“Expats”- Nicole Kidman’s new series

It premieres soon I believe.

I have no idea what this is about.

IN A WORLD of good cinematography

Nicole

Kidman

IS...

What’s going on at home that Nic NEVER wants to be there??

It seems like every month she’s in a new miniseries or series that goes by without notice.

I can't take Nicole's wax dummy face anymore

Nicole Kidman, young mom.

Watched the first two episodes and found it (so far) pointlessly odd and low-energy. Nicole’s face is very distracting.

[...]

Does Nicole learn to make Hong Kong style noodles and then open a restaurant in New York?

I’m enjoying it so far. Mainly because of the Hong Kong setting.

R9 I’ve only heard good things about the first two episodes

The first two episodes were very good.

Nicole Kidman only has chemistry with her female co-stars. I kept wondering if she and Sarayu Blue were going to kiss.

Remember the lesbian gossip about her before she took up with Keith. Naomi Watts was a bit of a focus.

I liked the story, but Kidman looks so bad it throws off my ability to enjoy it.

She looks fine.

I didn’t think Nic looked that bad. I really enjoyed the first two episodes.

[...]

[quote]Also, the idiots who keep making comments about Nicole's appearance haven't understood that they are making her look bad because she is dealing with grief.

Darkminge? If you really believe that, I have some swampland in FL I'd love to sell you!

The guy who plays her husband is hot in an offbeat way.

I'm enjoying it.

I ❤️ the name Darkminge!

[quote]they are making her look bad because she is dealing with grief.

I'm calling BS on you honey: I do declare that you can deal with grief and still look the most radiant, most enticing woman across all of Miami-Dade county. I certainly am.

Is the show really depressing or what's the twist?

I watched it last night because after seeing this thread I saw others saying positive things on tiktok and twitter. I liked the first two episodes a lot!

I watched the two episodes and it hasn't grabbed me. Foreshadowing and flashbacks and ellipsis and withholding do not make a story. I really don't care enough for these gimmicks to hook me in.

[quote]The guy who plays her husband is hot in an offbeat way.

Brian Tee is a hottie.

R22, it feels like there's a twist around the corner, but so far it's a straightforward heavy drama. They're using David Fincher filters or something. Everything feels very bleak.

Has anyone read the book on which the show was based?

This seems very stilted and obvious.

How old is Nicole Kidman supposed to be in this?

Patricia Clarkson is really good as Nicole’s Indian friend.

Lulu Wang hasn’t quite nailed this. She needs to watch everything by Wong Kar-wei about 100x more.

Maybe Nicole could play a little kid herself in her next project?

The clips make it look like LadyGloom at every turn.

[...]

R33 are you 13?

[...]

R35 it’s a penis. You must be 13 or have never seen one in person to act the way you are.

[...]

Yeah, that post reads as if a teenager wrote it. It is one thing to say “Wow, had no idea so-and-so had such a nice penis”, but to type what r33 wrote? I behaved that way when I got my hands on a Playgirl as a teen. I don’t get gitty and screechy because I saw a penis at my age.

[...]

Midway through episode 3, I realized I didn't give the tiniest of shits about the story or these people, and bailed.

R40 exactly. The series has no soul and the style is pretentious but lacking.

This show is so misguided.

Did Nicole promote it anywhere? I watch talk shows and there's not sign.

She is WAY too old to have those young children, unless they're adopted. More age-appropriate casting would be her children graduating from college and enjoying their 20s.

She keeps do that role in series after series. Mother of pre-teen children.

She could pass for late 30s. I don’t see the problem.

Miss Kidman is ageless.

Spoken like a true press agent.

I know this is reductive or whatever, but those of you who ARE enjoying the show, would you compare it favorably to another show or film? You know... "if you like X, you'll like Expats"...

R48? I'd say "Big Little Lies."

Of course, I watched Big Little Lies, but I didn't like it much. Same here.

