It is incredibly exciting to watch Kathryn Hahn act.
There’s a certain brashness to her full-throttle comedic performances that is as physical to watch as it is for her to perform. She charges at you with so much force you would duck for cover, were it not so entertaining to watch. (Think Bad Moms, Wanderlust, How Do You Know, or her guest work on Parks and Recreation.)
In a series of performances lately—I Love Dick, Private Life, Transparent—she’s harnessed that weapon-like power to make you flinch for different reasons, in subtle works as revealing about our own humanity, vices, insecurities, and indulgences as they are about the characters she’s playing.
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A combination of her dangerously wide smile, soulful eyes, and a frizzy mane of hair contribute to an unshakable feeling that she’s not so much acting as she is channeling an id at its rawest and most exposed state. Her own special knack is betraying a certain messiness that can be almost disturbing in its relatability, in that it’s the kind of mess we convince ourselves that we have hidden, or at least that we’re able to hide.
These performances are reminders that what you sweep under the rug or lock behind a closet, so to speak, are still there, nagging at you, waiting to be dealt with. It takes a meticulous handle on craft to wrangle what seems like wanton, almost reckless comedy and pathos such that, as it unfurls, it’s practically itching at you from the screen.
This is a long preamble to not only praise Hahn’s latest performance in the HBO limited series Mrs. Fletcher, starting Sunday, but also to delight in the opportunity to watch her explore these skills over the course of a series in which she’s the leading lady.
It’s already a remarkable gift to be the actor who nails supporting roles so spectacularly that you wish you could spend more time with those characters, while appreciating that they haven’t overstayed their welcome.
But when paired with writer-directors like Jill Soloway, whom she worked with on Transparent, I Love Dick, and their shared breakout feature Afternoon Delight, or Tamara Jenkins, as she did in last year’s Private Life, Hahn informs us that there really is no such thing as these characters overstaying their welcome. It’s just that we’ve been too afraid to validate, let alone reckon with, the scarier aspects of these people and the way they prod at tender nerves inside us that threaten to reveal who we really are.
In Mrs. Fletcher, that revelation is that the central character really is, as one bit of dialogue reveals, “a skinny MILF goddess.”
Is she more than that? Of course, as this is a series about a woman who, after her only son leaves for college, is forced to reevaluate who she is without motherhood as her singular identity. But that MILF epiphany, which is gifted to her by her best friend, along with a $41 candle that has “breathe” written on it in cursive, is the nudge that topples the first domino on that journey.
Mrs. Fletcher is based on the novel by Tom Perrotta, who also created the series and wrote the pilot. Perrotta has a nearly flawless track record when it comes to Hollywood adaptations of his work—Election, Little Children, The Leftovers—exploring the discomfort of things like ambition, angst, grief, and restlessness with such an explosive specificity it nearly broaches satire.
Mrs. Fletcher is quieter and maybe quirkier than those other projects. But with a murderer’s row of female directors, including Nicole Holofcener, Gillian Robespierre, and Carrie Brownstein at the helm, it’s a fascinating character study delving into what may be the definitive thing about each of us, but the one we first dismiss: sex.
It’s not only explored through Hahn’s Eve Fletcher, who turns to near-constant masturbation to porn to fill the quiet boredom of her empty nest, but also through her son, Brendan (Jackson White), who learns that abs and a chiseled jaw don’t guarantee sexual entitlement. There are things like consent and shared pleasure to consider, despite what pornography taught him—the devil’s advocate argument to the ways in which porn finally teaches Eve to indulge in pleasure and lose her inhibitions.
There’s also a subplot involving an elderly man at the senior center where Eve works who begins watching porn in the community space and masturbating in public, a nod to where a person’s instinct may go once a loss of faculties brings with it a loss of social propriety.
Basically, everyone is always thinking about sex. Sometimes it’s pervy, sometimes it’s horny, sometimes it’s out of disgust or anxiety, but the thought is constant—at least that’s what the show seems to theorize, and effectively.
When Eve becomes obsessed with porn, it’s as anthropological an exercise as it is sexual. Especially when juxtaposed against her son’s own kind of sexual enlightenment—one not based on opening yourself up, but bringing understanding and compassion to the carnal aspects—Mrs. Fletcher could arguably be about the ways the sexual revolution has failed us as much as it freed us.
There’s a personal essay class that Eve takes to fill the time when she’s not at work or, well, masturbating. There’s a prompt that she can’t crack: write about the moment when you consciously made a decision that lead you to the life you have today. It’s a fascinating conundrum explored here, to which there’s no easy answer. What elements of ourselves are there consciously, and what is there inherently, even if we’ve suppressed it, like Eve did with sex?
It turns out that Hahn is the ideal performer to grapple with this. There’s a lot of praise these days for shows that operate with, to use a recently popular term, “Big Dick Energy.” That’s not exclusive to shows centered around men and machismo, like Succession, but signals a certain aggressive, unapologetic nature that is very much a part of something like Big Little Lies or Watchmen, which have female protagonists.
Mrs. Fletcher arrives with as much boldness as these series, but is almost more appealing in the way it spares us their palpable cockiness. It asks us to explore ourselves along with it. For as explicit as it is about sex, implicitly it is about key aspects of humanity. It’s an imperfect series, to be sure, and not likely to stoke the zeitgeist in the same ways that these other BDE shows have.
It deserves our attention. Refreshingly, though, it’s not demanding it. Consent as you will.
