Whos going to watch the Undoing?

[EachandEveryone]

Starts tomorrow night on Sky Atlantic with a “fresh” faced Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. It looks good and I love glamorous New York 😃

I thought it was brilliant. Not realistic, but brilliant, and I was on the edge of my seat at the end waiting for him to crash the car and kill himself and Henry, or pull Henry down off the bridge with him. Hugh Grant’s acting was magnificent.

I guessed that NK was going to stitch him up on the stand (agree the tipping point was when he tried to blame Henry) but I initially thought she was just going to say straight out that she thought he was capable of it. The way they did it was much cleverer, though I suspect that the way they got round the hearsay re HG’s Mum’s opinion of him was legally bollocks.

Shame that the identity of HG’s other mistress was not relevant in the end.

@Whenwillow re NK’s face, you said But it was quite relevant to the story as I imagine a lot of women in the character's position would not grow old gracefully.

I commented way upthread that it might have been done for character purposes and/or it was believable in Grace if not in NK. Nobody picked up on what I said so am glad that you had the same thought!

Finally, someone said cynically that it was implausible that the helicopter was able to land on the bridge. I’m pretty sure that was not CGI’d, so it did actually happen in real life!

Wow www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/hugh-grant-nicole-kidmans-son-23096093.amp

Just watched. Thought the ending was fine. So glad it wasn't awful.

I didn't get why NK was walking in the park with her blonde lawyer friend.

HG driving and then just about to jump off the bridge was not what I was expecting.

So all good.

The walk in the park was the secret conversation with lawyer friend giving her the information from HG:s mum to drop him in it. NK is depicted as lying in bed thinking really hard about "what makes a monster", and then in the morning ringing her friend and suggesting a walk. The next conversation we don't hear the whole of is the one between laywer friend and prosecutor in the toilets. And then NK offers to go on the stand and surprisingly the prosecutor knows to ask very pointed questions. And you can see HG figuring it out and losing his "love mask" towards NK. It wasn't badly done but not really clever enough a denouement for the hype like.

@Oblomov20

Just watched. Thought the ending was fine. So glad it wasn't awful.

I didn't get why NK was walking in the park with her blonde lawyer friend.

HG driving and then just about to jump off the bridge was not what I was expecting.

So all good.

NK was walking in the park with her blonde lawyer friend to tell her to feed the prosecution with info about what HG’s mother had said on the phone.

Cross post!

Found the finale pretty good actually, better than expected. HG character was very convincing denying he killed her. I really thought it wasn't him. Specially when he questioned whether his son could have....

But the detail of him dropping his suit to dry cleaners was extremely suspicious and if that would have been known before (which it really should have in terms of the investigation) it would have made it more convincing it was him.
Also why did he actually volunteer the information about his sister to NK in the restaurant? That's what ultimately nailed him.
But surely being a clever psychopath that's the sort of this he would have never voluntarily told, in any case he didn't come across well surely?

Also during 12 (or whatever it was) years of marriage there was no indication at all??

Maybe I've spent too much time thinking about this

Also why did he actually volunteer the information about his sister to NK in the restaurant? That's what ultimately nailed him.
But surely being a clever psychopath that's the sort of this he would have never voluntarily told, in any case he didn't come across well surely?

That’s a really good point. When Henry mentioned what happened to the dog I remembered that NK had told Henry not to tell HG that he knew about the dog’s death. So when HG looked shocked I initially thought it was going to be because he had invented the dog death story and had totally forgotten what he had told NK.
Maybe he decided in that moment that he should reveal the sister’s death in a last ditch attempt to ramp up NK’s sympathy for him as a poor traumatised man? It might have worked of old Janet had not decided to spill her side of the story. Poor old Janet, by the way- she was a ridiculous grammar pedant but a dead 4 year old and a sociopathic murderer for a son are a pretty awful hand to have been dealt.

NK wasn't a very good clinical psychologist then was she.
She never had a clue. About anything, amity him, her marriage, nothing.

I thought HG was very very good. I was really on the edge of my seat when he was in the car with Henry and he was talking about how it wasn’t the real him that killed Elena. He genuinely seemed psychotic.

One thing I don’t understand is why HG went back home to NK after the murder and then fled in the morning? Why didn’t he disappear straight away. And so did he bring the hammer and his bloody clothes back home with him before leaving for his supposed conference the next morning? They never explained why he lied about that either. What was he planning to do when he was supposed to be at the conference?

What was also weird is that Jonathan had mentioned the conference before he murdered Elena- they discuss it prior to them going to the auction.
Why was he lying about going to a conference for no reason?

Re NK's plastic surgery, add me to the list of people finding it so distracting.
As someone mentioned on the other thread, the puffiness makes her look embalmed.
She's a year older than Sofie Grabol and when they had the cross examination scene the contrast between natural ageing and weird cosmetic surgery was striking.

If you were in a serious relationship/marriage with someone who was estranged from their family surely you would expect them to explain why?
Really enjoyed it but there were a few holes. Did the detectives not ask HG for the dinner suit he was wearing that evening. And you couldn’t just take a blood spattered outfit to the cleaners surely?

