Marriage and the Lies that Destroy It

Writer and producer David E. Kelley’s HBO series, “Big Little Lies,” is a powerhouse revelation of modern-day marriage. Though the series is often outrageous and extreme in the happenings between people, it does provide a slice of life today experienced by many couples.

Set along the gorgeous beachfront town of Monterey, California, it shows how complex relationships can be, and how wounded, damaged people wade through their pain often with incredible courage and sometimes with self-defeating denial.

The cast is a brilliant group of actors, including Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, Alexander Skarsgard, Jeffrey Nordling, Adam Scott, Zoe Kravitz, Meryl Streep, and others.

I don’t think as a society, we have ever come to grips with the reality of just how strenuous and effortful marriage almost always is. Or, as far as that goes, any serious couple relationship.

But marriage poses its own unique set of challenges.

Perhaps Einstein said it best, “Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.”

This is at the heart of Big Little Lies. The primary couples involved are dealing with all the human complexities that a relationship between two people can possibly experience.

Old inner wounds. Sexual and emotional abuse. Insecurity and nagging, often relentless self-doubt. Jealousy. Betrayal. Addictions, wealth and pretentiousness, and of course, big and little lies are all in the mix in the lives of these flawed and impaired and human couples.

The women in this series are smart, beautiful, and clever. But they can also be catty and raw. And they have reason to be.

The main females, Celeste (Kidman), Madeline (Witherspoon), Jane (Woodley), Renata (Dern), and Bonnie (Kravitz) are women with secrets and hurts, and they carry with them nagging, sometimes aching struggles with the men in their lives. They are loving mothers and caring partners, but they have their own private indiscretions and mysteries that define them.

Celeste is a trained attorney but now a stay at home mom. Her husband is a successful businessman, but he has a wave of vicious, uncontrolled anger in him that often explodes onto her in thrashing, empty sex. Madeline is endlessly chatty, sweetly filled with a mixture of pixie dust and cayenne pepper. Her husband has the patience of Job, is nerdy and intellectual, but deeply loves his wife. Jane is a single mom struggling with a profound, hauntingly emotional wound. Renata is at first a snitty, uppity business executive who loves being rich and is at odds with the other women, who later become allies. Her husband is one of those guys who stays in the background, but when he appears, is cool and handsome with his three-day beard and casual clothes, a bit ruffled but expensive. He turns out to be a fraud. And Bonnie is a New Age culture child, married to Madeline’s former husband. Yes, it’s all quite messy.

There are other intertwining relationships with these women. There are children. Celeste’s adorable twin boys. Madeline’s troubled teenage girl as well as her middle-school daughter who calls her “woman.” There is Jane’s sweet and bright son Ziggy. And Renata’s shy little daughter, Amabella. These child actors are amazing. And they perfectly reflect the hurt and the confusion that children endure when Mom and Dad are in conflict.

There are difficult in-laws (especially Meryl Streep’s, Mary Louise) and others who, like all families, have to wrestle with the ups and downs and complications of these relationships.

But what you see in this excellent series is a humanness that mirrors all of us. We may not have the intensity and destructiveness in our relationships as these characters have, but we are close to it, nonetheless. And some of us have been where some of them are.

At one point, when Renata’s life is crumbling, she says, “I can’t make a perfect world. No matter what, shit happens.” And so, it does, for them and for us, which is a vital lesson in this series.

There are no perfect marriages. The best ones simply stay in the struggle to be real and honest, to listen and to share, to keep working on the relationship, and to allow love to grow.

This extraordinary series reminds us, that lies will always spin out of control, and little lies will gradually become big ones. It’s those big ones that destroy marriage and leave us betrayed by our own misguided choices.

© 2019 Timothy Moody