Big Little Lies: Season 1, Episode 5 "Once Bitten"

 Big Little Lies: Season 1, Episode 5 "Once Bitten"

March 19, 2017

“Once Bitten” is the most powerful episode of Big Little Lies yet. This is the episode where everything falls apart for the three main leads; Celeste, Madeleine, and Jane. Each woman gives a heartfelt, emotional performance as they try to escape the demons within their lives. Jean-Marc Vallee’s direction is as showy as it gets and he revels in his directorial duties with the big stuff, such as car accidents, happening. The writing remains as strong as ever. They really did an excellent job capturing the realism of domestic violence, as I have pointed out in past episodes. Here, they take it to another level. The therapy session is a very strong, emotional scene. Robin Wiegert, who channels her inner Judd Hirsch from Ordinary People, is able to draw out the truth from Celeste about her abusive relationship. The episode incorporates flashbacks to show the searing pain and suffering that Celeste takes from the hands of Perry. Very hard and uncomfortable to watch, but it is needed to show a sense of realism.

In this episode, Celeste has a solo session with her therapist. She tries to say that nothing is wrong, and she loves Perry, but slowly the truth begins to come out. The therapist convinces her to come up with a plan in case she needs to take herself and the kids away to safety. Meanwhile, the marriage between Madeleine and Ed remains unpassionate as it gets, as proven in the attempted kitchen tryst. Madeleine tries to distance herself from her affair with Joseph, but a certain car accident may complicate matters. As for Jane, the school principal (played by P.J Byrne) conducts a meeting about Ziggy which fractures the relationships between the feuding families (mainly Renata versus Jane/Madeleine). Jane also makes a decision to confront her past alleged abuser which could complicate things for her as well.

Wow, what an excellent, well-written episode! It flies by in a hurry and leaves you craving for more. The performances from the women and Alexander Skarsgard are beyond excellent. Skarsgard legitimately scares me every time he is on screen. You never know when he will hit his wife or throw her head down on a pillow. Incredibly tense! As always, the cinematography and the soundtracks remain high points!

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