I also want to know how a 53 year old and a 60 year old met at Stanford 17 years ago. They must have been very mature students.

Phd didnt she say? I enjoyed it but the conference makes it seem premeditated.

In the book they meet at 21. So Nicole K's character would be 38. Which may be a bit too young even for her to get away with, let alone Hugh Grant.

Thought Hugh Grant was brilliant.

@happilybemused

Yeah, timeline/age factor was a bit muddled. Someone with PhD level education and a busy career might be quite likely to have put off having kids until their mid to late 30s or beyond. If NK's character was meant to be only 38 that'd mean she was about 25 or so when she had her son which is pretty young.

I did get the impression that NK's character and Sylvia etc were supposed to be maybe 40/early 40s. But ole Hugh looked at least late 50s so it was all a bit jarring.

Deeply unpleasant watching HG and his saliva strands with that very young actress who played Elena. HG easily old enough to be her dad. Their baby looked more like HG's grandchild lol

I thought the age gap between HG & Elena was because he's getting older and instead of just trying to encourage the God complex from grateful parents, he started an affair with a young/vulnerable parent to boost his ego.

The conference - I assumed this was just him carrying on the myth of working. He would have gone to conferences normally, so why wouldn't he book himself a few days away just for fun? Possibly he did plan to take Elena but then she got involved with the auction and getting to know Grace, which was all part of why he killed her.

The least realistic thing for me was that Elena managed to get onto the committee for the fundraiser at the last moment. Those committee spaces are like gold-dust, with all the career moms vying to label themselves as "CEO of auction" to show that they're the best & most important parent of the school.

Also she seemed completely out of place in that committee and only joined at the last minute.
Presumably the planning venue/prizes would have taken months to organise?

Yes - those auctions take a year or more to plan, and actually there's a "development" person employed by the school to raise money who would do that. The equivalent of the PTA would do smaller fundraisers, but the auction night at a school like that would raise hundreds of thousands of dollars - parents would not be in charge.

Their baby looked more like HG's grandchild lol

In real life HG has 5 kids ranging from 9 to 2. It’s not that much of a stretch to believe his character could have fathered a baby.

Henry was 12. So given the tendency for professional women to have kids later, NK was probably meant to be between 50 and 55ish. She is 53 IRL. I’ll be 55 when my son is 12. I missed that they were meant to have met a my university 17 years ago though, that is a bit odd.

Also she seemed completely out of place in that committee and only joined at the last minute.
I think there was a strong element of her being the charity case and the school bending over backwards to show how charitable/inclusive they were, for appearances. It was clear that there was nothing at all for her to do. It was also a device to show her inside one of their homes and how out of place she seemed.

@KickAssAngel

Yes - the wealth of the "upper middle classes" and their arrogance can be breath-taking. I also thought the school in Big Little Lies was a very accurate portrayal of private schools in the US. how everything has a polite veneer but under that everyone's just protecting their own interests.

The school in Big Little Lies was actually supposed to be a public school not private. Just in a very wealthy catchment area. This is how Ziggy ended up there. She could not have paid.

Speaking of our of place I really didn't get the styling choice for NK's characters.
She was wandering around Manhattan looking like an ageing Pre-Raphaelite painting.
She looked way out of place as a rich upper east side woman, and a shrink to boot.

Here's a pretty good interview with HG about the seriesew.com/tv/the-undoing-finale-hugh-grant-interview/

I think the only point to NK:s styling is to make her recognizable my silhouette only on the cameras. All these little points in the story lend themselves to over-analysing and what-does-it-meaaaaans really. Maybe it was a symbol of her being so empathetic and hippie dippie but even so she was fooled by the psycopath in our midst bla bla. Or else they just fancied the coats.

lazymum - that school in Big Little Lies is based on some RL examples. I know exactly what those parents are like, and the obnoxious behaviour of Reese Witherspoon's character in the pick-up line is so true to life. There are areas where the "public" schools are so exclusive they may as well be private. Local schools are funded by property tax, so if every house is worth over $1m, then effectively you get an enclave where only the children of millionaires are in the same school together.

And NK's "hippy" style is OK for that scenario. There are certain "types" within these enclaves. There's the hippy one, the business one, the fitness one etc. They are all variations on a theme. Hair and clothes are very expensively styled, houses are within a very small & exclusive area, they are all incredibly highly educated and often "liberal" but really very committed to preserving their own wealth.

These elite schools often have one or two kids who are on scholarships, or (like BLL) whose parents find a way to rent a shoe-box in the district etc. There's often lip service paid to how great it is to be so diverse, and a pretense of welcoming people (even fundraising so that more people can enjoy the experience of sending their kids to the school), but when something goes wrong, the "outsiders" are very quickly shunned.

David E. Kelly has a very good representation of this kind of community. It's what passes as being left-wing in the US, and you can see why people with less money find it objectionable. I suspect he is poking fun at himself and others who are part of these communities.