Sharp Objects (HBO) (1 Viewer)

[Adam Lenhardt]

Anybody else watching this? It's an eight-part adaptation of Gillian Flynn's debut novel of the same name. Flynn is also one of the writers for the adaptation, credited with the script for the second episode and co-writing the last two episodes. The showrunner is Marti Noxon ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "UnREAL", "Dietland"). Jean-Marc Vallée (The Young Victoria, Dallas Buyers Club, Wild, "Big Little Lies") directed all eight parts.

The 65-minute premiere had me completely entranced from beginning to end. Like a good novel, it lived entirely within its protagonist's head -- and in this case, that's a pretty unsettling place to be. Amy Adams is all sharp edges here as Camille Preaker, the audience's eyes and ears for this story. She doesn't have a lot to say, but she says it directly. Her childhood was traumatic, and her hometown is full of reminders. The story constantly weaves between present day and memory, like the first five seasons of "Arrow" but far more adroitly and at a much faster tempo. Sophia Lillis (It) plays the younger Camille, and by the end of the premiere it feels like one performance conveyed through two actresses.

The setting is complete Southern Gothic. You can practically feel the humid heat, watching it. Patricia Clarkson is forbidding as Camille's mother, whose carefully chosen words sting like needles. At a couple moments, I was reminded of Katharine Hepburn's performance in Suddenly, Last Summer. Camille's half-sister, Amma, is a pure Southern Gothic creation.

The procedural element, with Camille reporting on the brutal murders of two teenage girls in her hometown, proceeds competently enough. Her editor, as played by Miguel Sandoval, falls somewhere halfway between the real newspaper editors I've known and a crusty father figure like Ed Asner's Lou Grant. The police are principally represented by Matt Craven's frustrated local police chief and Chris Messina's wary out-of-town detective, on loan from the big city.

But it's the character work that's front and center. Less important than Camille's investigation is the hows and the whys, and the family that haunts her, both living and dead. I cared about this character, and I was fascinated by this world, so I'm not terribly concerned with how quickly (or even whether) the plot moves forward.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

I'm in.

Has all the feeling of slower burn novel on television, which we all like. Adam's character Camille constantly hitting the mini-bottles is a bit much. We get it, she's a drunk and messed up. The girl cast as her at an earlier age looks exactly like her (at an earlier age), which is pretty impressive. The idea of a newspaper editor sending her on this particular assignment is a bit far-fetched to this former journalist, or giving her that much latitude to develop and research a local interest story - it just doesn't happen anymore, but hey, we'll cut it some slack. (Doesn't it take place about 10 years ago?)

But if you want to see a novel turned into an EXCELLENT mini-series with Emmy-quality acting, don't forget to check out Patrick Melrose on Showtime with Benedict Cumberbatch. Now THAT's one f-ed up drunk and drugged character with a horrible past seeking redemption.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The idea of a newspaper editor sending her on this particular assignment is a bit far-fetched to this former journalist, or giving her that much latitude to develop and research a local interest story - it just doesn't happen anymore, but hey, we'll cut it some slack. (Doesn't it take place about 10 years ago?)

This was what required the biggest suspension of disbelief for me, too. There are only a couple newspapers in the country that still have the resources to permit that sort of indulgence. But then again, the real St. Louis Chronicle hasn't published since 1905.

The flashbacks when she was in her early teens took place in 1992, judging by the Bush/Quayle and Clinton/Gore political signs, which would put Camille's date of birth in the late seventies -- probably 1977-1979. Amy Adams was born in 1974. She she can definitely pull off playing younger than her real age, I don't think it takes place too far in the past.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

There was an Obama hope poster in her room after Camille woke up, so that suggests 2008 for the events of the film (unless that was just a fond nostalgia poster).

 

[Robert Crawford]

I very uncomfortable viewing for me. What a tortured soul, who survived some significant traumatic experiences in her life.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Adam, your post piqued my interest enough to check out the premiere.

I have mixed feelings. I never read the book it was based on (though I did read Flynn's Gone Girl before the movie came out), and it definitely feels like it's from the same author. So far, the first episode didn't really do anything for me, and there were a couple times I had to go back a couple moments to make connections that I had otherwise missed. But I'm not ready to blame the show for that; it just as easily could have been "user error" on my part.

I think I'm interested enough to check out the next episode, but I'm not necessarily committed to the entire run. But heck, it's only eight episodes, so if the next one doesn't bore me, I'll probably stick it out.

