Cast: Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Luke Evans, Asher Keddie, Samara Weaving, Melvin Gregg, Tiffany Boone, Grace Van Patten
Director: Jonathan Levine
Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)
Star and executive producer Nicole Kidman joins hands yet again with show creator and screenwriter David E. Kelley in an attempt to recreate the Big Little Lies magic. Nine Perfect Strangers, which, like the duo's Primetime Emmy Award-winning show, is adapted from a novel by Australian writer Liane Moriarty, isn't quite up there. That is not to say that the Hulu Original streaming in India on Amazon Prime Video, is totally devoid of sheen, at least of the surface variety.
The show crackles to life occasionally, especially because the actors in the cast have a way of skirting around the mostly laboured, shallow nature of the welter of imperfections that rich guests at a wellness resort - the Nine Perfect Strangers of the title - have to reckon with as they seek to heal under the watchful eye of an enigmatic warden.
Liane Moriarty's story, relocated to California, has been filmed in the town of Byron Bay in New South Wales, Australia. This review of the eight-part drama miniseries is based on a preview of the three episodes that are currently streaming. The remaining episodes of Nine Perfect Strangers are scheduled for release one at a time over the next five weeks.
The nine characters - unlike in the book, they are Americans - arrive at the Tranquillum wellness resort run by a Russian émigré who promises her clientele "total transformation" over the course of a ten-day retreat. It isn't exactly an escape from their worries and fears that lies in store for the people who have checked in. As Masha Dmitrichenko (Kidman) tells Frances Welty (Melissa McCarthy), a writer grappling with a career headed south, they are all here "for the suffering".
Mercifully, Nine Perfect Strangers, if the three episodes made available for preview are a reliable pointer, does not heap too much suffering on the audience even when it tends to wallow in the vapidity of the idle rich, a class of people that Kidman and Kelley (who also teamed up for the miniseries The Undoing) are untiringly interested in.
The guests at Tranquillum are broken either emotionally or psychologically. But not all are willing participants in Masha's programme. Some have strayed into it half-heartedly, if not entirely unintentionally.
What Masha intends to do with the nine carefully picked inmates is visually captured through close-ups of fruits being crushed in a mixer-grinder to rustle up smoothies. On one occasion, Masha tells Frances about the Japanese art of mending broken pottery and shows her a bowl repaired with lacquer.
None of the guests is game for any such subtle alteration. There is no dearth of avoidable encounters and painful emotional punch-ups as Masha and her two trusted employees, "personal wellness consultants" Yao (Manny Jacinto) and Delilah (Tiffany Boone), put the nonplussed nine through the paces.
The run-ins that the resort inmates have with the unorthodox methods of healing in place in Tranquillum House - and with each other - aren't consistently engaging. Some hit home, others don't. It is the actors who keep the show going at a reasonably even keel.
Nine Perfect Strangers cannot escape some degree of comparison with HBO's The White Lotus, available in India on Disney+Hotstar, but it isn't really in the incisively satirical zone of the latter. The White Lotus puts a murder upfront and shows us human remains in a wooden casket being loaded in the cargo hold of a passenger aircraft. It instantly heightens our curiosity and draws us in.
In Nine Perfect Strangers, intrigue kicks in rather late in the form of threatening text messages to Masha, who, in her own words, was an abrasive workaholic until she was shot in a parking garage and was clinically dead for a while. Kidman plays the inscrutable character exactly the way it is meant to be - she is a blend of aura and artful assertiveness that is just right for a woman enjoying a second lease of life.
Masha's one-on-ones with the emotionally scarred guests - just a handful get a look-in in the first three episodes - reveal a fair bit about the latter but nothing at all about the resort's inscrutable warden. Frances verbalizes her troubles with more clarity than the others. "I am a twice divorced, middle-aged, hot-flushing, menopausal heap", she admits to Masha.
So, we know what is gnawing at Frances. Her agent has failed to push her latest book to a publisher. She is irritable as hell, a state that is aggravated no end by Tony (Bobby Cannavale), a former sporting star addicted to mood-enhancing pills. Both are past their prime and have issues that threaten to push them over the edge every time they interact with each other.
Talking of issues, everybody out here is prone to panic attacks, meltdowns and moments of great despair. This is an obnoxious bunch. Masha knows them inside out and has a regimen all chalked out. Consider what all she has got on her hands here. There is the social media influencer Jessica Chandler (Samara Weaving) and her car-obsessed husband Ben (Melvin Gregg). They drive down a bumpy road in their spanking new Lamborghini looking for tips to save their marriage. Is Tranquillum the right place for them?
Or for Carmel Schneider (Regina Hall), a single mother whose husband has left her for a younger woman? Every time Carmel sees a pretty young woman like Jessica, she has the urge to punch her in the face. She confesses as much. She also makes a lunge for Lars Lee (Luke Evans), who begins to get under her skin even before they have stepped into the resort. Matters come to a head when Lars quips that Carmel scares him.
The Marconi family of three - chatty high school teacher Napoleon (Michael Shannon), his brooding wife Heather (Asher Keddie) and their distracted 20-year-old daughter Zoe (Grace Van Patten) - take up a great deal of footage. They are still processing the aftermath of a huge family tragedy and a marriage that appears to have gone sour as a result.
Somebody asks: "Are we in some kind of reality show?" Another guest is sure that Tranquillum is a ploy to "separate rich people from their money and make them feel good about themselves". Nine Perfect Strangersis littered with many such shallow but agreeable witticisms but the show is enlivened just enough by the performances - McCarthy is the liveliest of the lot - for it not to sink into extended drudgery.
