My Brilliant Friend

HBO has enjoyed a good deal of success with its limited series, many of them driven by high-profile stars, a la "Big Little Lies." Here, the book is the centerpiece, and the setting and performances make it possible to escape almost entirely into the sometimes aching, sometimes stirring, almost invariably beautiful world of My Brilliant Friend.

The casting is exceptional. Every face and body is credible as one that might actually have lived in that period. The performances are alert and sensitive without seeming studied. ... This is a late-breaking candidate for show of the year, a drama about the place where aspiration and reality intersect.

This masterwork from HBO isn’t the sort whose powers depend on the suspense of plot turns. Every chapter is a profoundly moving world unto itself--a stunning achievement whose every moment lives in all the ways that matter in drama.

Around the lead characters, we start to see a whole generation come of age. I mean it as a compliment when I say that My Brilliant Friend is the year’s best teen drama, drawing you into the lives, loves, and struggles of a group of children cusping on adulthood.

With a sensationally authentic cast--this unsentimental story movingly depicts emotional resilience in changing times. [26 Nov - 9 Dec 2018, p.9]

In each era, the actors create a transfixing yin and yang that keeps the viewer’s rapt focus.

Book fans may be at a slight advantage, since if you’ve forgotten who someone is in a book, you can always go back a few pages. That is a minor complaint in the face of a series that gripped me from frame one, despite telling a very small, intimate story that occasionally amounts to two girls learning lessons about how the world works and little else.

My Brilliant Friend, whose first installment airs on HBO on Sunday, presents the story of Lenù and Lila’s girlhood with all the unsparingness of Ferrante’s writing. ... Against this somber backdrop, the young actors sparkle. Del Genio gives off a placid but stubborn energy as Lenù, contrasting with Nasti’s ferocious intensity as Lila. When the two are replaced by older actresses who play the characters as teenagers, they almost uncannily match their younger counterparts.

The limited series, about the long, complex friendship between Elena and Lila, breathtakingly renders Ferrante’s world on the poor outskirts of Naples in all its simple beauty and cruelty. But its first two episodes, set in the 1950s, are elevated most by Elisa Del Genio and Ludovica Nasti, who play the preteen Elena and Lila, respectively. ... Insightful and clear-eyed, My Brilliant Friend takes you there.

Throughout, we see the world the way the girls see it, knowing what they know. The world seems bigger to them, and thus their emotions always feel bigger, in ways that can make My Brilliant Friend acutely thrilling or devastating. ... This is a great show with a huge heart. Just be prepared for it to break yours every now and then.

The series portrays the lives of two poor young girls, that so many of their contemporaries might deem insignificant, as important and enthralling as anything else onscreen.

The story is easy to get swept up into, in regards to the rhythms of its language and the cyclical nature of its challenges. Their struggles feel both relatable and totally foreign all at once.

Beneath the show’s heavy coats of operatic varnish and prestige-TV enamel, it demonstrates a humble tenderness. In the specifics of its plot and the essence of its tone, the adaptation is faithful, though not slavishly so.

The adaptation has a sharp sense of time and place without nostalgia or sentimentality. Costanzo’s attention to period detail helps; it can feel as if you’re watching a lost postwar Italian film about postwar Italy.

Young Elena and Lila dominate the series' first two hours so completely that none of the other characters in their orbit really stand out, which also means none of them stand out as fake or distracting. ... The series' first two hours mark an extraordinarily promising beginning.

My Brilliant Friend is an impressive effort, a translation of novel to screen that preserves certain of its literary qualities while transmuting others into moving and effective TV.

It takes awhile to catch fire, and for a viewer even to get his bearings, so numerous are its characters; but it does, and you will.

[My Brilliant Friend] is slavishly faithful to the source material. If this doesn’t make it a particularly inspired or creative adaptation, it does at least restore the books to themselves rather than their talking points.