So far, Amy Adams is the best thing about this for me - she's pretty much always awesome so that's no surprise.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Keep in mind, Josh, I love me some pulpy Southern Gothic. If that's not your thing, the show might not be your thing -- even if it's really well-executed pulpy Southern Gothic.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I don't really have any experience with Southern Gothic, so I guess I'll find out whether or not it's my thing over the next few weeks! Still, always worth trying something new to find out.

 

[Robert Crawford]

I watched the second episode. If this series didn't have one of my favorite actresses of today, I might have bailed on it.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The teleplay for the second episode was written by Gillian Flynn, who wrote the novel the miniseries is based on.

I didn't care for it as much as the premiere; the pulpy procedural elements came to the foreground, at the expense of the atmospherics. Yes, it's a miniseries centered around a serial killer murdering girls. But the mystery is the least interesting thing about the show. This episode foregrounded the investigation, so I was less engaged.

The heart of the show is the three women of this family: Adora, the matriarch of the family and the ruling monarch of the town; Camille, the prodigal daughter and outcast; and Amma, the half-sister, who wears two different masks depending on the place and the company. I am endlessly fascinated by the people residing under that roof. The lines drawn between the three of them are fascinating, like Adora's self-harm plucking out her eyelashes, and Camille's self-harm carving words into her skin, or the maid being ordered by Adora to clean a spot on the floor, and then Amma obsessively cleaning the same spot on the floor of the same room in her dollhouse.

The scene in the convenience store, after Camille abruptly left the funeral service to repair her torn dress, is particularly revealing. It is the first time we see Amma with all of her cards on the table. She is not playing the role of Adora's perfect daughter, and she is not playing the role mildly interested small town local. She wields power the way their mother wields power, but with none of Adora's discretion or finesse. She is the alpha of this particular pack of mean girls. When Camille admonishes her that "it's dangrous out there for you; people are killin' little girls", Amma's friend responds, "Not the cool ones." Amma's quickly stifled laughter belies her hysterics at the end of the episode. The vodka Amma hid in the Spite bottle mirrors the vodka Camille hid in the Evian bottle in the premiere. That Camille indulges her half-sister's underage drinking instead of discouraging it is interesting, as well.

I'm also fascinated by Henry Czerny as Alan, Camille's music-obsessed stepfather. He had to know that in marrying Adora, he was accepting the role of prince consort in her kingdom. They have genuine affection toward one another. And yet he very purposefully withdraws from the world around him.

The centerpiece of the episode was the reception at the Keene household after the funeral service. The whispers that followed Camille everywhere spoke volumes about this town, this woman, and the relationship between the two. I loved this exchange between Camille and Jackie, the only person in the town she seems to hold any real affection toward:

JACKIE: No, no, I mean it. You tackled those demons.
CAMILLE: My demons are not remotely tackled. They're just mildly concussed.​

Interesting to see D. B. Sweeney pop up as the father of the second murdered girl. Usually in those scenes, the investigator takes advantage of the grieving parent to learn something they couldn't have learned otherwise. But even if the exhaustion of his grief, his guard never comes down. He never forgets that Camille is a reporter,

At times, the show has a wonderful attention to detail: I loved the old lady taking down all of the missing posters so that the Keene family wouldn't be confronted with their murdered daughter's face everywhere they go. There is a lot of fake nice in Wind Gap, but there is -- occasionally -- some real nice, too.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The sense of foreboding in this third episode was practically suffocating. Another tragedy seems inevitable, and all parties involved powerless to stop it.

The opening scene, in which the sheriff breaks up a hog chase, and Amma crashes a golf cart into Adora's rose bed and stumbles in drunk, was highly instructive. Until this point, Amma has carefully curated every moment we've seen of her, carefully calibrated her persona to her target audience. But standing in Camille's bedroom, more inebriated than she's probably ever been, she is more open than she intends to be. We see how she has romanticized her long-absent sister, how Camille's presence and Camille's very different relationship with Adora makes Amma chafe even more at her own overbearing relationship with Adora, and how completely unaware she is of her own mortality.

Camille's life, on the other hand, has been significantly defined by the two previous girls who looked up to her, and died: her sister Marian, and her fellow patient Alice. She is keenly aware of Amma's mortality, how the toxic environment of Adora's home is pushing Amma toward oblivion, and she doesn't know how to short circuit the tragic loop she sees playing out all over again.

With the flashes into Camille's past, we get more and more context for what brought her to this point. When she ventures into Marian's room, preserved by Adora exactly as it was at the time of her death, we see that the bed is an old hospital bed, with side rails and an IV pole. Clearly, the episode that killed her as she laid in bed next to young Camille wasn't a surprise incident but the culmination of an ongoing illness.

