Olive Kitteridge

Lisa Cholodenko, director of High Art and The Kids Are All Right, is yet another major filmmaker who has turned to the small screen to direct intimate human stories. Olive Kitteridge, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Elizabeth Strout as a four-part miniseries for HBO that aired in 2014, covers 25 years in the life of the title character, a middle-school math teacher played by Frances McDormand with a perpetually dour expression. Prickly, sharp-tongued Olive finds fault in nearly everything and everyone, almost as if to balance the optimism and generosity of her husband, Henry (Richard Jenkins), who receives the worst of her derisive comments. Themes of depression and mental illness, as well as loss and guilt, run throughout the story, in which Olive seems to use her cutting and brutally frank remarks to keep emotion at arm's length. But she's also a caring person (albeit in her own way), who performs small acts of kindness without preamble. Olive is both entertaining and infuriating without ever becoming a cartoon curmudgeon, and Cholodenko slowly draws us beneath the surface to see her underlying humanity while detailing disappointments, frustrations, and losses; the emotional depth of her marriage; and earlier events that put her present life into perspective. Patient viewers will be rewarded with a rich story and complicated characters in this fine series costarring Bill Murray and John Gallagher Jr. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)