Big Little Lies: Season 1, Episode 3 "Living the Dream"

 Big Little Lies: Season 1, Episode 3 "Living the Dream"

March 05, 2017

“Living the Dream” is an excellent episode. You start to see some of the strings being pulled as we march towards the end of our murder mystery conclusion. This episode is not about the murder mystery at all. It tackles serious themes of motherhood. Plus, we go deeper into the lives of some of the characters. Renata, for example, is truly not the villain. She is just a mother who is willing to humiliate herself to make sure her daughter gets what is best. The viewers also see that her rather deadbeat husband may be the best husband in the show…and that is saying something. Rape is also a central theme with Jane and Celeste both at the forefront. It can be a hard watch, but it is a necessary one. This is a powerful, emotional, and well-acted episode, Witherspoon, Kidman, Woodley, and Dern all deserve Emmy recognition. Let’s throw Skarsgard in there while we are at it.

Renata’s daughter, Amabella is having her birthday party. Renata is disappointed that Madeleine’s daughter and friends do not attend as they decide to see “Frozen on Ice” instead. Speaking of Madeleine, her bulldog personality is pushed to the front again as she fights the town for the right to put on her play, Avenue Q. Her tenacity in her personal life forces her oldest daughter, Abigail (played by the lovely Kathryn Newton) to move in with her father and Bonnie. Celeste and Perry go to therapy together. Celeste is very unwilling to mention her physical abuse, but surprisingly Perry admits everything happened because of his insecurities. Finally, Jane is able to open up to Madeleine about her past and how Ziggy is the product of rape. Not a normal rape sequence, as politeness existed and no dark alley was used, but still rape is rape.

Overall, this is an excellent episode that features some amazing acting from all the ladies. Laura Dern and Nicole Kidman are co-MVP’s here. If you want some sexy dance moves, Zoe Kravitz has you covered…despite being at a children’s birthday party. There is many moving parts, but you can see the dots starting to connect within the domestic lives of everyone. Unlike the book, there is no black and white. There is no clear villain. This episode proves that Renata does deserves sympathy. As for Perry, you do understand his reasonings, but sympathy still ceases to exist in my case because there should be no excuse for domestic violence. Amazing episode!

My Grade: A


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

Image
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” Ah, wise words from our new young friend, Ferris Bueller. In John Hughes’s 1986 film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , all Ferris wants to do is take a day and have fun. That is the most simplistic theme the movie has. You can go deeper, but the main takeaway is that it is okay to have fun. That is a motto I have taken to heart. I really loved the film. People consider The Breakfast Club to be Hughes’s best and most important movie. That’s a fine statement to make, but I would personally rank the film number two behind this particular one. The teen characters are instantly relatable, it has a memorable antagonist for the children, and this is basically a thirty-year-old travel guide for Chicago. Just how Woody Allen creates his movies as love letters for New York, this is applicable for John Hughes. A Chicago love letter!   Like all of his films, Hughes wrote...
Read more

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Image
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) The James Bond franchise is one of those franchises that will never die. It has been going strong since the first movie rolled out in the early 1960’s, and new James Bond movies are still produced today. What makes this series unique is they use multiple actors to play the titular character over the years. They all bring their own gravitas to the role, and each Bond is a different man when compared to each other (although the martini, shaken not stirred and the beautiful women among other things remain a constant.) So my first James Bond review for this blog is 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me. This wasn’t my first look at the series, but it was my first look at the older movies. I really liked what I saw. This is an old-fashioned story that combines a spy drama and an action-packed war movie into one package. Like many of the older Bond movies, the story can get borderline preposterous. The cheesiness of the plot did come to grow on me after awhile, even...
Read more

Table for Five (1983)

Image
Table for Five (1983) I can guarantee that ninety percent of my readers here have not seen this tear-jerking melodrama 1983’s Table for Five , yet alone heard of it. Hopefully after reading my kind words, you will be somewhat intrigued by this movie. When doing my research for the film, I was shocked to see how vastly underrated the movie is. There are only a few reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, hardly any information on Wikipedia or Google-hardly anything out there in this vast Internet landscape. Then, why on earth is this movie so good? Sure, maybe some folks will say the movie is just a predictable Lifetime TV movie, but honestly it is much more than that. There are some elements that makes this film seem destined for the television at times, but to me it is much more than that. I consider the movie to be an honest, emotional portrayal about fatherhood and family. Directed by Robert Lieberman, this film is about a man named J.P Tannen (Jon Voight) who fails at being fathe...
Read more