We also get insight into the mysterious girl who keeps appearing when Camille's had too much to drink. One of the times Camille had herself committed when her self harm got out of control, the girl was her roommate in the psych ward. Like Marian, she liked Alice very much. Unlike Marian, she saw a great deal of herself in her. Camille tries to a be a good surrogate big sister for Alice, but her very presence in the girl's life is toxic; Alice came into the psych ward thinking that things were bad, but she'll grow out of it and things will get better. Camille is the living embodiment of the fact that they might not. The two women have family visits on the same day, and both go poorly. Afterwards, Alice needs Camille to tell her some comforting lies. But Camille, injected with a fresh dose of Adora's particular kind of poison, cannot get out of her own head enough to see that. She is honest. Alice weighs the possibility that she could turn out like Camille, and decides that that's not worth sticking around for. Sydney Sweeney, so great on Netflix's short-lived "Everything Sucks!", is exactly right as Alice. Movies and television aren't usually very good at portraying mental illness. Alice is about as close to the reality as I've seen.

Alan, Amma's father and Camille's stepfather, continues to fascinate me. He withdraws into his music, is content to let Adora rule the roost without challenge. But he is not the evil stepfather. When Adora disparages Camille in private, Alan defends her. When Adora causes a scene at the psych ward and storms off, Alan makes sure Camille is attended to. He dotes on Adora, but he is not blind to who she is. There's a wonderful moment in tonight's episode where he steps out onto the porch and looks out into the night intently, but says nothing. I would love to know what's going through his head in that moment.

When Camille spots Amma skating through town -- the way her and Marian used to skate through town -- a protective instinct drives her to follow. Amma leads her to the farm where the hogs are kept. This too expands our insight: The hog operation is called Preaker Farms, which suggests that the family's wealth comes from Camille's father, not Adora or Alan. The scene she witnesses inside is a performance specifically crafted for her. Amma is withholding information from Camille but the sense that her half-sister knows something she doesn't is less troubling to her than all of the things her half-sister doesn't know that she doesn't know.

As the episode proceeds, Amma gets angrier and angrier that Camille isn't proving to be the person Adora made her out to be, the cool and dangerous big sister she imagined her to be, and her vindictive streak becomes steadily less disguised. Amma sees the town of Wind Gap as her prison and Adora as its warden, and she expected Camille to be her fellow inmate, eager to help her break out. What Amma doesn't realize -- maybe can't realize -- is that Camille has already buried one sister, and the thought of burying another one is intolerable to her. Adora is the lesser evil when a serial killer is on the prowl.

The actual investigation into the murders continues to be the least interesting thing about the show. The follow-up interview with Ann Nash's father -- in which she finally brings out her recorder! -- just seems to be getting going when Adora bursts into the room to run interference. The interview with Natalie Keene's brother is more interesting. Even through the incessant prattling of the boy's girlfriend and her very transparent attempts to the shape the narrative, a picture emerges. Like Camille and like Amma, he hates the town. By upbringing and disposition, he is better suited for a city environment. Wind Gap was never a good fit. But now he blames it for killing his sister. More than any of the other characters she's met, Camille relates to John Keene, sympathizes with his sense of alienation. By the end of the interview, she seems pretty sure that he didn't do it. But we see someone who is driven by a need to lash out at the town.

The detective from Kansas City is initially standoff-ish after reading Camille's gossipy public interest piece about the town in the immediate aftermath of the discovery of Natalie's body. But she's the only person in town that doesn't despise him, so he gets over it quickly. The scene near the end, with Camille and the detective getting further drunk on the hood and roof of his car, and Amma skating up with her lackeys like some sort of surreal distorted vision of Alex DeLarge and his droogs, feels like this show concentrated into its most potent offerings.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

The show seems to be obviously pimping the stepfather as the chief suspect. If I read the flashbacks at the psyche ward right, he was bringing Camille roses and Adora intercepted him and threw them down, scattering them on the ground. This was intercut with Alice's suicide discovery. Was she actually murdered, as well? The intercutting seemed to imply something more.

I get it that the author is not as interested in the murder mystery as the character developments, but it is inevitable that viewers would gravitate to the mystery and want some twists and surprises there. I don't think we'll get them, but that the murderer will just be made more obvious to audiences get that out of the way. That's why I thought the intercutting with the stepfather was a bit in our faces.

