Nicole Kidman in Lulu Wang’s Amazonian drama – The Hollywood Reporter

Nicole Kidman in ‘Expats’

Amazon MGM Studios

Sitting in the center of expatriates is a mystery of the kind that has fueled countless crime dramas and countless true crime series. On a normal night in Hong Kong, a little boy, Gus (Connor J. Gillman), disappears while out on a night out with his family. The questions this incident raises are obvious and urgent: What happened to him? Who did it? Where is he now?

But answers, on Amazon Prime Video’s expatriates, they are much more difficult to obtain. In fact, the questions the series really invests in are those that arise when it becomes clear that satisfactory answers may never be obtained, about how to exist alongside so much uncertainty, injustice, and unthinkable pain. Its six-hour episodes follow this line of thinking through explorations of sexism and classism, home and family, and with so many important themes floating around, some are inevitably covered better than others. But always, the series is kind enough to its characters to sit with their confusing truths instead of pushing them toward neat arcs and clear solutions.

Directed by Lulu Wang (The farewell) and based on the novel by Janice YK Lee, expatriates largely revolves around three American women in Hong Kong. The first we meet is the aimless 25-year-old Mercy (an excellent Ji-young Yoo), in the form of her disembodied voice. “I want to know about the people who caused the tragedies. “People like me,” she says as slides slide of a wrecked car, a broken chairlift, and pilots flying a doomed plane. “Are they ever forgiven? Do they ever move on?

Mercy’s internal monologue turns out to be directed at Margaret, Gus’s mother, a Nicole-Kidman-in-Big–Little–Lies guy played by Nicole Kidman herself. Margaret behaves as if she were made of glass, capable of breaking at any moment and lacerating anyone unlucky enough to be in her orbit, usually Clarke (Brian Tee), the husband who has been struggling to keep things together while She breaks down. Since Gus’s death a year earlier, Margaret has been so consumed by her anguish that, as she says, she “has no room inside me” to worry about anything else. She’s even become estranged from her best friend and neighbor, Hilary (Sarayu Blue), who is in the midst of a midlife crisis amid her crumbling relationship with David (Jack Huston).

expatriates He is patient in his narration, which does not mean that he is boring; rather, it relies on the compassion of his writing and the rawness of his performances to hold our attention as its three protagonists circle around their unwieldy feelings or thrash about their ugly consequences. The series follows Margaret as she sobs in the bathtub of a cheap apartment she rented to get away from her own family, and bears witness to her as she terrorizes her remaining children with her uncontrollable fears that she will kill them. spend something else. It gives Mercy plenty of room to explore the jagged edges of an ongoing relationship with a boy she seems to hate, and Hilary time to wrestle with her ambivalence about marriage, parenthood, and everything else she’s been told. wants. the whole life.

And in a touch that elevates it beyond the usual domestic prestige drama, expatriates extends that voracious empathy beyond these three families to the rest of the world around them. Wang’s camera captures details that aren’t strictly relevant from a plot perspective, but could be glimpses of other untold stories that conflict with the ones we’re following: the mop propped on a door by an invisible worker, the driver sleeping in a car while his client dine at a restaurant. In the penultimate episode, a 97-minute opus that could almost function as a standalone feature, expatriates It follows that the curiosity about the corners of Hong Kong that its American characters have mostly ignored, approaching a neighborhood of upper-class Chinese citizens, the pro-democracy protests that swarm the streets, the crowds of Filipino domestic workers exchanging gossip under a bridge.

Along the way, it introduces the perspectives of previously peripheral characters like Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla), Hilary’s live-in helper, blessed with a beautiful singing voice that she hopes will be her ticket to a better life. And she sheds new light on the relationships we’ve already seen from the other side. Margaret can insist all she wants that her maid Essie (Ruby Ruiz) is “like family” to her. But it seems it never occurred to Margaret or anyone else in her real family to include Essie in their collective grief for Gus, a boy she helped raise from birth, or to imagine that Essie would like to spend more time with him. . his royal family in the Philippines.

The downside to the detour is that a single episode doesn’t seem like enough time to explore all of these rich characters and communities, let alone the thorny politics they address. As exciting as it is for Essie or Puri to finally have some time in the spotlight, or as moving as it is to hear a protester argue with his terrified mother about his determination to fight for a better future, they are sent back to the on the sidelines for a finale that re-centers the most privileged central trio. But expatriates he seems fundamentally aware that his view is that of, well, an expatriate. “It’s not your fight and it never was,” snaps Charly (Bonde Sham), a protester friend of hers, when Mercy tries to join her. “You are a tourist. It doesn’t affect your future. Not precisely. “You can just leave.”

What should Mercy do about it? expatriates He doesn’t pretend to know. It also offers no satisfying resolution to Gus’s fate, nor new beginnings for characters who have already endured so much. When Hilary points out the generally fucked-up state of the world as an argument against having children: “Why would I want to put another soul through that?” She—she recognizes that she is complaining from a place of privilege and that her frustration is totally valid.

But the strange comfort expatriates It offers lies in its very recognition of all this pain and the grace it extends to the deeply flawed souls who pass through it. None of us, the series reminds us, is completely alone when we suffer, struggle, and are struck by the terribleness of existence, because so many others are experiencing the same thing and the world will keep turning anyway. It is not necessarily the happiest or most comforting vision. In Wang’s generous hands, it becomes life-affirming anyway.