OLIVE KITTERIDGE Explained: Life Is Never Ordinary

Lord, spare us from shotguns and fathers’ suicides—this plea opens the second stanza of one of John Berryman’s Dream Songs, the American poet who ended his life by jumping from a bridge into the Mississippi River. Berryman had no children and never used a gun. Can we then say that the prayer of a man who spent his life and work wrestling with his father’s suicide was answered? If so, on January 7, 1972, God must have been in a very dark mood. Berryman’s line appears in a brief, seemingly insignificant scene in Olive Kitteridge. Shortly after it is read with flat affect by a character embittered with everything, we learn that the title character’s father also decided that the best way to overcome life’s problems would be a precise shot to the head.

This moment of Berryman’s presence can easily be missed. But if we examine the HBO miniseries more closely, we see that the battered, as if crushed in anger or helplessness, copy of his poems belongs not only to Jim—one of the characters—but is also an integral part of the opening credits. This is a crucial clue. Once we notice it, we realize that the spirit hovering over Crosby, Maine, is not so much the poet himself as his creative idée fixe. The trauma of death drives the reflection on life in Olive Kitteridge. And, as in the confessional strand of poetry, it is not about fundamental questions but a quiet contemplation of daily life and an attempt to answer, what on earth am I doing here?

Olive (Frances McDormand) has lived in Crosby practically forever. We meet her in the 1980s and bid her farewell in times we can consider contemporary. The series’ four episodes present successive stages of her life and those of her close ones—her husband (Richard Jenkins) and son (John Gallagher Jr.). Before retiring, Olive works at the local school as the dread of both students and parents—a strict math teacher. She carries her schoolroom manner into her home life, where her family often feels cornered like misbehaving children. Her personality drives her son to flee as soon as he finds the chance, though her husband Henry remains—he loves Olive sincerely, against all odds. McDormand’s and Jenkins’s characters are fire and water, polar opposites. Yet over time something we all know in theory becomes clear: life does not consist of simple divisions. Fire and water exist only in nature; human personalities are always a mixture of both.

Based on Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Lisa Cholodenko’s miniseries tells a life story that is ordinary—without grand intrigues, adrenaline-pumping cliffhangers, or heroes plucked from the most popular American series. One might say it is astonishing that for nearly four hours we care about the life of a small-town pharmacist and an eccentric woman who hides her fear of loneliness behind a carefully constructed mask, rarely lifting it even before the one person who could give her heaven. But can that truly surprise us? After all, in real life we encounter such people far more often than Underwoods, Starks, or Whites (no offense to them). HBO has extensive experience portraying ordinary people who, through their very ordinariness, become fascinating. Characters enmeshed in everyday life have always formed the core of its most important narratives. Olive Kitteridge fits perfectly into this tradition.

The miniseries carries the spirit of Six Feet Under—and not only because of Richard Jenkins’s presence alongside Frances McDormand and occasional Bill Murray, all delivering flawless performances. It shares the same sensitivity in approaching its characters and weaving a story about life that—as the film’s tagline says—is never ordinary. Indeed, the promotional slogans for successive seasons of Alan Ball’s series fit Olive Kitteridge almost too perfectly: every day above ground is a good day, life is being wasted on living, everything, everyone, everywhere, ends. That sense of ending pervades Crosby, even in tiny moments such as when Olive shows a visitor a small grove and says that a town resident died right there. Just as in Berryman’s verse—you never know when someone will raise a shotgun and snuff out the light, you never know if you might do it yourself, and that’s just how it is—nothing can change that.