I still don't buy that any reporter would be leashed out on an extended assignment like this. Perhaps they'll play up the point more that the editor, as surrogate father figure, just basically gave her an extended sabbatical to help her work her shit out.

Also the FBI or whatever he is detective wandering around on his own leisurely snooping around just doesn't make much sense or show any urgency. The author, again, is not really interested in realistic depictions of reporting or investigations. That's okay, since we get enough of those, but it's a bit distracting at times.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The show seems to be obviously pimping the stepfather as the chief suspect.

I haven't read the novel either, so this is pure speculation, but so many characters have stated that the killer has to be a man that I'm almost certain that the killer is going to be female.

I still don't buy that any reporter would be leashed out on an extended assignment like this. Perhaps they'll play up the point more that the editor, as surrogate father figure, just basically gave her an extended sabbatical to help her work her shit out.

Given all of the pill bottles and medications spread out in an orderly fashion on his dining room table when he calls her from home, my interpretation is that he's dying so he doesn't care much that he's being extravagant with resources for one of his deeply damaged reporters, whom he has a soft spot for. If the outlay causes him problems with the publisher, well, he's on his way out anyway.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I enjoyed this third episode more than the other two, best so far in my book. If this was an open-ended series running for 12 or 22 episodes a year for years on end, I’d probably drop it. But as an eight episode miniseries, I think I’m game for seeing it through.

Maybe I’m just a terrible person but it seems like at least 50% of Camille’s problems would evaporate if her mother just vanished overnight. She would have been better growing up in the worst Dickensian orphanage than under Adora’s roof.

 

[John Lee_275604]

If I read the flashbacks at the psyche ward right, he was bringing Camille roses and Adora intercepted him and threw them down, scattering them on the ground.

I am somewhat in the dark as to the full gravity of the scene [seemingly by design] as well, but I read it much differently.
It seemed more like Adora collected the roses from the bush at the homestead, then threw them down in anger due to something revealed by the nurses station personnel about Camille's present condition. Some detail about what led to her commitment or something about her condition. Something that turned Adora's motherly concern to judgmental anger.
The stepfather then scavenged what he could of the bouquet off the floor and tried to make sure it still got to Camille.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The pieces continue to drop into place in interesting and tantalizing ways.

Henry Czerny's performance as Alan continues to come into the foreground. I don't know if we knew until this episode that Marian was Alan's daughter (and thus Camille's half-sister and Amma's full sister). Depending on your theory about him, his understated but very pointed declaration of his own loss casts light in very suggestive directions.

It also makes the relationship between him and Camille more of an open question. When she arrived at the house in the premiere, he seemed to have only a casual recollection of who she was, as would make sense if he'd come into the picture after she'd moved away. But everything we've learned since then contradicts that. If he is Marian's father, than he is basically the only father Camille's had in her life in any meaningful sense of the word. And yet there are discordant notes: Was Camille so upset on the day that Alice killed herself because Adora threw a fit and stormed out, or because Alan showed up with the flowers? Did young Camille not want anything to do with the birthday cake Alan surprised her with because Adora wouldn't even get out of bed to acknowledge her birthday, or because Alan was the one doing the surprising? Either Alan is a sympathetic stepfather who knows better than anyone what it's like to live under Adora's thumb, or there's something far more sinister going on. Either reading seems perfectly plausible to me.

The scene between the sheriff and Adora, in addition to having some very potent subtext, captured just what an affectation Adora's delicate constitution really is. She knows exactly what's going on with the murder investigations, and exactly what the repercussions are.

That potent subtext comes into play shortly after, when Adora visciously cuts down Camille for her public display of affection with the carpetbagger detective in the driveway. Adora's favorite word to describe Camille is "willful" and yet every time Camille is in her mother's presence, she instantly reverts back to being that little girl. Adora is the one person who can pierce her armor at will.

The murder tour of Wind Gap was less interesting for what it revealed than how Camille chose to reveal it. We learn a lot about her view of the world through the way she presents the horrible things that have happened.

It seems more and more clear that the revelation of what happened to Camille in that shed and who killed the two girls will be be made clear around the same time. That is a place with weight and pull to it.

