In the end, I'm very ambivalent about this miniseries.
There is eye-catching, ear-piercing, acting from Claire Danes, who has come along way from her teenage tv debut. More so,I'm definitely a fan of Lizzy Caplan (if you are, hopefully you've seen her work in "Masters and Johnson" and elsewhere). They garb her in suburban frumpiness, but still she shines through.
I don't mind narrators, I know that is a catch for some people from "Apocalypse Now" to just plain ol' now. It helps that Caplan's character is the narrator, and that becomes very important by episode 7. I'm trying desperately hard to not spoil things here. It was interesting to come here and see some of the foreign versions went with a variation of "The New Life of Toby."
We spend a lot of time with Jesse Eisenberg as Toby. More time than even his cinematic kids spend with him. And they send a lot of time with him. As his character struggles in the film, and struggles with getting away from himself. It feels like Eisenberg does the same as an actor.
Thus Caplan feels to me like the emotional center of this film, even if she is thrust aside by both plot and the twirling Toby. Fleishman's world is turned upside down. Frequently literally on camera from the opening shot on iirc.
My wife pulled the parachute after episode 6, I think sensing where this might be headed. I did find myself wondering who the film is for.
A simple cliche is "Marriage is hard. Divorce is harder." Or maybe I have that swapped around and Marriage is harder....it might depend on a lot of circumstances. Including financial ones, besides my emotional distance with Eisenberg's Toby, the fact that the various folks in marital distress here are all upper middle class I think kept me at a distance.
And well, I've got some breeder bias on the amount of sacrifice one signs up for when having kids. But I don't want to sound as smug and self-righteous as Toby frequently does. I know a situation can go from hard to impossible....and I've never been abandoned by parents, lovers, "friends" and Dr. Goldberg to have a sinister substitute obstetrician show up instead.
Personally I was tempted to abandon the film and as a Toby proxy, go off with Mozhan Marno's "Nahid" character and see if both she and I/Toby would transition out of our kept lives into something more sustaining. Not an option here, but it was one moment when Toby actually listened to someone else (after that someone else had provided comfort to him first of course). And her tale was fascinating to me and perhaps Tucker Carlson fans.
Bottom line I'm just not sure what the target audience is for this? I hung around for the Caplan/Danes acting... I did like some of the Jewish insight, the kibbutz curse and there's a pretty wonderful and unique bat mitzvah.
PS Also I am struggling with these 600 word minimums IMDB, sheesh. I peck away at a paragraph or two, but then get sucked into too much spewing (sorry if you are reading to the dregs here, I'm trying). Is the 600 limit just to help train Amazon's version of chat-gpt? It can't all be about bored of the rings, can it?
Hmmmm, bored of the wedding rings could have been an optional title for this review, but I'm sticking with My So-Called Wife. It feels like getting the best out of this film comes with whatever empathy might come from that.
There is eye-catching, ear-piercing, acting from Claire Danes, who has come along way from her teenage tv debut. More so,I'm definitely a fan of Lizzy Caplan (if you are, hopefully you've seen her work in "Masters and Johnson" and elsewhere). They garb her in suburban frumpiness, but still she shines through.
I don't mind narrators, I know that is a catch for some people from "Apocalypse Now" to just plain ol' now. It helps that Caplan's character is the narrator, and that becomes very important by episode 7. I'm trying desperately hard to not spoil things here. It was interesting to come here and see some of the foreign versions went with a variation of "The New Life of Toby."
We spend a lot of time with Jesse Eisenberg as Toby. More time than even his cinematic kids spend with him. And they send a lot of time with him. As his character struggles in the film, and struggles with getting away from himself. It feels like Eisenberg does the same as an actor.
Thus Caplan feels to me like the emotional center of this film, even if she is thrust aside by both plot and the twirling Toby. Fleishman's world is turned upside down. Frequently literally on camera from the opening shot on iirc.
My wife pulled the parachute after episode 6, I think sensing where this might be headed. I did find myself wondering who the film is for.
A simple cliche is "Marriage is hard. Divorce is harder." Or maybe I have that swapped around and Marriage is harder....it might depend on a lot of circumstances. Including financial ones, besides my emotional distance with Eisenberg's Toby, the fact that the various folks in marital distress here are all upper middle class I think kept me at a distance.
And well, I've got some breeder bias on the amount of sacrifice one signs up for when having kids. But I don't want to sound as smug and self-righteous as Toby frequently does. I know a situation can go from hard to impossible....and I've never been abandoned by parents, lovers, "friends" and Dr. Goldberg to have a sinister substitute obstetrician show up instead.
Personally I was tempted to abandon the film and as a Toby proxy, go off with Mozhan Marno's "Nahid" character and see if both she and I/Toby would transition out of our kept lives into something more sustaining. Not an option here, but it was one moment when Toby actually listened to someone else (after that someone else had provided comfort to him first of course). And her tale was fascinating to me and perhaps Tucker Carlson fans.
Bottom line I'm just not sure what the target audience is for this? I hung around for the Caplan/Danes acting... I did like some of the Jewish insight, the kibbutz curse and there's a pretty wonderful and unique bat mitzvah.
PS Also I am struggling with these 600 word minimums IMDB, sheesh. I peck away at a paragraph or two, but then get sucked into too much spewing (sorry if you are reading to the dregs here, I'm trying). Is the 600 limit just to help train Amazon's version of chat-gpt? It can't all be about bored of the rings, can it?
Hmmmm, bored of the wedding rings could have been an optional title for this review, but I'm sticking with My So-Called Wife. It feels like getting the best out of this film comes with whatever empathy might come from that.