Erm, no, R49. This is nothing like Big Little Lies. Jean Marc Vallee was a terrific director, especially of television, and while BLL lies had mystery - multiple mysteries - it also established an ensemble of characters that we were made to care about and/or be intrigued by, including male characters. Even the circumstances were intriguing because on the night in question, all of the female characters were dressed up as Audrey Hepburn characters, etc. Even the children had intriguing characters whether they were angelic blondes or were providing the needle drops on the soundtrack.

Expats places the audience at such a distanced remove that it is inert. And what there is to focus on is so contrived and obvious - woman doesn’t want to have children, other woman is so lonely she has to refer to her domestic help as family and stands out amongst all of Hong Kong for her warmth even though she’s played by a chilly, age defiant, frankly clammy looking Nicole Kidman. (Someone on IMBd describes it as “another of her oh so familiar dead eyed, facially paralysed performances…”) Her husband has all the presence of an extra sharing a ride in a crowded elevator.

But Wang goes out of her way to create even more distance through the sheer contrivance of her storytelling - an entire boatload of painfully posed people do nothing, don’t even move a muscle, while a young child (behaving like the antichrist) heads toward the railings of the boat to thrust himself overboard and nobody stops him? The thing is just drained of life. It actually dehumanises the Chinese (Far East Asian) characters by making them universally remote, uncaring people; they’re so distant and uncaring they can make the passenger in the back seat seen miles away from the driver they’ve known for 3 or 4 years; they will actively seek the loyalty of your children and rob you of your relationship to them; they will encourage others to put their life at risk performing dumb stunts they don’t even have the interest to fully witness, etc. They don’t even seem to inhabit their own region, despite our knowledge of their fierce defence of it and their own individuality.

Mostly what goes wrong here is that Wang is purposely withholding information that is bloody obvious. From the beginning, BLL referred to an outcome but left us wondering not just whodunnit and but what exactly was done and in service to what. Our own instincts, at least of television drama, were encouraged and led us to think these women likely tore each other apart over petty jealousies to do with age, men, class, maybe even race; what was so satisfying is that the women didn’t tear each other apart. They came together in primal defence of each other, closing ranks in a suspicious community that could only speculate and gossip in the face of this strong bond these women had established and, as an audience, we suddenly had to reconsider our perception of everything we’d been told. It activated the viewer.

(cont.)

In Expats, we know Kidman, mostly (more so than her husband it seems) has lost a child. Does it matter how? Wang seems to think it does. For how many hours she stretches out this reveal, pushing the audience further and further away, who knows? I can tell you, I don’t care. With everything going on in the world that this hermetically sealed environment seems immune to, including the death of, what, nearly 50,000 children in Gaza? Over 100,000 Ukrainian children trafficked into Russia? I don’t care about Nicole Kidman’s imaginary tv melodrama child to have the circumstances of his known fate drawn out over multiple episodes. I’m not waiting or intrigued to see if he falls down an elevator shaft or gets eaten by a shark or whatever, which is meant to be the pull of this series: how did he die? Whose fault is it? (Maybe the question should be, how did he plot his escape?)

In Ordinary People, we know Buck dies in a boating accident trying to save his younger brother. We understand the family’s grief, we care about what is left of them because we know what happened, we know he the immediate impact of it as well. In Expats, Kidman’s grief is meant to be so exquisite that it is unknowable and maybe at some point in the series, we’ll be informed enough to know why. But we must wait and in the meantime follow this brittle, department store mannequin…through what? This is the fatal flaw of Expats: we don’t even know what we’re watching. Or why. Or that we need to.

Mostly, I feel sorry for the editors, imagining how many versions and takes of this shit they had to watch. In a lot of ways, imagining this as a subjective exercise, it’s almost worse than Cats, struggling to decide how many and which takes of airless interiors to use, making the same bloody point over and over. Oh, these people are isolated. I get it. Mostly by choice. It doesn’t even demonstrate the pull of living in Hong Kong which, literally, looks as lifeless as a one-dimensional brochure.

I didn’t think myself capable of this but I actually feel sorry for Amazon.

R51 oh. Please.

