A small shift in perspective makes all the difference
With much improved visual effects over the 1997 film Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, which for better or worse will be the unavoidable point of comparison, the Peacock show The Miniature Wife takes full advantage of its outlandish premise to shed literal and metaphorical light on the ways even a modern, educated, independent career woman can be made to feel small in her marriage.
On one hand we have Leslie, a physicist who studies the miniaturization of matter to boost the potential of world agriculture. The potential of this technology is limitless, but his company has been in financial difficulty after the failure of his earlier project, a variety of transgenic tomato. If he can’t win over a promising new investor, he can lose all he’s been working for. On the other hand we have Leslie’s wife, Lindy, a writer who struck gold with a virally successful novel 20 years ago and has been unable to write anything else since. When a series of misunderstandings results in the misattribution to her of a short story actually written by her student, she has to reckon with the reasons why she wants fame and figure out whether there’s anything that matters to her more than public adoration.
Leslie and Lindy come from less than ideal families that perversely shaped them into a perfect match for each other. Leslie’s mother crafted a bubble of normalcy to counteract his father’s all-controlling tyranny, so he grew up knowing only a glossy, shiny appearance of happiness. Lindy‘s mother basically resents her for existing, so she grew up attached to her father’s tall tales that provide the feeling, but not the substance, of happiness. So here’s where we are today: Leslie is a self-centered manchild who’s never had to stomach hard truths; Lindy is a raw, open wound who’s exhausted of a lifetime of hard truths. What has sustained their marriage this long is that they give each other exactly the excuse they need to not grow.
So it shouldn’t surprise that they view their respective professional advancements as a zero-sum game where only one of them can be successful at a time. Lindy’s novel already won a Pulitzer; now Leslie is hoping for a Nobel, and that impossible quest has sucked all the energy in their relationship and kept Lindy’s writing career in limbo for the last 20 years. The escalating mutual resentments come to a head in a quick comedy of errors that results in Lindy reduced to pocket size and trapped in a dollhouse while public opinion erupts around the new short story wrongly published under her name. Added complication: Leslie hasn’t figured out how to safely bring tiny things back to normal size. Another complication: Lindy has been having an emotional affair with one of Leslie’s employees. Worst complication of all: as soon as Lindy is returned to normal size, she intends to leave Leslie, and it’s clear she’s in the right here. She’s had enough of being ignored, taken for granted, minimized. The plot of the show is a clever way of making her feelings literal and showing what it’s like for a wife to feel small.
What follows for the rest of the season is a hilarious parade of slapstick jokes about surviving life in miniature. Lindy wrestles a fly, befriends a plastic astronaut, seeks refuge in Christmas decorations, turns toothpicks and cotton swabs into versatile weapons, struggles to operate a touchscreen phone, and masters the uses of dental floss as a climbing rope. A recurring gag, that never gets old, is to see her speak into a wireless earbud as a (for her) gigantic phone receiver. Elizabeth Banks as Lindy hits the right notes as simultaneously terrified and exasperated at the injustice of her situation, while the usually more dramatic Matthew Macfadyen as Leslie reveals a charming sense of comedic timing in the role of a clueless genius.
Despite the great performances (watch out for Adam Capriolo’s brief but stellar moments in a fascinatingly amoral tertiary role), the writing of character is where The Miniature Wife came close to losing me. Sometimes it comes off as a stretch that these two are able to wound each other so deeply and still come out stronger (Is that something neurotypicals do? They really get so angry they yell irrevocably hurtful things they didn’t mean? If so, how on Earth do they get any relationship to work?). It’s a truism of scriptwriting that character is revealed by choices made in extreme circumstances, and it’s hard to imagine a more extreme test of the strength of a marriage. Where do you find the maturity to give up the mirage of achievement for a true measure of inner development? What will finally push you to put yourself in the uncomfortable shoes of your significant other? For most couples, one hopes it doesn’t take molecular reshuffling.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
