Clare’s life is a mess. Her husband kicked her out, her daughter hates her, and she’s about to lose her job. In addition to accumulating bullshit. But now an old friend offers him an unlikely mission: to answer a letter from the readers. Pardon ?
More misplaced to give advice, you die. Cuddly zany, the series Tiny Beautiful Things, starring Kathryn Hahn as a disheveled 40-something Clare (and Sarah Pidgeon as Clare in her broken early twenties) which arrives on Disney on Friday, is above all a little gem of emotions, scathing humor , but also of philosophy.
“What would I say to myself, if I met at 20? “Why am I not the person I dreamed of being?” “What did I do with my life in the end?” »
If you’re a fan of letters from the editor, these questions are no doubt familiar to you. They are taken from the section Dear Sugar, published from 2010 in the literary journal The Rumpus, collected in the form of a collection in 2012 (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar).
The pen behind these luminous advice, anchored in a felt experience and overwhelming truth: Cheryl Strayed, the one to whom we already owe the powerful autobiographical novel Wild, on her solo hike and in search of herself on the Pacific Crest Trail (1700 km), a poignant story adapted to the cinema in 2014 by Jean-Marc Vallée, who died at the end of 2021. “You are from Montreal, like my very dear Jean-Marc Vallée, my brother”, interrupts us d elsewhere the author in the middle of an interview, hands on heart, as part of a virtual press meeting last week.
Cheryl Strayed does not hide that the character of Clare takes a lot from her. But obviously not everything. Her marriage, her relationship with her daughter, her today, what, “that’s not me,” she clarifies. “But she had to have had all the formative experiences that I had. Everything that makes me who I am. Namely: the loss of his mother to cancer, an absent father, a childhood in poverty, and being married too young. “And on that level, it’s incredibly autobiographical. »
The title of the series of eight 30-minute episodes (Tiny Beautiful Things) is also the same as its collection of chronicles. It also evokes a painful memory. “When I was at my lowest, grieving my mother, I started taking heroin,” Cheryl Strayed tells the camera. I felt like a nobody. One day, a little girl got on a bus and kindly handed her a helium balloon. “I didn’t take it,” she recalls. I felt like I had no right to it. That I didn’t deserve this little joy…”
“She gets us (she gets you)!” “, enthuses creator and executive producer Liz Tigelaar (alongside Reese Witherspoon, among others), an assumed admirer of Cheryl Strayed.
This is precisely why on the screenplay side, Liz Tigelaar chose to start from questions from readers, not to tell their own life, but rather to invite her Clare to revisit hers. “Out of respect for Cheryl’s story,” she explains, “I wanted to tell her story, in the form of non-linear memoirs. »
“What if Cheryl had never done that hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, and if she hadn’t become a writer, what would she be doing?” […] I had the intuition that there was rich material there to exploit. »
And how: you are challenged to watch a single episode without tears in your eyes, or crying…
It must be said that there is something endearing and refreshing in the character of this woman in her forties, full of contradictions and imperfections. She drinks, she cries, she curses. A lot. She blunders constantly. But it is true. With its wrinkles and clumsiness. “There is no veneer to her story,” confirms Liz Tigelaar. She is inspiring in her authenticity. »
A rare fact in the archifiltered universe that we know. “It’s crazy all the attention that women get today when they play women who seem to be real women, also welcomes the producer. That says a lot about the portraits we’ve put on screen so far…”