Olive Kitteridge Review

Olive Kitteridge is rude to almost everyone, contemptuous of cheerfulness and incapable of saying what she feels, and Frances McDormand plays her without a single softening note. Her husband Henry, the town pharmacist, is kind to the point of weakness, and Richard Jenkins makes his decency both lovely and a kind of reproach. Across twenty-five years in Crosby, Maine, their son grows up wounded, the town's small tragedies come and go, and Henry's tenderness for the young woman he hires at the pharmacy, played by Zoe Kazan, sits in the marriage like a stone.

Jane Anderson's script keeps Elizabeth Strout's structure of linked episodes rather than a single plot, Lisa Cholodenko directs with patience, and Frederick Elmes's camera finds the seasons on the coast. Bill Murray arrives in the last part and brings a grumpy, unexpected warmth. The series won eight Emmys, including for McDormand, Jenkins, Murray, Anderson and Cholodenko.

It is slow, and its bleakness will not suit everyone, though it is often darkly comic. It is also one of the most honest portraits of depression and marriage television has produced, and McDormand's Olive, cruel and funny and finally frightened of being alone, is a great performance.