Alison Oliver talks to friendsPhoto: Enda Bowe/Hulu
Sally Rooney’s prose, demurely simple as it may seem, is most alluring because of the complexity it can contain. In the first chapter of her novel, Conversations With Friends, her narrator, a young woman named Frances, gives us brief flashes of her temperament. “I couldn’t think of anything funny,” she says at one point, “and it was difficult to craft my face to express my sense of humor.” Frances’ constant self-examination makes her an engaging, unnerving narrator . But what’s great on page isn’t necessarily the best fodder for what’s great on screen. On the heels of Hulu’s Normal People, another Rooney adaptation directed by Lenny Abrahamson (Room) that was an achingly tender take on budding and built intimacies, the streamer is back with Conversations With Friends. And the results have been mixed at best.
As Frances, the unruly poet who falls in love with a dashing married man (an actor, of course), Alison Oliver had an understandably difficult task ahead of her. Frances lives in her head, constantly brooding over her actions, her words, her fears. She’s the kind of person who prefers to do the spoken word for fear of writing down something printed and letting it live on outside of herself. (“I like the impermanence of it,” she admits.) She is an introspective character, a witness to her own life. To Oliver’s credit, she finds ways to make such inwardness legible in Conversations With Friends, managing to capture it in a sideways glance or a furtive blush. And yes, she comes alive when she meets Nick (Joe Alwyn). Suddenly, she’s not standing on the sidelines or playing second fiddle to her social friend Bobbie (the always sunny Sasha Lane). She finally feels seen with Nick, even though she knows that such looks are inevitably fleeting. After all, he’s married. And maybe just as distant as her. Her awkward opening flirtation is charming and more grounded than such scenes often are. “What are you writing about?” Nick asks her, before immediately regretting it, “That’s a terrible question.” They stumble into an affair where her need to be seen is so obvious that she knows she’s in too deep.
And it’s all for a man’s affection. And therein lies what rocks this miniseries.
conversations with friends
C+
C+
conversations with friends
based on
Sally Rooney’s 2017 novel of the same name
With
Alison Oliver, Sasha Lane, Joe Alwyn, Jemima Kirke
format
Half-hour drama; watched four episodes for review
Nick is meant to be the catalyst for something changing in Frances; why else would she start an affair with a man who is married to the older woman who is also courting her best friend? (Yes, the show and novel may hint at friendly dynamics, but the intimacies explored here are decidedly more lascivious.) And finally Alwyn, who is a beautiful specimen (it’s understandable why Oliver’s Frances would hesitate when she caresses his naked body to come out afraid he’d disappear and turn out to be the product of her wild imagination) can never quite capture the magnetic pull his character is destined to exude. He’s not helped by a script that’s both sparse and over-determined, one that at times expresses its characters what, in Rooney’s words, would otherwise remain an inner monologue. (“You think things and don’t say them,” Frances is told at one point.)
G/O Media may receive a commission
Jemima Kirke, Sasha Lane, Alison Oliver and Joe Alwyn talk to friendsPhoto Credit: Enda Bowe/Hulu
It’s no surprise that the series feels most electrifying when it dispenses with dialogue altogether. Sequences of Frances anxiously checking her phone for a lonely text message from Nick, or of her tugging at her hair despite knowing she’s being watched, become truly ordinary moments filled with outsized emotion. (Side note: kudos to Abrahamson for filming his actors actually typing on phones and not, like so many productions these days, relying on tapping on green screen props where the actual typing is added in post; it’s silly to focus on those details, but it’s refreshing to see such digital conversations have haptics.)
As Nick and Frances’ relationship blossoms (and ebbs and flows), Conversations With Friends offers the glimmer of an intriguing offering. Namely Rooney’s book. “The Novel Is Better” feels like such a tired line, but there’s something to be said about the prose’s expansive inwardness and the way a TV adaptation can reduce rather than distill such a sensibility. Then again, as Frances reminds us, the consistency of Rooney’s words is still there for us all to find even after we’ve worked our way through this adaptation and wondered why those words alone weren’t enough.