[quote](cont.)

Oh, did you have to?

Sorry R53, I meant to say “(cunt),” referring to you.

Is it good? She's terrible at accents.

R46 = Stevie Wonder.

Jesus, R50 -- it was just my opinion. I'm allowed. And I made it a point to say I didn't like either series.

R48 The Undoing and The Affair are tonally similar.

My issue is that the character's motivations are muddled --what does David want? What was up with that post-coital "looking for Gus" scene?

Why is Mercy still fucking him, as he's directly tied to an incident she deeply regrets being a part of?

I don't care about Nicole Kidman's husband's spiritual awakening, he's boring and their kids are boring. I'm not buying Nicole's mental breakdown, partly because her face doesn't move, which limits her range of emotions. That's not a criticism or judgement, but...as an actor, you gotta be able to move your face a little bit.

Anyway, I'm going to hang in there because I love Sarayu Blue and find her character to be quite compelling.

*characters'

R50 R51 I enjoyed your comments and thank you for taking the time to write them. Ignore the cunts cunting. They’ve got nothing better to do.

R57, it wasn’t about you at all. Your remark was just a good jumping off point for my own thoughts about the series. Of course you’re entitled to your opinion, in all things.

How much must Nicole hate being at home that she keeps taking all these crappy tv roles?? Big Little Lies was great, and won her awards, but since then she’s done The Undoing (memorable only for her green coat), Nine Perfect Strangers (looking AND sounding bizarre), a supporting role in Special Opps: Lioness (playing second fiddle to Zoe Saldana, of all people!), Faraway Downs (which I have never heard anything about, anywhere, and if it wasn’t always popping up in my Hulu feed, I’d swear it didn’t exist), and this Expats show. And she has FIVE more in production!

I have not seen Faraway Downs, so no idea if they have done CGI work for Nicole and Hugh on footage filmed well over a decade ago. That said, Australia was a cool movie worthy of respect, and the fact that they (Baz?) got “Over the rainbow” alone to be included is epic.

The later episode was a bit of a drag. Nicole Kidman should sue the cinematographer AND the wig stylist. The scenes where she is in the morgue.… Ooooooofffft!

Her face looked so monstrous in the morgue scene when she was laughing/crying.

R65, I totally agree. I found that scene so frightening, unintentionally so. I really felt for Kidman, not for the character she was playing but for the actress trying to portray that character.

Actors who transition from crying to laughing are said to be delivering a tour de force. However it's easier than you think.

Faraway Downs is just a massive director's cut of the movie Australia. Because clearly the world was clamoring for more of that!

I did like Expats, though (a) it turned out NOT to be mainly about "the perpetrators" at all, as proclaimed in the prologue, and (b) Kidman's flat voice gets intolerable when you binge. Her expressions are not bad but her voice has no dynamics.

No one wants to talk about this? I found episode 4 to be really bizarre. I'm confused about what happened with the kid and I'm not sure I really want to know the answer.

It wasn't their kid on the slab. The husband had been praying that it would be, so he and his family could escape the nightmare his wife was increasingly inflicting on them.

He understood that unless the kid turns up dead, they are all doomed. If he left her, no court would award him the kids, since she is in such pain about having already lost one.

I think he's right that kiddie traffickers probably swiped the kid. David and Mercy are too incompetent to have been in on it, and anyway we know Mercy really was paying full attention to her phone when it happened, because the director had us with her POV at the time.

The only interesting point, which nobody seems to have considered, is Philip's drawing which shows Gus "hand in hand with Jesus". It could be, but in fact Philip was there when Gus disappeared and might have seen something, which he deems it sensible to dress up as a religious thought because (a) his mother has turned into a loony, and (b) to acknowledge that he saw someone with Gus would give him the same kind of personal inadvertency guilt that Mercy and David can't shake.

Episode 5 was very intense. Didn't anyone else see it?

We all stopped watching after Episode 1 or 2.

I watched the whole series and it was just too bleak.

Nicole can’t close her mouth and her lips are so distracting.

