Other Kinds of Family Values ...
Jan. 11th, 2007 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77No one else I know will admit to watching HBO's Big Love, but I have to say that I zipped through the first season like nothing else I've seen since ... well, HBO's Rome. Which is pretty high praise, in that Rome is just about the most consistently fascinating television series I've ever seen.
Echoing HBO's first major hit drama, The Sopranos (yes, yes, I watch a lot of HBO--just on DVD, mind), Big Love portrays a family who are in a whole lot of ways just like the network's demographic--suburban, relatively affluent--except not. The message seems to be something like: look, they're like you, but nothing like you, their family values are not yours. Or even close.
Rather than being mobbed up, however, the family on Big Love, if you haven't heard, are polygamists. The inhabitants of this family compound are however not the Mormon fundamentalists that you read about in Under the Banner of Heaven--although they are close relatives. Bill Paxton, Jeanne Triplehorn, Chloe Sevigny, Ginnifer Goodwin, et al have left behind the prairie-skirted fundies described in that book to live discreetly in three neighboring houses in a big, happy, anonymous development like "the rest of us." Paxton's character is building himself a little hardware empire, which apparently enables him to support his gajillion children and two stay-at-home spouses, with a little help from the pittance that Jeanne Triplehorn's character earns as a public school teacher.
All is naturally not idyllic in this apparent male fantasy, however: The nonpolygamist conservative Mormon neighbors ask numerous unsurprising but awkward questions about the relationship between Paxton and the mothers and children in those three closely-conjoined houses. The fundie relatives show up periodically, looking embarrassingly nineteenth-century. A polygamist patriarch (played with dusty malevolence by Harry Dean Stanton and based on the real-life polygamist leader Warren Jeffs) threatens to get rough with Paxton if he doesn't give up a piece of that hardware action. Sevigny's character has a serious shopping problem that threatens to put the whole family in hock to creditors. Triplehorn's oldest daughter has grave doubts about the family lifestyle, and seems to be seriously considering throwing caution to the winds and becoming some kind of crazy noncomformist Southern Baptist. The twentysomething Goodwin, frankly, has more in common with her husband's older kids than she does with him. And Paxton's character, poor slob, has, er, performance issues.
Pathetically funny as that all sounds (and it is, believe me), Paxton, Triplehorn, Sevigny and the rest of the cast do a fantastic job of building sympathy for these strange characters. Triplehorn, who years ago fled the fundamentalist community with her young husband and apparent dreams of monogamy, is in many respects the hero of the piece. But I found myself increasingly drawn to Sivigny, too, although her character turns out to be scarily messed up. And there's ultimately an impressive bond going on between the "sisterwives" in this overly complicated household, in part shaped by the fact that they don't really belong either where they are or where they came from.
Also, kudos to the show's producers for choosing a brilliantly counterintuitive musical theme for the title sequence: the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" ...
Echoing HBO's first major hit drama, The Sopranos (yes, yes, I watch a lot of HBO--just on DVD, mind), Big Love portrays a family who are in a whole lot of ways just like the network's demographic--suburban, relatively affluent--except not. The message seems to be something like: look, they're like you, but nothing like you, their family values are not yours. Or even close.
Rather than being mobbed up, however, the family on Big Love, if you haven't heard, are polygamists. The inhabitants of this family compound are however not the Mormon fundamentalists that you read about in Under the Banner of Heaven--although they are close relatives. Bill Paxton, Jeanne Triplehorn, Chloe Sevigny, Ginnifer Goodwin, et al have left behind the prairie-skirted fundies described in that book to live discreetly in three neighboring houses in a big, happy, anonymous development like "the rest of us." Paxton's character is building himself a little hardware empire, which apparently enables him to support his gajillion children and two stay-at-home spouses, with a little help from the pittance that Jeanne Triplehorn's character earns as a public school teacher.
All is naturally not idyllic in this apparent male fantasy, however: The nonpolygamist conservative Mormon neighbors ask numerous unsurprising but awkward questions about the relationship between Paxton and the mothers and children in those three closely-conjoined houses. The fundie relatives show up periodically, looking embarrassingly nineteenth-century. A polygamist patriarch (played with dusty malevolence by Harry Dean Stanton and based on the real-life polygamist leader Warren Jeffs) threatens to get rough with Paxton if he doesn't give up a piece of that hardware action. Sevigny's character has a serious shopping problem that threatens to put the whole family in hock to creditors. Triplehorn's oldest daughter has grave doubts about the family lifestyle, and seems to be seriously considering throwing caution to the winds and becoming some kind of crazy noncomformist Southern Baptist. The twentysomething Goodwin, frankly, has more in common with her husband's older kids than she does with him. And Paxton's character, poor slob, has, er, performance issues.
Pathetically funny as that all sounds (and it is, believe me), Paxton, Triplehorn, Sevigny and the rest of the cast do a fantastic job of building sympathy for these strange characters. Triplehorn, who years ago fled the fundamentalist community with her young husband and apparent dreams of monogamy, is in many respects the hero of the piece. But I found myself increasingly drawn to Sivigny, too, although her character turns out to be scarily messed up. And there's ultimately an impressive bond going on between the "sisterwives" in this overly complicated household, in part shaped by the fact that they don't really belong either where they are or where they came from.
Also, kudos to the show's producers for choosing a brilliantly counterintuitive musical theme for the title sequence: the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" ...
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-12 06:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-12 06:30 am (UTC)*sigh*
Date: 2007-01-22 04:10 am (UTC)Re: *sigh*
Date: 2007-01-22 06:27 am (UTC)Re: *sigh*
Date: 2007-01-22 07:32 am (UTC)Re: *sigh*
Date: 2007-01-22 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-13 03:09 am (UTC)Good show, though. GREAT cast.