"Pieces of Her," which premiered Friday on Netflix and based on the 2018 Karin Slaughter novel of the same name, is a tidy and effective thriller without much to say about the state of anything at all. The ratio of violence to running time is low, which is welcome, and there is barely any sex, which is reasonable enough for a story whose characters are more worried about being killed than hooking up and whose most important relationship is that of mother and daughter. And that too is a kind of relief.
The series, developed by Charlotte Stoudt ("Homeland") and directed in its entirety by Minkie Spiro ("The Plot Against America"), keeps you moving along, even when you have to work a little to make sense of it — or when, seemingly about to end, it reveals a new set of twists and turns, like a line at Disneyland, and sets you thinking about problems of pacing in the eight-hour narrative universe.
Toni Collette plays Laura, a speech therapist in the sleepy, sandy community of Belle Isle, Georgia; Bella Heathcote is her daughter Andy, who came down from New York when Laura was undergoing cancer treatment and has stuck around, working nights as a police dispatcher and living in Laura's back house, where, she texts a friend, she can "fail rent free." (She's an artist who has reduced herself to doodling.)
As exposition will make clear as they sit in a diner on Andy's 30th birthday, Laura is concerned that Andy is not concerned enough about Andy and too concerned about Laura, and Andy is concerned that Laura is too concerned with Andy not being concerned enough about Andy and too concerned about Andy being concerned about Laura. (That is, they love each other and push each other away.) This dynamic will not substantially change as life turns from quiet to crazy. Suddenly — if you like your shocks delivered fresh, I suggest you skip ahead to the next paragraph — there is a shooting, and in the ensuing chaos, in order to protect her daughter (who, wearing her uniform, becomes a target), Laura turns for a moment into Carrie Mathison, or Mrs. Peel, or any super-spy or special forces agent whose name you would like to write in.
"If someone threatens your child you do anything to protect them; something just kicks in," she will tell a seemingly skeptical police detective, which is the point of the story but also just a fragment of the Whole Truth. For as the incident becomes national news, it quickly grows clear to the viewer that Laura has been hiding out and that this bit of unwanted publicity has put her, and Andy, in danger. That danger arrives with absurd swiftness, setting off a story that moves from Georgia to Alabama to Texas to San Francisco — there is a lot of driving — and back to the 1980s, including an interlude in Oslo, where various events set the gears turning that will ultimately explain what we're seeing in the present.
This is a story whose characters will lie about who they are, what they know and what they are put to — Andy is the only one who doesn't, apart from a false name on a hotel register, and that's only because she doesn't know anything — and given that its method is to pile revelation upon everything-changing revelation, there is hardly anything to be said about what happens that isn't either a spoiler or a red herring that temporarily seems like one. I won't go into much detail about the nuts and bolts of the story, except to say that it involves a lot of familiar elements — corporate malfeasance, a political candidate, a powerful family, a suitcase full of money, fake drivers licenses, assorted hired thugs and, in flashbacks, of which there are many, a collection of full-service leftist radicals I associate more with the late 1960s and '70s than the '80s.
In spite of its stretch-limousine length, "Pieces of Her" does its work in a mostly classic, even Hitchcockian fashion, telling a story about an ordinary person who finds herself caught up in a mystery and on the run, with the signal difference that Hitchcock was not interested in the emotional dynamic of mothers and daughters. As in many such stories, its protagonist — that is, Andy, who becomes both hunted and hunter — is required to act as if she had at least taken some extension courses at CIA summer school, though Heathcote does a fine job of communicating just how off-balance Andy remains even as she thinks cleverly, or recklessly, on her feet.
Their individual characters, as regards the thriller, may be summed up in a line from each.
Laura: "I don't want Andy having to look over her shoulder the rest of her life."
Andy: "Mom, I'm not letting this go."
As it goes on, the series will spend more and more time in the past. (Jessica Barden does nice work as Laura's younger self, while resembling Collette not at all.) Though necessary to explain the present action, and the site of the series' biggest revelations, these scenes can feel a little theatrical, a costume drama with the emphasis on costume and remote from the more involving action of the present. There is a complicated plot involving the aforementioned radicals that, in its ratio of effort to likely effect, makes no sense at all. (Apocalyptic militancy, from wherever it comes, is often quixotic, but these people are supposed to be at least a little smart.) At the same time, the series does a fair job of distracting you from such thoughts while events are in play, as on a roller coaster where you are too busy screaming to consider its construction. Later, you might have some thoughts.
Some of the payoffs seem a little too tidy; but they are tidy, at least. There are a few minor holes left unplugged, possibly as beside the point, and a couple of motivations that seem insufficiently accounted for, in real-world terms, to make sure that certain characters will meet again. (There is always the fallback, of course, that you just can't tell about people.) Also, if you are going to teach someone to shoot a pistol, lining up bottles on the roof of a car seems an imprudent way to do it. They have fence rails for that. But these are small complaints.
Among the other characters, some of whom will turn out to be other than described here, deserving mention are Gil Birmingham (always a strong screen presence) as Charlie, an old friend of the family; Omari Hardwick as Gordon, Laura's ex-husband and Andy's stepfather, uncomplaining and helpful; Jacob Scipio as Jack, whom Andy meets in a bar on her first night on the run and who will teach her to shoot a gun; Terry O'Quinn as an industrialist; David Wenham as the aforementioned politician; and Joe Dempsie as Nick, a radical.
Although there are more than enough questions to draw you to the end — and there is a certain amount of just getting to the end involved in any eight-hour mystery — what makes "Pieces of Her" something better than just a diverting entertainment are the central performances and the mother-daughter story that exists both within and without the thriller. (They have more than the usual hurdles, but also the usual hurdles.) The series is most satisfying when Collette and Heathcote, each embodying her own particular mix of exhaustion and resolution, are together onscreen — it adds an ordinary emotional component often missing from thrillers. And though events will keep them mostly apart, the viewer's desire to reunite them, ultimately the point of the story, keeps this journey into genre compelling.
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‘PIECES OF HER’
Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)
Where to watch: Premiered Friday on Netflix
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