“Harper & Hal,” premiering Sunday on movie-centric streamer Mubi, is a gorgeous, generous limited series that doesn't do much to show you anything other than people, who they are and how they get along or don't get along. Its elements are not unusual because they are taken from life and not from films – or simply from films, since they are themes that films often address.
But just like this year”Adolescence“, which it (in various ways) resembles in its mixture of naturalism and artificiality, a series written, directed and starring 28-year-old Cooper Reiff – screenwriter, director, star of the indie films “Shit” and “Cha cha real smooth— demonstrates that it is still possible to make something fresh in an oversaturated environment.
Although the story spans eight episodes, the cast is compact. Harper (Lili Reinhart) is the daughter of Mark Ruffalo's character, referred to only as “Dad”; Hal (Reiff) is her younger brother. Aaliyah Chanel Scott plays Jessie, Harper's longtime friend; Havana Rose Liu as Abby, Hal's ex-girlfriend; Kate (Betty Gilpin) is daddy's girlfriend. The company is completed by Audrey (Addison Timlin), a divorcee with two young children who shares an office with Harper, and Hal's roommate, Kalen (Christopher Meyer).
In scenes set in the past, Reinhart and Reiff play their younger selves, in the style of Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle. “Pen15” with less overt comedy, although Reiff's performance as a very young Hal, who no one on the show calls hyperactive (though that would be me, not the doctor), is often funny. This is not a gimmick, but a device – about the same as one-time production “Adolescence” This was not a performative cleverness, but a proper fit with the material—both in the sense that the child is the parent of the adult, and because it allows for a different, deeper kind of performance than what you might get from a first- or third-grader. (How frighteningly good the little child actors are.) What's remarkable is that this brings the characters together across time.
A confluence of events creates drama. The house where Hal and Harper grew up, and which Dad, who spends much of the series seriously depressed, especially can't let go of, is for sale. (Harper and Hal are in Los Angeles; home, dad, and Kate are elsewhere.) Kate is pregnant; there is a possibility that the child may have Down syndrome, which makes the dad think that “the child is disabled… you have to meet him where he is every day” and that he could be a more caring parent to his older children. Jesse has a job offer in Texas and wants Harper to go with her. Hal, a college graduate who doesn't point anywhere in particular even though he loves to draw, breaks up with Abby after he finds out—when she tells him she wanted them to be “exclusive”—that they haven't been that way until now. And Harper became infatuated with Audrey.
The loss of their mother and their father's unresolved grief brought Hal and Harper closer together; she looks after her brother, who, although grown, sometimes wants to crawl into bed next to her; at the same time, Harper has internalized the feeling that she is holding everything together, and this makes it difficult for her to move on. They are on the island together.
“Are we friends?” asks young Hal Harper.
“We are brother and sister,” she replies.
“Not friends.”
“I think we can be friends too.”
Almost complete absence of explanatory dialogue. The characters do not suffer from speech; the silence allows the viewer to enter the space between them and allow their experience to resonate with their own. (If you've lived long enough to read TV reviews, you've felt some or all of these things.) There's no wall of declaration erected between viewer and audience, but the actors, especially Reinhart and Gilpin, can destroy you with a look. (Although some writers and actors love them, there's nothing less believable than a long monologue.)
While the story feels organic, it is also very structured, stretching out Kate's pregnancy, laced with resonances and reflections – “I Will Survive” sung by adult Harper in karaoke and in flashbacks as part of the children's choir, or precocious young Harper reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” “It's about this family where everyone is very lonely,” she tells Hal, lighting herself up, “but then it gets worse because they become distant and selfish and so miserable. But maybe things will get better.” (We often see her with a book.) The editing has a slow and fast rhythm; short scenes alternate with long ones; memories explode in a montage. Just as Reiff doesn't bother much with explanations, he eliminates transitions. We are here, then we are there. You won't get lost.
There were a couple of times when I worried that Reiff might be steering his ship to some cliched grim outcome, but I needn't have worried.
