Netflix’s ‘Pieces of Her’: TV Review
Pieces of Her revolves around one seemingly simple question: Who is Laura Oliver (Toni Collette), really? It’s the one her daughter, Andy (Bella Heathcote), is faced with after a random act of violence unravels the web of lies Laura has built around their lives, and the one Laura herself seems reluctant to address after decades of wrestling with it in private.
The season’s eight episodes devote all their time to pondering this mystery, piecing together bit by bit the whole ugly backstory that led Laura to the place we meet her at the start of the series. But on some level, the question of who Laura Oliver is continues to evade it. Slick enough to keep a viewer from turning off Netflix’s autoplay feature, but too broad and detached to generate much in the way of insight or emotional connection, Pieces of Her struggles to locate a beating human heart at the center of its mystery.
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Initially, the series looks promising enough. The pilot (which, like every episode, is directed by Mikie Spiro and scripted by Charlotte Stoudt based on the novel by Karin Slaughter) starts by setting the scene in quick, easily legible strokes: the sleepy seaside town, the unassuming middle-aged mom, the aimless artist daughter, the loving but occasionally touchy relationship between them. The shooting that precipitates the narrative’s tangled series of events is appropriately shocking and horrifying, and the questions that follow raise an uneasy tone. Why is Laura so upset to be seen on TV in news reports about the incident? Why is she suddenly so insistent on distancing herself from her daughter? What doesn’t Andy know about her own family? As the threats Laura has anticipated draw closer, Andy goes on the run, first toward safety, and then toward the truths her mother has worked so hard to hide from her.
As ever, Collette is fascinating to watch. Laura is a slippery character by design. She shifts on a dime from fiercely protective to coldly indifferent, terrified to incandescent with rage, and often it’s difficult to tell where the real Laura ends and her deceptions or defense mechanisms begin. But Collette maintains a firm grasp on her throughout, corralling all the character’s many moods into a single complicated woman in a state of long-overdue transformation. In supporting roles, Gil Birmingham and Omari Hardwick provide solid, steadying presences, breathing a bit of warmth into an otherwise chilly show.
Meanwhile, the series works to keep up a reasonable sense of momentum. Twists and turns drop with clockwork regularity, and little time is wasted on wheel-spinning or unnecessary detours. (This being a mystery, there are still some red herrings.) They’re complemented by cryptic glimpses into Laura’s past: a younger Laura at a piano, a man shot onstage at a business conference, a frightened woman fleeing her husband in the dead of night. Some are fleeting, cutting in like intrusive thoughts and disappearing before we can parse their meaning; others take longer journeys into the past, as Andy makes significant discoveries about Laura’s past or recovers half-forgotten memories from her own.
But Pieces of Her gradually loses steam as the season progresses. Sometime around episode three, it becomes clear that for all the time Andy’s spent trying to piece together who her mother is, the show itself has never stopped to consider who Andy‘s supposed to be, beyond a mechanism propelling the narrative forward. Depending on the needs of the storyline, she’s a defenseless deer in headlights or a smooth operator executing spy-movie maneuvers. If she has a personality, or life goals outside of learning about Laura, or any friends at all beyond the one random person who texts her in the first episode and then is never mentioned again, Pieces of Her does not offer up any of those details.
Meanwhile, the more secrets Andy unearths, the less interesting they turn out to be. The teases that pique curiosity early in the season give way to dramatic yet oddly predictable reveals, presented with great seriousness and little nuance or feeling. Pointed references to thorny issues like corporate greed or political corruption or domestic terrorism temporarily lend Pieces of Her the sheen of a more intellectual endeavor, but somewhere along the way the series loses either nerve or interest in doing much of anything with them. They become not a lens for understanding some larger picture, but window dressing for a much smaller and more banal story of a young woman in an awful situation.
Pieces of Her is on slightly more solid footing with its exploration of the violence waged against women — on a personal level by men who claim to care about them, but also on a larger scale by the society that purports to protect them, as invoked by footage from the 2017 Women’s March playing on a TV or skeptical chatter about female political candidates overheard on a radio. Such abuse leaves a mark even on women like Andy who’ve been shielded from the worst of it; as Andy realizes late in the season, Laura’s experiences have shaped their relationship since long before Andy was even aware they existed. Here, too, though, Pieces of Her doesn’t seem to have much to say about misogyny beyond the fact that it exists, and is bad.
What makes the series’ mediocrity all the more frustrating is that touch upon the germ of a meaningful idea. “Contrary to what you may think, my life didn’t begin the moment you were born,” Laura snaps at Andy — and stung as Andy looks, the line gets at something true and relatable about the lopsided dynamics between parents and children. Under all of its frosty remove and increasingly outrageous but decreasingly compelling twists, Pieces of Her is fundamentally about a young woman truly seeing her mother for the first time, not as the flawed parent who raised her but as a whole person on her own terms. But for that idea to hit as hard as it could, we’d first need to care about these people as people — to be able to see them as living, breathing creatures and not just collections of sordid plot points jotted down on a piece of paper somewhere.
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