the instinct to fall apart, instead steeling herself for whatever's yet to come.
It's a balancing act that found a particularly remarkable showing in David E. Kelley's Big Little Lies, with Kidman as a woman on the edge of shattering within her abusive marriage.
In The Undoing, Kidman is again a wife overwhelmed by her husband's potential for perfidy, a role she once again owns with an irresistible force. But not even Kidman's performance, nor sharp turns from the likes of Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland, can quite centre its diffuse interests. The new HBO limited series is, to no one's surprise, ably acted and handsomely made. Director Susanne Bier shoots the chilly New York winter in which the show's catastrophic events unfold with an eye for the unsettling.
When Kidman's character Grace gets overwhelmed, we see flashes of the horrors running through her head — and it's just about impossible to tell if we're looking at the past or some imagined version thereof. In these unsettling moments, when Grace acts as an unreliable narrator in the increasingly bizarre story of her own life, The Undoing is extremely effective as a psychological thriller. Where it gets lost, then, is in chasing the scattered interests of its ever-twisting plot.
Grace's world turns upsidedown the day after a young mother is gruesomely murdered the night after her glitzy private school benefit. The media, salivating over the details of a crime implicating the city's most elite social strata, can't get enough coverage of the aftermath and ensuing court case, i.e. the stuff that tabloid dreams are made of. Pundits debate the hazy facts of the case, noting the victim, Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), was unlike the other manicured mothers at the elite Reardon School, being Latina and poorer.
When turning to the prime suspect (Grant), they make sure to highlight that he's not just a charming children's oncologist, but a white and obscenely wealthy man. (Grant, playing more or less against type, is perfect casting as a man most can't help but love, even when given proof that they really shouldn't.)
That his father-in-law (Sutherland) has the kind of old New York City money that practically grants him his own zip code can't hurt, either. And when push comes to shove, the skeptical reports continue, who's the jury going to believe: dead Elena and her taciturn husband Fernando (Ismael Cruz Cordova) of Harlem, or upstanding citizens Jonathan and his statuesque therapist wife (Kidman) who's modelled her entire life on being as helpful and presentable as possible?
These are useful, interesting questions about an all-too-real dynamic that lies at the heart of a growing class divide. So it's frustrating to realize that The Undoing raises these issues almost as a courtesy before almost entirely glossing over them.