If you’re just tuning in for Bill Murray, know that he’s barely in tonight’s first half of “Olive Kitterage” and doesn’t return until the last 27 minutes of this four-hour miniseries.
Murray is key to bringing a surprisingly satisfying ending to this complex project, but viewers will enjoy following the emotional twists and turns that attend the tale as they wait for the erstwhile Ghostbuster to stumble in.
Based on the Pulitzer-winning book by Elizabeth Strout, “Kittridge” stars Frances McDormand (“Fargo”) as a Maine math teacher whose big brain frequently gets in the way of her own happiness. It’s directed by Lisa Cholodenko (the sperm-donor dramedy "The Kids Are All Right") from a teleplay by Jane Anderson (the 2003 transgender HBO movie "Normal”).
Even leaving aside Murray (whose role may remind some a tiny bit of the Jack Nicholson character from “Terms of Endearment”), the miniseries sports an solid supporting cast that includes Richard Jenkins (“Six Feet Under”), Zoe Kazan (“Ruby Sparks”), Peter Mullan (“Top of the Lake”), Rosemarie DeWitt (“Mad Men”), Ann Dowd (“The Leftovers”), Jesse Plemons (“Breaking Bad”), John Gallager Jr. (“The Newsroom”) and Cory Michael Smith (whom you’re not likely to recognize from his role as Ed Nygma over on “Gotham”).
It’s always compelling, unusually thoughtful, and at times plenty moving as it takes its quarter-century journey.
... Olive is a fantastically complex character, and McDormand asks for no sympathy in her portrayal of the woman, and yet a lump rose in my throat more than once in the final hour of this four-hour miniseries. … She's not ashamed of her physical hungers, but her emotional ones frighten her. And yet she keeps going, honest and contrarian, caring and selfish, and it's impossible to look away. …
... as great as both McDormand and Jenkins are in the lead roles (both are early Emmy frontrunners), their story ultimately feels too repetitive — the miniseries plays as a collection of anecdotes designed to make the same point over and over and over again — to justify the running time. … Things liven up in the final hour, thanks to Bill Murray as a wealthy neighbor whom Olive gets to know late in life, but it's a mark of how dour the majority of the project is that Murray feels like a ray of sunshine even underplaying a depressed character. …
... a rare treasure, a measured, understated portrait of a marriage that finds poetry in the most prosaic of settings and circumstances …
... the only thing a person can do is stand amazed. Literally; when this lovely, ruthless, masterfully restrained two-night, four-hour contemplation of love, marriage, parenthood, mental illness and identity came to an end, I stood up. There was no one physically present to applaud and I felt I had to do something.
... a gloriously thoughtful wallow in the subtle and sometimes even insecure ways that families and friends relate to one another. …
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says:
... It takes some time to sink into the story — Olive (Frances McDormand, “Fargo”) herself is cold and aloof — but by Monday’s second part of the miniseries as viewers see the characters age through a 25-year period, there’s a relatability that starts to sink in as viewers come to recognize the damage one generation can inflict on the next. …
The San Francisco Chronicle says:
... Olive Kitteridge, the character, is a difficult woman to like, but it’s impossible not to get hooked on “Olive Kitteridge” … explores Tolstoy’s notion that every family is unhappy in its own way, making the particular unhappiness of the Kitteridges universal through a magical combination of great direction, writing and performances. …
The story of Olive Kitteridge is an unlikely candidate for a TV miniseries. And that’s what makes it such a magnificent TV miniseries. ... …
... a fascinating, tragicomic study in human stubbornness, contrariness and contradiction. …
… a quietly captivating miniseries about a seldom-quiet woman.... The more you see of her, the more you want to see, in a film that — unlike so many on TV these days — seems precisely as long as it should be, without a moment wasted or another moment needed. …
... this finely crafted, wonderfully cast meller suggests a promising new life for the women’s-picture genre on nets willing to let such stories breathe. …
9 p.m. Sunday & Monday. HBO.
