Based on Karin Slaughter’s novel, the thriller follows a young lady (Bella Heathcote) as she searches for the truth about her mother (Toni Collette) and their family history in the aftermath of a horrific tragedy.
Pieces of Her focuses on a basic question: Who exactly is Laura Oliver (Toni Collette)? It’s the one her daughter, Andy (Bella Heathcote), is confronted with when a random act of violence unravels the web of falsehoods Laura has woven around their lives, and it’s the one Laura herself is hesitant about about about to address after decades of grappling with it privately.
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The season’s eight episodes are devoted entirely to delving into this mystery, piece by piece piecing together the entire heinous past that brought Laura to the point where we meet her at the start of the series. But, on some level, the identity of Laura Oliver remains a mystery. Pieces of Her, which is slick enough to keep a spectator from turning off Netflix’s autoplay function but too wide and impersonal to produce any understanding or emotional connection, fails to discover a beating human heart at the center of its mystery.
The series appears to be promising at first glance. The pilot (directed by Mikie Spiro and scripted by Charlotte Stoudt based on Karin Slaughter’s novel) begins by setting the scene in quick, easily legible strokes: the sleepy seaside town, the unassuming middle-aged mom, the aimless artist daughter, and their loving but occasionally touchy relationship.
The gunshot that sets off the narrative’s complicated chain of events is properly startling and horrible, and the questions that follow cast an unsettling pall. Why is Laura so furious about being shown on television in news coverage about the incident? Why is she now so adamant about separating herself from her daughter? What is it that Andy doesn’t know about her own family? As the perils Laura has foreseen approach, Andy flees, first to safety, and then to the secrets, her mother has tried so hard to keep hidden from her.
Collette, as always, is a joy to watch. Laura is a character who is purposefully deceptive. She may go from passionately protective to coldly indifferent, afraid to enraged in the blink of an eye, and it’s frequently impossible to discern where the real Laura stops and her deceptions or defensive mechanisms begin.
Collette, on the other hand, keeps a strong grip on her throughout, corralling all of the character’s moods into a single difficult lady during a long-overdue change. Gil Birmingham and Omari Hardwick give good, steadying presences in supporting parts, bringing a modicum of warmth to an otherwise frigid performance.
Meanwhile, the series attempts to maintain a respectable feeling of momentum. Twists and twists are dropped with precision, and little time is wasted on wheel-spinning or needless diversions. (Because this is a mystery, there are some red herrings.) They’re supplemented by mysterious flashbacks to Laura’s past: a younger Laura playing the piano, a guy shot onstage at a business conference, and a terrified lady escaping her husband in the middle of the night.
However, as the season goes, Pieces of Her loses steam. Around episode three, it becomes evident that, for all of Andy’s time spent trying to figure out who her mother is, the program has never paused to contemplate who Andy is meant to be as a character other than a plot device.
She may be a vulnerable deer in headlights or a slick operator executing spy-movie moves, depending on the story’s objectives. Pieces of Her doesn’t reveal anything about her personality, life ambitions other than learning about Laura, or friends other than the one random person who contacts her in the first episode and then is never mentioned again.
Meanwhile, the more mysteries Andy discovers, the less fascinating they become. Early in the season, the hints that piqued interest give way to dramatic yet curiously predictable reveals, delivered with tremendous solemnity and little subtlety or passion. Pointed references to problematic themes like corporate greed, governmental corruption, and domestic terrorism give Pieces of Her the appearance of being more cerebral at first, but the series eventually loses the courage or inclination to do much with them. They become a window decoration for a much smaller and more basic narrative of a young lady in a dreadful predicament, rather than a prism for comprehending some broader picture. Pieces of Her is a little more grounded in its examination of the violence perpetrated against women, both on a personal level by men who claim to care about them and on a larger scale by the society that claims to protect them, as evidenced by footage from the 2017 Women’s March on TV and skeptical chatter about female political candidates overheard on the radio.
Even women who have been spared the worst of the violence leave a mark; as Andy finds late in the season, Laura’s experiences had molded their relationship long before Andy was even aware they existed. Pieces of Her, however, don’t appear to have anything to say about sexism other than the fact that it occurs and is harmful.
The series’ mediocrity is made all the more painful by the fact that it touches on the germ of a profound concept. Laura shouts at Andy, “Contrary to what you may believe, my life didn’t begin the minute you were born,” and as wounded as Andy appears, the phrase strikes to something real and relatable about parent-child interactions.
Pieces of Her is really about a young woman actually seeing her mother for the first time, not as the damaged parent who raised her but as a full person on her own terms, despite its chilly distance and progressively absurd but decreasingly riveting turns.
But, in order for that notion to be as powerful as it could be, we’d have to care about these individuals as people — to be able to view them as real, breathing beings rather than a collection of gruesome storey lines scribbled someplace on a piece of paper.
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