The renaissance of Kathryn Hahn has been one of the few bright spots in the bleakness of the last few years. It officially began (though she had been ramping up her work via the likes of Transparent and the wonderful Mrs Fletcher before that) with her turn as nosy neighbour-cum-witch Agatha Harkness in Disney’s 2021 hit WandaVision, and she is now the central figure of the streaming platform’s new series Tiny Beautiful Things.
The drama is based on Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 collection of essays of the same name, which were themselves based on the responses she used to write for the Dear Sugar problem page of online literary magazine the Rumpus. Into it, she channelled her many and varied life experiences – good and extraordinarily bad, all of which would become familiar to millions when her memoir, Wild, went on to be an Oprah-anointed global phenomenon. She delivered compassionate and brilliantly written replies to those seeking solace from the anonymous agony aunt. If, to the average UK sensibility, they often veered towards the emetic and set off oversharing alarm bells – well, that’s probably our problem and not hers. But it does mean that you might want to approach the latest iteration of her work with either caution or a determinedly open, uncynical mindset, however unnatural it feels. I think it’s the best way to get through it.
Hahn is Clare, a married (just about) mother of one who is on the cusp of her 50th birthday and entering a perfect storm of current frustrations, past regrets, unfulfilled ambitions, unprocessed trauma and fears for the future. She was once an aspiring young writer with a book deal (though we see her effectively being bullied into it by a male editor during one of the flashbacks to Clare’s youth – in which she is brilliantly played by Sarah Pidgeon). But her mother (an underused Merritt Wever given little but a saintly one-note to play) died of lung cancer when Clare was 22, sending the latter into a spiral of estrangement from her brother, infidelity while with her first husband, divorce, heroin addiction, self-loathing (we see her refuse a little child’s offer of his balloon on the bus because she feels unworthy of “such tiny beautiful things”) – and she never wrote the book.
Now she is an administrator at a care home – though not for long, following the discovery that she is bedding down in a patient’s room after her current husband has thrown her out of the family home – and wondering in voiceover, “How did I get so far from the person I wanted to be?” Look, I told you: adjust your mindset (and accept the balloon) or pop it in low-level fury and get out while the getting’s good.
When an old friend offers Clare the job of advice columnist, she is reluctant at first to pretend to be an authority when her own life is such a mess. But gradually she comes to realise that you can still help others even if you can’t help yourself, and composing the replies comes to act as a kind of catharsis and salvation. Staging posts on her journey towards healing, you could say, if you’ve adjusted enough.
Tiny Beautiful Things is clearly designed as a tearjerker and there are many times when the manipulations show too starkly to be effective. There is a recurring scene about a coat, the last gift Clare’s mother was to give her, which the young Clare asks to return as she doesn’t like the colour. This is overplayed to the point of absurdity: “When a gift is given,” Sugar tells one of her correspondents and us, repeatedly, “say thank you.” But if you’re a Strayed fan, or you’re in the mood for a good cry, enjoy. Otherwise, it is purgatory of quite a different kind.
Tiny Beautiful Things is on Disney+
