'Lessons in Chemistry' Review: Brie Larson brings heart, soul and fierce determination to her role
Given the title, you might think it’ll be homework watching this series.
Given the instructional, dry-as-dust title, "Lessons in Chemistry," you might think it'll be homework watching the eight-part, Apple TV+ series. No worries. Though tonal shifts from comedy to calamity too often break its stride, this buoyant series handles the subject of the 1960's battle for women's rights with a touch that is funny, touching and vital.
Brie Larson, an Oscar winner for "Room" and a household name as Captain Marvel, brings heart, soul and fierce determination to the role of Elizabeth Zott, a woman who's way ahead of her time in fighting her way out of the restrictions of a so-called a man's world.
When we first meet Elizabeth she's a struggling lab tech in 1950s Los Angeles where the entrenched men in charge keep her in subservience. Her insistence on open doors comes from a past assault at work where her complaints of abuse by a male colleague fall on deaf ears.
The exception is fellow loner Calvin Evans, the Nobel-winning head chemist played with smarts and charming awkwardness by Lewis Pullman ("Top Gun: Maverick"). Her talent and droll wit are a match for his. They move in, adopt a dog they call Six Thirty and decide never to have kids, preferring devotion to chemistry and the rowing exercises that occupy their few off hours.
A tragic accident spoils their happy ending, leaving Elizabeth alone, unmarried, pregnant, and cut off—by men, of course!— from participation in the chemical breakthrough she developed with Calvin for the chauvinist Hastings Research Company.
Out of a need to support herself and unplanned daughter Madeline, played by Alice Halsey, she takes a seemingly out-of-nowhere offer to host a local TV cooking show called "Supper at Six," using chemistry as her guide and female empowerment as her secret sauce.
About this time you may be asking if "Lessons in Chemistry" is a true story. It isn't. The book is fiction, the first novel from Bonnie Garmus, who was 65 at the time, an experienced ad agency copywriter with a self-taught interest in chemistry and rowing who also experienced sexism first hand. Her empathy shows in her book and in the TV series, developed by Lee Eisenberg ("The Office") with cowriters Elissa Karasik ("Loki") and Emily Fox ("Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist") .
It's too bad that the streaming version added much that was not in the Garmus book, including a subplot involving Elizabeth and a Black neighbor, Harriet (Aja Naomi King), who involves her in the civil-rights movement. A worthy topic, which extends the social activism of the series beyond white problems but is developed too thinly to be more than a distraction.
There's also an entire episode whimsically narrated by the dog Six-Thirty (B.J. Novak does the voice). Even Calvin shows up as a supportive ghost. Then there's the time expended on Madeline as she investigates the roots of the father she never knew and the family that raised him. What she finds is too tidy and sappy to be persuasive.
Luckily, Larson consistently plays against the sentimentality wired into the script and lets us see Elizabeth in the exhilarating act of inventing herself as a woman who smiles only when she feels like it, refuses to ingratiate herself for fools and never lets up on her drive to pursue her goals against the prevailing notion of the time that a woman's place is in the home.
Elizabeth's idea of a home—she turns her kitchen into a lab—flies hilariously in the face of the demands made her obnoxious station manager, hilariously played by Rainn Wilson as a sexist pig personified. He bristles when she signs off every show by saying, "Children set the table, your mother needs a moment to herself."
In her moments to herself, sticking it to the patriarchy in favor of her own scrappy agenda, Elizabeth is a timely and timeless reminder of no-bull feminism. And Larson connects to her role with every fiber of her being. Now that's what I call a real lesson in chemistry.
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