Previously: Episode 1 (Nathaniel) Episode 2 (Spencer) Episode 3 (Lynn) Episode 4 (Nathaniel) Episode 5 (Eric) Episode 6 (Chris)
by Nathaniel R
Parting is such sweet sorrow. But so is sticking together. With the seventh and final episode of Big Little Lies -- beware SPOILERS ahead all throughout this post-- we're in some ways directly back where we ended last season, with the Monterey Five, all in harmonious agreement. This time around, though, it's a bit grimmer if you stop to think about what might occur after they all confess. We don't mean the threat of a possible third season (which we don't actually think will happen) but the narrative possibilities inside our own heads. Exactly how do you conspire to lie about manslaughter and get away with it? Did Celeste keep her children only to lose them? Did Madeline save her marriage only to lose her freedom? Etcetera.
But we're jumping right to the finale and we need to backtrack again for the best moments and fine performances of the finale...
Top Ten MVPs of Big Little Lies, Episode 2.7 "I Want to Know"
10 Renata demolishing the train set
Laura Dern's darkly comic character arc this season had her life (and wealth) unravelled by her husband's crimes. David E Kelley doesn't always write "believeable" characters but sometimes cartoonish fan service is so cathartic. When Gordon pushes his already manically angry wife one step to far she takes a baseball bat to all his expensive toys. Our apartment was screaming with glee. Get him, Renata. Get him!
9 Douglas Smith as Corey Brockfield
"What is fun?" As we've noted in these round-ups before the men in Big Little Lies are rarely acclaimed for their work and their characters are often the antagonists of a given situation. Smith's slow-burn endearing performance took us by surprise. At first he was just "love interest" but by the end of the season we were so rooting for Jane to realize he's a catch. Even her little son (the excellent Iain Armitage) agrees, urging his mom to give him another chance. Brockfield aced that 'what is fun?' speech and won not just Jane over but (presumably) most of the audience, too. The show tried a bit hard to keep his motivations mysterious for some late season drama but the actor cemented himself as a stable and loving "Ed" type rather than another variation on the more clueless or shadier male characters. One side note here: If you stop to think of Big Little Lies dramatizations of the husbands and boyfriends throughout the two seasons, it's fairly interesting that though some of their are flawed to the point of being despicable, almost none of them are characterized as "bad fathers"... which makes the arc of Celeste being accused of being "the bad mother" a sort of side-eye at societal misogyny.
8 Laura vs Meryl, round two
While the first face/off between these two acting powerhouses was weirdly dissatisfying, the second was explosive. Renata was already in a mood ordering coffee and belittling the barista, when Mary Louise approached. Laura Dern has been accused of overdoing it in this series but people do lose their grip on occassion and this scene was thrilling in its cringeworthiness (get a hold of yourself, lady!) even as you fully sympathisized with the reasons for her rage and hostility. For her part Streep did that neat trick of continuing to make Mary Louise feel both innocently out-of-her-depth as well as slyly manipulative simultaneously. Plus she aced the scenes offhand but brutal punchline when she offers to take Renata's coffee to her.
We're going to the same place".
Hell?
7 That Perry's abuse remains shocking
The courtroom scenes never felt like they could really happen; Kelley can't resist being an entertainer first and former lawyer second when it comes to his TV shows -- but that has its rewards as we see here. The out of nowhere reveal of video proof of Perry's abuse of Celeste was more of a cheap plot gotcha than an organic development but boy did it work in the context of this particular entertainment. Too often television shows work to desensitize us by indulging in gratuitous violence through repetition of grisly images (this is a random example but I stopped watching The Flash due to how many times it made me watch Iris being stabbed through the heart -- these are not the type of images we should be forced to memorize as an audience) but Big Little Lies quite valiantly managed to never numb us to the brutality of domestic abuse. This type of imagery should always be shocking and unacceptable andthe actresses watching drove home the point yet further.
6 Sweaty Adam Scott
Mmmmmm. Also damn he's a good actor. The contained emotion as he calmly explained to Madeline what he'd need to stay in the marriage felt exactly how this character came to this point.
5 "You lost your children, you don't get to take mine"
Celeste remains one of Nicole Kidman's best performances. Admittedly her work was a little broader in season two (whose wasn't?) and I didn't quite buy how hard she was going at Mary Louise given her legal training and the risk of making herself unsympathetic -- but the rest of the courtroom performance was riveting and this line reading slayed as a final winning blow.
4 The confession, pt 2
Early in the episode Bonnie confesses her true feelings to Nathan -- she never loved him (ouuuuch) -- but the narrative has been far more interested in her other inevitable confession, that she pushed Perry to his death in Season 1. This final episode wrapped up all the disparate arcs too neatly and quickly -- it might have helped to spread out the drama instead of saving so much of it for the last two episodes -- but the final image of the women arriving at the police station together to confess to their lies about Perry's death felt right. "The lie is the friendship," Celeste says unironically earlier in the episode, but the finale indicates that the bond will survive the lie. It's a good note to go out on for a series that surprised in its first season for playing like a catfight only to reconfigure itself as it played out, with great style and feeling, into a story of female solidarity.
3 and 2 Marriage Vows Renewed & Reese Witherspoon in general
The happiest of all the endings, was the wisely brief renewal of vows with Ed & Madeline recommitting to each other with only their daughters as witnesses. That this happy ending was so very satisfying (and authentically felt) is a huge testament to the chemistry of Adam Scott and Reese Witherspoon. At the risk of sounding like a broken record Reese Witherspoon has never won enough praise for this series. I maintain that she's given her all time best performance within, cumulatively. It's a rich three-dimensional portrait of a loveable but aggravating woman and her guilt, exhaustion and elation with Ed's behavior and decisions was admirably precise and character specific. Here's the cherry on top: she's also elevated Kidman's work. Kidman deserved her Emmy last season but Witherspoon has always been right beside her, actually doing more work to sell this particular best friendship and, more crucially, the overarching themes of solidarity as well as relationship intimacy and its limits more than anyone else in the series.
1 An olive branch - Hugs for Meryl
At times Big Little Lies season 2 clumsily behaved as if it had invited Meryl Streep on board only to have a prestigious actress that it could then reduce to a fall guy and antagonist. Mary Louise was sometimes a caricature of a manipulative mother but her newly excavated grief on the witness stand humanized her just in time for a lovely grace note in the finale when Celeste sends her two boys over to hug their grandmother.
Did you like the finale of Big Little Lies? Though it didn't quite deliver on the promise of the very exciting penultimate episode ("The Bad Mother") it had its moments.
For your exiting joy, please enjoy this brief video of La Streep's last day on set. The "good riddance" cake is LOL.
MERYL STREEP#BigLittleLies pic.twitter.com/9bSEhfT6mo
— εѵα ✨ (@evamariestreep) July 22, 2019