Camille's reaction and response to learning that Amma had played in that shed with the two murdered girls was harrowing. One of the most subtle but effective bits of pure visual storytelling so far came from this sequence; Camille, having just discovered that Amma is almost certainly going to be the killer’s next target, frantically runs upstairs and discovers Amma’s bedroom is empty. As she races downstairs back to her car to rescue her from the night, all quick cuts to emphasize the frenetic pace and desperate stakes, Marian — frozen at the age of her death — is sitting obediently in the background of the shot on a bench of the second floor landing. The most elegant bit of visual expression for an internal thought I've seen in quite some time.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Just when you think Adora can't possibly be more horrible to Camille, she finds a way to top herself. There are two ways to read their conversation over cocktails on the veranda: The first way is this is Adora being Adora, and the pleasant pretext was just her method of getting under Camille's armor so she could strike more effectively. But the second way is perhaps more terrible: Adora, grateful that Camille found Amma and returned her home safely, she decided to attempt a pleasant conversation, and to speak frankly about their relationship. I just can't imagine her being so cruel to Camille for so long if she was truly so detached from her eldest child, however.

It's hard to pin down Adora's opposition to Camille's continued fraternization with the Kansas City detective. Is there something about the investigation that the two of them working together might uncover that Adora doesn't want uncovered? Or is it pure sexual jealousy?

At this point, it seems fairly safe to rule Bob Nash out as the killer. Unless he's deflecting, his ferocious anger toward John Keene doesn't seem like an act. He's a weird dude, he might even have been an abusive father, but he doesn't seem like a killer. Same with John Keene himself.

Calhoun Day was a hoot. I loved the way Camille cut through all of the town's venerated bullshit when summarizing the historical source of the celebration for the Kansas City detective. As a damn Yankee Northerner, I've never understood these sorts of Confederate heritage festivals, where the locals ritualize a failed insurrection against the country that they proudly honor the remainder of the year.

We continue to get these strange cutaways to Alan, where we see more than Camille does but not enough to form any firm conclusions.

I'm beginning to think the dynamic between Camille and Amma is the central one on which this series is going to pivot, even though the longstanding horror show between Adora and Camille has occupied the central focus thus far. My current theory, based on these first five episodes, is that:

Spoiler: Speculation based on aired episodes -- have not read source novel

Amma, who seems to be obsessed with Camille, has been reading her only surviving sister's articles online. Knowing about their sister Marian's death, and seeing articles about murdered girls in St. Louis, she kills Ann Nash to lure her sister back home. And then, once she is in town, murders Natalie Keene to keep her sticking around. The woman in white that the young delinquent boy saw was Amma in the same long white dress that she lent to Camille for the barbecue.

There are holes in that theory, since Amma presumably wouldn't have the strength to rip out the girls' teeth.

But I think it's clear that Amma either played a part in the murders, or knows something that Ann and Natalie knew, and that the killer will kill her to keep secret.

The scene at the dress shop was just absolutely devastating. As was Amma's reaction; she is someone who is used to orchestrating situations for her own ends, but she clearly had no understanding of the hornet's nest that she'd kicked.

The use of nonlinear editing is also getting more complicated, as we've now had some flash fowards integrated into Camille's mental state, including Amma scraped up and bloodied inside the deer hunting shack.

Hard to believe there's only three episodes left, given that things feel like they're still just ramping up.

EDIT: Forgot to add: The reveal that the drama teacher who Amma has been shamelessly trying to seduce is the same boy that led the charge with whatever happened to young Camille in that deer hunting shed was an interesting one. He seemed genuinely if awkwardly apologetic to Camille during their brief enounter. The question I have: Does Amma know (or has she heard some rumor) about what went down between him and Camille, and if so is that her reason for being interested in him?

 

[Robert Crawford]

I'm glad there are only three episodes left. I couldn't stand to see much more bullshit Camille can take from her mother. Matter of fact, that whole town is messed up.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Zero story advance in this last episode, bordering on redundantly indulgent. At this point I'm debating whether I should have just read the book and saved 8 hours of viewing if I had interest in the topic (which is more a meditation than a murder mystery).

We keep going over the same territory; we get it. Perhaps there was some contractual or economic reason they had to stretch to 8 hours, but usually in limited series, we get some major momentum in the last three episodes (penultimate episode in series like The Sopranos were usually the most explosively dynamic), but this series, to use a southern Gothic expression, just lollygags along.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I want to resist the temptation to rank each episode in what’s clearly a continuous story - it does strike me as being a little silly to grade each episode individually when none are meant to stand alone.

That said, I found last night’s to be the most underwhelming of the batch so far. It mostly seemed like filler, showing us more of the bad relationships we’ve previously seen, without doing much to push the plot forward. I don’t mind episodes that focus more on character, but I don’t feel that we got a lot of new insights on the characters either.

Hopefully next week’s will have some more momentum.