*Spoilers ahead*
Motherhood is seldom a straight line but more often than not, mainstream entertainment simplifies it as a picture of selflessness and unconditional love. The many textures of a mother’s emotions, that come with a bundle of contradictions and complexities, are usually left unaddressed.
A whodunit is not typically a genre one would expect to be a study of anything maternal, but Mare of Easttown is not your quotidian guilty-pleasure crime television. Yes, there is crime to solve and a killer to find, but the Kate Winslet-starrer HBO mini-series is at its heart a story of mothers wrapped around a murder mystery. Everything that happens in the bleak neighbourhood of Easttown is a direct or indirect result of what happens in the lives of its mothers.
The events are set off by Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny), a teenage mother’s desperation to get the money for her infant son’s ear surgery. After her death by homicide, we are gradually sucked into the orbit of a town that we soon realise is torn apart by the grief of many mothers. They are far from perfect and each one fighting a battle of her own. Detective Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet), who is seen as, or rather expected to be, this matriarch protector of the town, is a single mother of two, and a grandmother to her dead son’s baby. Mare (short for Marianne) lives with her own mother Halen Fahey (Jean Smart) so their home is a four-generation household that often becomes a sparring ground of mothers and grandmothers.
We enter Mare’s life, which in her own words, “is a s**tshow” as she tells her colleague. “I am about to lose custody of my grandson, and I’m working through unresolved issues about my son who killed himself.” Those issues now define her strained relationship with her teenage daughter Siobhan and her own mother. The dynamics in the house are all very topsy-turvy, wherein Kate’s Mare, with her beer-guzzling, loudly chomping, and generally insolent ways towards Helen, sometimes feels like she is the teenager in the house — a complete foil to the well-behaved and comparatively more collected Siobhan, the real adolescent.
In the quieter moments, however, the picture shifts – when Mare lies down next to her grandson Drew and watches him drift off to sleep, or a quiet acknowledgment when Siobhan tells her that she has broken up with her girlfriend, or when, in the middle of another argument, Helen tells Mare, “I’m always on your side, even when I act like I’m not." These moments are so subtle that you almost miss them in the sea of chaos, but that is what also makes them so real — these are life’s little big moments.
Mare and Helen’s relationship is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. “We can’t stand each other,” she tells her date Richard. But there are many shades hidden in that statement. The funeral scene where Helen’s affair with the widowed neighbour is exposed, followed by Mare almost choking to keep a straight face and later cackling away in the car on the way back home, will probably go down in television history as among the funniest funeral moments. Mare muttering ‘homewrecker’ to a red-faced Helen, as she leaves for a date, is another priceless touch.
Mare may be a mother and a grandmother, but Helen still takes a gleeful interest in her daughter’s dating life – how she dresses, who she meets. And when they are not caught in verbal duels, they share town gossip. A frantic Mare rushes home when she hears of Helen’s fall, but makes no effort to hide her disappointment upon seeing what appears to be a benign cut on the forehead. “Sorry I am not more maimed for you!” lashes Helen. And the only time we see Mare in a teary mess, with her rock-solid armour gone, is when she sinks into Helen’s embrace, after coming home from meeting Colin’s mother, who had slapped her and blamed her for her son’s death. All it took was for Helen to ask, “How’d it go?"
Even as she has clamped her own grief from losing her son, Mare is weighed down by the anguish of the other mothers in town whose children have died or gone missing on her watch.
As her therapist observes, she dives headfirst into these cases to delay facing her own grief, “seeking an external solution to internal pain." Her own moral compass is questionable too, when she plants drugs on her grandson’s mom, Carrie, to try to ensure she loses the custody battle. For Mare, bringing up her grandson Drew is a rare chance at a do-over, to correct the wrongs she did with her autistic, addict and now dead son Kevin, and she will go to any extent to protect that chance. Fighting her is Carrie, who is battling her own addiction while trying to do everything she can to piece her life together for Drew. And helping Carrie, is Helen – for “purely selfish reasons” – because she fears Carrie will win the battle and cut them out of Drew’s life. It is all a Venn diagram of the politics of motherhood.
Solving a crime in a town where everybody knows each other, is both a help and a handicap for Mare. The suspects she interrogates are children of her friends or of people she knows closely, and Mare handles them with a care that is almost maternal. For her, there is no separating the personal from the professional. But the real test comes when sitting on the other side of the bench is none other than her best friend Lori’s (Julianne Nicholson) son Ryan. That moment, when she stares at the CCTV footage and realises that he is the killer she has been looking for all this while, is gut-wrenching. We never see Mare shed a tear while talking about her dead son, but her voice breaks when she has to say the words ‘13-year-old,' ‘suspect,' and ‘murder’ in the same sentence. The mother, who is no stranger to the grief of losing a son, has to now be the person to take her best friend’s son away.
Of course, she is angry with Lori for protecting Ryan, lying to her, and obstructing a murder investigation. But as a friend, Mare can hardly bring herself to mete out the worst punishment a mother can imagine. And for that, she must face a mother’s wrath. Lori exploding at Mare in the car, venting her pent up anger and frustration at not being able to protect the thing that is most dear to her, is an emotionally brutal moment. Her screams of ‘My Ryan!’ will haunt us long after the closing credits have rolled.
Lori and Mare are two best friends who are also two grieving mothers. And their love for each other is sometimes almost maternal in the way they protect one another. In the penultimate scene, Mare holds Lori as she collapses into her embrace, shedding all the weight she has been carrying, and gently rocks her. She will not let her go, a mother does not leave. Being there for her best friend finally gives Mare the strength to be there for herself. At last she listens to Helen’s words – “you need to forgive yourself." As she climbs the ladder to the attic, in a telling and symbolic last scene, she also takes the first step in shedding the guilt she feels for her son’s suicide.
All through the series, we see the men in the town fight, cheat, kill each other, kill themselves, break windows, and hurl milk bottles for revenge, while the women are left to not just clean up after them but to also make the place worth living again. It is not like they do not make mistakes – from misplaced anger to making corrupting and even fatal choices – they are far from infallible. But in the end, if Easttown is torn apart by a mothers’ grief, it is also pieced together by a mother’s love.
Mare of Easttown is streaming in India on Disney+ Hotstar Premium.
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