If his name may not mean anything to you, his face is bound to be familiar to you. Since the early 2000s, Kathryn Hahn continues the roles on the small and the big screen. First in the background, she gradually established herself and marked the minds of viewers thanks to her performances. One of the latest is none other than the role of Agatha Harkness, Elizabeth Olsen’s enemy witch in WandaVision. Before finding her in this role in the spin-off Agatha : Coven of Chaos scheduled for 2023 on Disney +, the actress is embarking on a completely different register with Tiny Beautiful Things. In this series composed of 8 episodes of about thirty minutes, it tears our hearts.
Tiny Beautiful Thingsa series based on a true story
In Tiny Beautiful Things, we follow the career of Clare Pierce, played by Kathryn Hahn. The latter has always wanted to be an author, a dream that unfortunately never came true and she vegetates in her job in a retirement home. In her personal life, it’s not much better: tensions are building up between her and her husband, as well as with her teenage daughter. For years, the fragile balance of Clare’s life has actually been threatened. A discomfort that actually dates back almost 30 years: Clare has never been the same since the sudden death of her mother. When she is recruited by a friend to answer a letter from the readers, Clare will come to terms with her grief. Tiny Beautiful Things is an adaptation of a novel by Cheryl Strayed, bringing together several essays from her column Dear Sugar for a literary site: she responded anonymously to desperate readers. Cheryl Strayed’s life was just as complicated as that of Clare’s character: her mother died of cancer while she was in college, which plunged her into a drug addiction.
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A plot between two temporalities
To better explore these painful moments of the present, the action of the series is divided into several temporalities. The opportunity therefore to see another actress play the character of Claire. This is Sarah Pidgeon (seen in The Wilds) who plays the young version of the character in these flashbacks, where she is accompanied by Merritt Wever as Frankie, Clare’s mother. These constant flashbacks are necessary to better understand how Clare got there, and why she is so lost. We can just sometimes regret that these flashbacks remain fairly superficial, thus not giving us all the keys to fully understanding Claire. Starting from the observation that it is above all the “beautiful little things” in our lives that count, Tiny Beautiful Things draws a beautiful portrait of a broken woman, and shows how she tries to put the pieces back together. Thus, the mother/daughter relationship is at the center of the series, both in the “past” and in the “present”.
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Tiny Beautiful Things will surely make you cry
Tiny Beautiful Things is a series that deserves to be seen in its entirety. Initially, the character of Clare may seem a bit unsympathetic but she is clearly revealed over the episodes. Despite a few slumps and a little messy moments, the series gains in emotion, until reaching its apotheosis in the last episode, filled with heartbreaking but also inspiring moments. Yes, we even went so far as to shed our tears at the end.
