I'm not sure that I would have finished the "Sharp Objects" miniseries if it weren't a murder mystery. The author of the source material, Gillian Flynn, has admitted that her book was primarily intended to be a character study, with the investigation merely providing some handy narrative hooks. The adaptation follows suit, mostly concerned with the stormy personal life of Camille Preaker (Amy Adams), a St. Louis journalist who returns to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri to investigate a death and a possibly linked disappearance. This means interacting with her long estranged family and the scars of her eventful girlhood.
Camille is one of those romanticized trainwreck characters who strikes me as very iffy in construction, a woman with a checkered history and a laundry list of vices, haunted by a childhood trauma she never really got over. Returning to Wind Gap sparks an immediate relapse into bad behavior. She starts drinking like a fish, engaging in risky sexual behavior, self-harming, and revisiting the worst parts of her past. The vast majority of the eight-episode run is spent watching her slowly investigate the case while teetering on the edge of self-destruction. Frankly, it's not an easy watch, even with Amy Adams doing her best to keep Camille sympathetic and believable.
It's only when Camille is interacting with her family, the Crellins, that "Sharp Objects" becomes a fully-fledged Southern Gothic melodrama - and a very enjoyable one too. Much of Camille's personal damage was wrought by her mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), an ever disapproving, perfectionist figure of overbearing Southern maternity. There's also Camille's ennabler stepfather Alan (Henry Czerny), and a precocious teenage half-sister, Amma (Eliza Scanlen). Camille and Adora's tense reunion and subsequent encounters provide plenty of memorable moments, and Clarkson delivers a wonderful turn as the manipulative mother from hell. Scanlen also does some great work as the unnerving Amma, a sheltered girl itching to break out of her shell.
The trouble is that the juiciest material doesn't get underway until roughly the fifth episode. For the first half of the series, "Sharp Objects" moves very slowly, looking into Camille's past and establishing the way the insular town operates largely by vicious gossip and deeply ingrained prejudices. And while it was nice to have the background and context for the mystery, I was surprised at how little Camille and Adora's pasts actually mattered to the plotting. I wonder if it would have helped matters if the episode count were lower, or if there had been more POV characters. A visiting police detective played by Chris Messina offers some contrast to Camille's story, but it's a fairly limited role. Other locals like the town gossip, the uncooperative sheriff, and the various suspects are set up well, but don't get to do as much as I expected they would.
The series has quite a bit in common with "Big Little Lies," sharing the same director, Jean-Marc Vallée, who uses a very similar visual vocabulary and editing style. "Big Little Lies" had significantly more characters and storylines to fill out its episode count, however, while I think "Sharp Objects" would have been more watchable if it had been about half of its length. When the show is being a dysfunctional domestic drama or a murder mystery, I like it fine. When it's all about Camille and her bottomless reserves of trauma, it feels like work. I caution that I may just be biased against the subject matter - I only got through one episode of the superficially similar addiction memoir "Patrick Melrose" before calling it quits.
"Sharp Objects" is very much in keeping with HBO's recent roster of prestige projects. The production values are excellent, and the writing is very intelligent. There's not a lot of hand-holding, and I appreciated that even if the story sometimes got a little ridiculous, the audience was trusted to put the pieces together themselves. Also, one place where it's better than "Big Little Lies" is where it decided to stop. The final few minutes of "Sharp Objects" make for the best ending to any piece of media that I've seen all year. Thankfully, the creators have announced that "Sharp Objects" will remain a miniseries with no sequels.
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