It’s somewhat consoling to me that on the Rotten Tomatoes website, Nine Perfect Strangers, the current Nicole Kidman and company vehicle on Hulu, adapted from the novel by the Australian writer Liane Moriarty (Big Little Lies, The Husband’s Secret), has received 60 percent of its viewers’ approval. I find it extremely disappointing, however, that 62 percent of reviewers—including all the “major” publications we saw—panned the series.
The fact that such negativity is going out to the masses via the major print media says a great deal, in my opinion, about our culture. As Barbara, my wife, remarked: “They had an idea about how plot and characters ‘should’ be. They called it ‘messy’ … but life is messy!”
Actually, that is the best “pow-punch” review I can imagine! I feel that Barbara said what really needs to be said. From here on in, I’ll simply flesh out some details for those of you who haven’t yet seen the miniseries, to give you a more concrete sense of it, and especially to lay bare one underlying reason for the controversy.
Psychedelic therapy
The underlying reason is the depiction of “psychedelic therapy” administered by Nicole Kidman’s character “Masha,” the proprietress of Tranquillum, a wellness spa on the coast of southern California, transplanted there from the novel’s Australian location (the series itself was filmed in “California-like” Byron Bay in New South Wales).
Liane Moriarty has taken documentation of emotional breakthroughs in controlled experimental settings in relation to grief, addiction and chronic depression—as recently reported by Michael Pallen (How To Change Your Mind) and others—and imported these findings into her fictional setting about a spa and the charismatic Russian-born figure who runs it.
The series takes nine people, including a grief-stricken family of three, a couple having problems and four loners who are also at their wits’ end (each for a different reason), and brings them to Tranquillum, invited by the management for healing. All are mired in enough desperation to come.
The “messiness” of what transpires in the eight episodes is due, partly, to the troubled state of the guests — “Masha” has bitten off a lot!—and partly to the Russian’s spontaneous and often radical ways of meeting her clients’ challenges.
This involves, to begin with, microdosing the guests with psylocybin, without informing them beforehand. Obviously, there is an ethical issue in this approach. However, for Barbara and me, and many others among those 60 percent YES viewers, it doesn’t sink the ship! I’ll try to explain why.
Radical transformation
Barbara and I had similar impressions of the first seven episodes. I remember expressing mine to her: “It’s like the first series I’ve seen where I really feel I’m there! And I WANT to be there!” For our money (which we won’t actually even have to pay, because we saw the whole series on Hulu’s free-month introductory offer, paid for by the ads we had to watch every 10 minutes or so), the series is about the dramatic depiction of radical transformation.
And this depiction of that extremely fragile subject matter is, I feel, as good as most anything I’ve seen on the topic since witnessing Prospero’s machinations in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Come to think of it, though, the comparison is not completely apt: Kidman’s character embodies her own human vulnerability—a plus! Prospero’s, if I recall, does not.
I think that for one to see and follow this agenda in the series, a certain “something” inside the viewer has to be open … has to have been opened at some point in the person’s life.
Barbara and I both saw possibilities being enacted! We didn’t have time to judge, because our attention was totally on these lovable (and sometimes not-so-lovable) lost souls, and on what we believed was the good-faith effort of Masha and her staff to help release them from their self-created prisons.
The plot did “thicken” several times, and our faith in Masha, as well as in many of the guests, was tested. I was in fact on tenterhooks, well into the series, thinking, “Have I misplaced my faith?” But no, I felt … and then it got really slippery! But that is merely suspense, and without it, drama is boring!
A visionary project
How can I say the rest of what I feel? I feel that the actors, including the brave Kidman, as well as the producers and directors, took on a visionary project that is vastly important! And nearly impossible to pull off, with so many aspects that predictably would put off people who can’t “see” the underlying raison d’etre.
I feel that Nine Perfect Strangers is an astonishing achievement! It’s messy, like real life—and it leaves me with hope, which is almost, unarguably, the most precious possible commodity Art or life can give us these days!
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image 1: Max Reif; image 2: Wikimedia Commons; image 3: Max Reif
