Review: Normal People - the series
If you’ve read my recent review of Sally Rooney’s bestselling novel Normal People, you’ll know I was somewhat underwhelmed. The recent BBC Three and Hulu adaptation of the text, on the other hand, consumed me entirely. As a result, I’ve gained a newfound appreciation for the world that Rooney created, in which two intelligent, introspective loners, Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan, navigate the trials and tribulations of their shared adolescence in Ireland.
The series (which is co-written by Rooney) is unflinchingly faithful to the novel, and yet, also has an atmospheric stillness to it, something which holds your gaze and quiets your breath, that I felt was absent from the original text. At times, Rooney’s novel suffers from an overabundance of words and a parsing of every action. The series, however, dissects the thoughts, feelings, failures, and uncertainties of the characters so decisively, and often without words, by capitalising on that exclusively cinematic ability to let silence speak, deferring to panning shots of a cold Irish landscape accompanied by melancholic music; a quiet reflection of Connell and Marianne’s internal alienation.
The series’ brilliance can also be attributed to the talent of its two leads, Daisy Edgar-Jones as Marianne and Paul Mescal as Connell. Edgar-Jones embodies all of Marianne’s intensity, candour, shrewdness, and fragility. And while I took issue with aspects of the novel’s depiction of Marianne, I found that the series captures her pain more acutely, so that her self-loathing feels earned, instead of implanted. Critically, Marianne’s history of familial abuse is revealed much earlier than in the novel, thereby allowing you to understand her perceived unlovability not as a symptom of battered femininity, but as the impetus for her journey towards healing; a thread which she pulls and pulls and pulls at over the years, until she eventually comes undone. Meanwhile, Mescal plays Connell with such pathos and precision, capturing every breath, every sigh, every nervous exchange, that it’s almost disarming. He conveys all of Connell's cautious intelligence, the insecurity, the fluctuating emotional maturity, and critically, the warmth that first drew Marianne to him.
Normal People is not just an intimate portrait of first love, it also portrays that profoundly human desire to connect with others and to feel a sense of belonging. Indeed, the series gets to the heart of isolation: what it looks like on the outside, and how it feels on the inside. There’s one particular episode that illustrates isolation as both a cause and a symptom of more serious mental health problems, when Connell, following the suicide of an old school friend, finally seeks help from a counsellor. He explains that he doesn’t find it easy to click with people, and how, back at home, in school, he’d fallen into a sort of easy, unexamined popularity. Reflecting on that time and those friendships, Connell acknowledges that, while they may not have shared the same political views or attitudes towards women, ‘that stuff didn’t really matter in school,’ and they were friends, nonetheless. Connell is acutely aware of the fact that he wasn’t happy then, not really, but he also gleans the past, as we all do, through a lens of nostalgia. ‘I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life,’ he says through barely contained sobs, ‘but I hate it here, and I can never go back.’ That chapter is closed, and it’s not even that he wants to re-open it, but at least then, ‘people seemed to like me.’
As it turns out, and as Connell knows too well, it’s not enough to exist as a tangible being. Having a family, friends, an occupation, a hobby—observable, measurable things—do not alone create a fully formed person. That requires something else: a sense that you are, on some imperceptible level, understood. Besides his mother, Marianne is the only other person who truly knows Connell, and she enables him to exist as three-dimensional, and not wander in the purgatory that is his own fragmented sense of self; torn between his hometown of Carricklea and Dublin, torn between who he was and who he is, all the while not quite identifying with either of those past or present selves. It’s an existential crisis in motion, and Mescal portrays real, honest emotion in all its ugliness: from his running nose and the saliva on his chin, to his vacant stare and cracking voice. Ultimately, he provides the audience with a cathartic release, exposing all the pain and fear that we fought so hard to hide.
Normal People is many things: frustrating, meditative, poignant, and entirely overwhelming. It pinches a nerve and forces you to examine yourself; the person others perceive you as, the person you are, and the person you hope to be. It’s as if the characters float through the series, held together only by sheer momentum and unfulfilled need, and the whole time you’re holding your breath, anticipating the inevitable. In that sense, Normal People is an embodiment of the disconnect that so often exists between people, even the closest of friends. More than that, though, it’s a portrait of how two people can teach each other to be vulnerable, to succumb to their grief, and maybe even make each other better.