Alias Grace

[A] remarkable series ... Like [A Handmaid’s Tale], it’s a stern reminder of everything today’s women have to lose, and how little conservative legislation it would take to lose everything.

Alias Grace doesn’t wrap everything up tidily -- and at times can be a bit messy and far-fetched. ... The performances are uniformly first-rate, though, and viewers will get closure rather than any dangling cliffhangers.

Gadon is an electrifying lead, and as our potentially unreliable narrator recalls her journey to notoriety, director Mary Harron lets her claustrophobia simmer until it crescendos in an eerie fever pitch. [3 Nov 2017, p.54]

Alias Grace is discomfiting, compelling, deeply insightful television.

Harron has found an original cinematic language to convey Grace’s memories, a dream-like narrative propulsion that carries us along. ... Levi is Alias Grace’s only false note: he seems to have walked right off the set of Chuck without adjusting for the time-period here. Sarah Gadon’s performance is transfixing.

Gadon’s extraordinary performance is matched by those of her co-stars; Paquin, all sugar and icicles in one swoop, is especially good, as is Zachary Levi as Grace’s friend Jeremiah, a traveling salesman and something of a benevolent trickster as well.

Where The Handmaid’s Tale has a propulsive sense of urgency and a tendency to aggressively hammer home its points, Alias Grace operates on a much more subtle, hushed frequency.

Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Alias Grace accomplishes something “The Handmaid’s Tale” did, but in an even more effective manner: it tells a story of one woman that’s also a story about women as a whole, and about the roles, fictional and otherwise, they’re forced to play.

“Alias Grace” is a story about storytelling — one character compares Grace with Scheherazade — which makes Ms. Gadon essential to its success. She is mesmerizing.

What might have been a rather talky script is enlivened by the peerless performances of Sarah Gadon (who played the romantically doomed librarian in the Hulu miniseries production of 11.22.63) as the wan but flinty Grace and Canadian TV regular Paul Gross as the bewildered Dr. Jordan.

Quietly mesmerizing adaptation of her [Margaret Atwood's] 1996 novel.

Fans of The Handmaid's Tale may just have a new obsession.

There’s a lot to like about it — it’s gorgeously shot and quietly compelling, with a potent lead performance from Sarah Gadon — but at times, it gets sluggish and overly gloomy. Stick with it, though, because the sixth and final episode is truly remarkable, weaving all of its disparate narrative strands together for a thoroughly satisfying finish.

Polley’s script is sturdy, occasionally leaning too heavily on underlining Atwood’s themes to make sure they come across when viewers don’t have constant access to Grace’s inner monologue. But it’s Harron’s direction and Gadon’s performance that truly drive the work.

The show’s direction, by American Psycho filmmaker Mary Harron, is elegant, and the script, by Away from Her writer/director Sarah Polley, is crisply modern in its understanding of characters’ psychological realities yet blurry enough on the margins to allow in delicious ambiguity.

Slow at first, the understated project gains momentum behind its central mystery, as well as Gadon's star-making turn as the 19th-century heroine.

The danger that “Alias Grace” might be too talky is allayed, partly by the camera work — anyone who has seen “In Treatment” knows that therapy can be visually dynamic when handled properly — and mostly by Gadon’s performance.

The miniseries ... packs considerable drama, emotion and misery into six episodes. It’s so heavy throughout the first installment, you might wish for at least one of the characters to open a parlor window and let in some air, but as the story progresses it becomes too engrossing to turn away.

[Alias Grace] uses her maybe crime as a salacious shibboleth to deliver not a whodunit, but a whydunnit, exploring the dangerous experience of being a young woman in a past that’s not quite past enough.

Alias Grace tells a complete and satisfying story that both calls attention to and satiates our desire for the gory details we crave from such a story.

The pace is occasionally glacial, and there were moments when I was as impatient as the (fictional) Dr. Simon Jordan (Edward Holcroft, Wolf Hall) for Grace to get to the point of her long and twisted tale. Pay attention, though: There will be a payoff. The real attraction is the performances, particularly Gadon’s as the model inmate.

The patchwork narrative is brilliantly deliberate, because throughout the book, Grace is piecing together quilts. ... Next to Gadon’s psychologically complex portrayal of Grace, everything else about the piece fades into the background.

The blank slate that Grace affects here allows her relationships to be shaped by the insights and desires of her appraisers, and leaves us guessing at the veracity of her story.

It’s more quiet and contemplative (and occasionally a bit dull) than it is propulsive. But viewers drawn to quiet, thoughtful character stories and a largely unknown story from women’s history may find “Alias Grace” engaging enough.

This is a very, very Canadian show. With only six episodes of broadcast (40+ minutes) length, Alias Grace is brief and, because only a little happens, moves quickly. The hook may be a murder, but it's more interestingly examined as a story about storytelling and for the contributions of Polley, Harron and Gadon.

The real Grace was released from prison after 30 years of incarceration, reportedly moved to New York and was lost to the tides of history. “Alias Grace,” however, will leave you pondering the mysteries of this woman for a long time to come.

It’s fairly soon clear that this is script-writing captivated by its own ambiguity—a condition in no danger of being infectious to huge numbers of the film’s viewers.

It’s still mostly restrained and respectable, though, with modest production values and uneven performances.