“Harper & Hal,” premiering Sunday on the Mubi movie channel, is a beautiful, generous limited series that has nothing to show but people, what they are like, and how they get along or not. Its elements are not unknown, because they are taken from real life, rather than from movies, or simply from movies, since they are themes that movies have often resorted to.
But, like this year's “Adolescent,” which it resembles (differently) in its mix of naturalism and artifice, the series, written, directed by and starring Cooper Raiff, 28, screenwriter, director and star of the indie films “S—house” and “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” proves that you can still do something new in an oversaturated medium.
While the story spans eight episodes, the cast is tight. Harper (Lili Reinhart) is the daughter of Mark Ruffalo's character, credited only as “Dad”; Hal (Raiff) is his younger brother. Alyah Chanelle Scott plays Jesse, Harper's longtime girlfriend; Havana Rose Liu is Abby, Hal's short-term girlfriend; Kate (Betty Gilpin) is dad's girlfriend. The company is completed by Audrey (Addison Timlin), divorced with two young children, who shares an office with Harper, and Hal's roommate, Kalen (Christopher Meyer).
In scenes set in the past, Reinhart and Raiff play their younger selves, a la Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle's “Pen15,” with less overt comedy, although Raiff's performance as the very young Hal, whom no one in the series describes as hyperactive (although I will, not a doctor) is often funny. It is not a trick but a device, in the same way that the unique production of “Adolescent” was not performative intelligence but the perfect match for the material, both in the sense that the child is the parent of the adult and because it allows for a different, deeper kind of performance than one can get from a first or third grader. (As creepily good as child actors can be.) Significantly, it unifies the characters over time.
A confluence of events triggers the drama. The house where Hal and Harper grew up, and which Dad, who spends much of the series especially depressed, can't let go, is being sold. (Harper and Hal are in Los Angeles; the house, and Dad and Kate, are elsewhere.) Kate is pregnant; there is a possibility that the baby has Down syndrome, which leads Dad to reflect that with “a disabled child… you have to meet him where he is every day” and that he could have been a more present father to his older children. Jesse has a job offer in Texas and wants Harper to come with her. Hal, a college senior who doesn't aim anywhere in particular, although he likes to draw, breaks up with Abby after learning (when she tells him she'd like them to become “exclusive”) that until then they hadn't been. And Harper has been attracted to Audrey.
The loss of his mother and his father's unresolved grief have made Hal and Harper unusually close; She is the caregiver for her brother, who, although he is older, sometimes wants to get into bed next to her; At the same time, Harper has internalized the feeling that she is holding everything together, which makes it difficult to move on. They are together on an island.
“Are we friends?” —young Hal asks Harper.
“We are brother and sister,” she responds.
“Not friends.”
“I guess we can be friends too.”
There is an almost total absence of expository dialogue. The characters are not affected by the speech; The silences allow the viewer to enter the spaces between them and let their experience echo with their own. (If you've lived long enough to read TV reviews, you've felt some or all of these things.) There is no wall of statement erected between the viewer and what is seen, but the actors, especially Reinhart and Gilpin, can destroy you with a look. (Though some writers and actors love them, nothing feels less true to life than a long monologue.)
Although the story seems organic, it is also highly structured, spanning the course of Kate's pregnancy, full of resonances and reflections: “I Will Survive,” sung by an adult Harper at karaoke and in flashback as part of a children's choir, or a precocious young Harper reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” “It's about a family where everyone feels very alone,” she tells Hal, shedding light on herself, “but then it gets even worse because they withdraw and become selfish and very miserable. But maybe it will get better.” (We often see her with a book). There is a slow and fast pace to the cut; short scenes alternate with long ones; Memories explode in the montage. Just as Raiff doesn't worry too much about explanations, he eliminates transitions. We are here, therefore we are there. You won't get lost.
Once or twice, I worried that Raiff might be steering his ship toward some dark, clichéd outcome, but I needn't have worried.