Why did you stick to it?

I was already invested and curious how it would end.

I really enjoyed episode 5. Seeing the point of view of the Filipina helpers, local Chinese, etc., not just the rich, bored wives. It was intense.

I still don’t understand David’s (Angelica Huston’s son) involvement with the missing kid other than he’s fucking the person who lost the kid and drinks like most NYC gays. What is his connection to the story?

R73 How did you watch the entire series?

Some of y’all sound like your prissy white asses can’t watch a series created by a female Asian director. Such blindly dismissive comments.

The series is very good and so is Kidman. Episode 5 is particularly strong.

R78 can do math and wants receipts.

I still haven’t watched the latest episode.

It's worth seeing, R81.

I read the book when it was first released (interested because I had once lived that expat life in HK).

The series really evoked that life - not just the visuals but the concerns and conversations of the expats and especially the dynamics of the relationship with the “helpers” - so called because the expats are too embarrassed to call them what they are - maids.

Having said that I doubt that I would have understood what was going on in the first ep without having read the book.

I started watching because I thought it was going to be one of those Harlan Coben BBC style mystery miniseries. I kept thinking that’s what I was watching all the way through episode 4. I finished episode 5 and was unsatisfied by the lack of resolution of the main plot lines, but then I realized that was sort of the point. One man’s “main plot” is another man’s window dressing, and vice versa.

OK -- I guess I'm the only one here who made it the whole way through. It wasn't too bad. It had an interesting ending.

Anyone else?

I just wanted to shake Mercy to think rationally; but then again, I’ve never experienced trauma like that.

Agree about Mercy R86. It was like she was sleepwalking through the pregnancy and suddenly she was 6 months pregnant and seeing a doctor for the first time.

Are we not going to talk about David's dong?

I don't like how they exploit their Filipino workers.

And David’s beefy arse in ep 1, R88.

Jack Huston gained 20kg for the role so the arse is probably back to normal but that swinging cock is here to stay.

Yeah her face is so youthful looking.

Her shit stained pits are gross.

I can only assume there was some Nicole Kidman-related drama on set. Everyone was lit and made up beautifully except for Nicole. In the last episode particularly, they made her look diabolical.

I'd have liked this series much better if it ended at the end of Episode 4, where Clarke's dilemma was really tragic. I thought Episode 5 was a tedious excursion away from the main story. Agreed, the main story would have been improved with more POV from the helpers all the way through, but taking an episode out to stick it on near the end was just annoying. In fact, structure is not the strong suit of the "creator" (as I notice she bills herself despite having adapted it from someone else's novel). Episode 6 just looked like "let's wrap it up", even though the original novelist wrote the script.

I couldn't manage any interest in Harpreet's first world problems, which had no connection with the main plot. Mercy is perhaps the least attractive main character I can remember. Although I'm sure it was the author's intention that I should be, I was totally unconvinced she was constantly tortured by having lost the kid. The lesbian GF was absolutely right: she was self-centred, ungrateful for her privileges, unwilling to apply herself with any self-discipline at all, and had no core of meaning in her life from the very start, long before she met Margaret and Gus. She lost Gus purely because she spent the entire outing in which she was supposed to be looking after him obsessing about whether this was a full-time job for her or not. She went on treating people like extras in her life right through the series (David, who had always wanted a baby, her mother, Charley the GF, and the baby itself, which I hope to hell social services confiscates at birth before it gets abducted in a market as well). IMO she made Murphy's Capote look soulful.

As for the Kidman character, at least the husband managed to get the kids away from her. But giving up on the traumatized kids you DO have, to hang round--doing nothing--in case the one you DON'T have turns up...WTF? It's only ever going to be the cops who alert her he's been found, alive or dead, and they have a telephone. Not only that, but depriving Essie of her own family and forcing her to bring up Margaret's instead!

Like a lot of books and shows by women, it asks us to care about some very unsympathetic women.

I'm a woman myself, so don't throw things on that account. I'm annoyed enough without being accused of toxic masculinity.