{"id":9736,"date":"2023-01-11T20:21:39","date_gmt":"2023-01-12T01:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9736"},"modified":"2023-01-11T20:21:39","modified_gmt":"2023-01-12T01:21:39","slug":"fleishman-is-in-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/11\/fleishman-is-in-trouble\/","title":{"rendered":"Fleishman is in Trouble."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fleishman is in Trouble<\/em>, streaming now on Hulu, is an adaptation of the 2019 novel of that name<\/a>, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the title character and Claire Danes as his ex-wife. It\u2019s bad. In fact, it\u2019s bad in a lot of different ways, but none more so than the fact that it doesn\u2019t even seem to understand who the most interesting character in the series is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Toby Fleishman (Eisenberg) is a successful hepatologist at a New York City hospital who is somewhat recently divorced from talent agent Rachel (Danes) when, after a weekend when he has their two kids, she fails to come pick them up at her assigned time \u2013 and the next day, she\u2019s not only still AWOL, she\u2019s unreachable. This becomes the catalyst to explore the history of their now-defunct marriage, Toby\u2019s experiences as a single guy, and his friendships with Libby (Lizzie Caplan) and Seth (Adam Brody), whom he’s known since they all spent a semester in Israel during college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Libby is the narrator, and the stand-in for the author, and we also get a fair amount of her story as well. She\u2019s married to a safe, boring lawyer (Josh Radnor), with whom she has two kids and shares a nice house in the Jersey suburbs. She was working as a writer, but quit about two years before the events of the show to become a stay-at-home mom. With Toby getting a divorce and living it up as a single guy, while she finds the other stay-at-home moms to be incapable of having a modestly intellectual conversation, she falls into an existential crisis of her own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way the series unfurls, we get mostly Toby\u2019s perspective for the first six episodes. Rachel is derisive towards him, even in front of friends; consumed by her work; and diffident towards her kids. In his telling, she\u2019s all of the problems, and he comes to believe she was also unfaithful to him with a mutual friend. Only some of this is accurate, although when we get more of her side of the story, the result is we realize he\u2019s also kind of an ass. Blame may not be shared equally, but neither of these two is free from it. By the time the final episode began, I hated them both, with Eisenberg more or less doing the Mark Zuckerberg character from The Social Network<\/a><\/em> and Danes hitting one very loud note over and over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby, it turns out, is high on his own supply, probably exacerbated by the success he\u2019s having on dating apps. (Jesse Eisenberg is listed at 5\u20197\u201d. He would not be doing that well on the apps in real life.) He and Rachel have differing memories of pivotal events in their marriage, including a traumatic scene around the birth of their daughter, and when Rachel develops post-partum depression with psychotic elements, Toby, a medical doctor, recommends \u2026 a support group. Not a psychiatrist, or anyone who could prescribe something. It\u2019s hard to fathom, but it also may be a sign he really doesn\u2019t take his wife seriously at all. She, meanwhile, is a very thinly drawn stereotype, the embodiment of the myth that you can\u2019t be a successful working woman and a good mother together, which is especially odd in a series that depicts the alternative, stay-at-home moms, as vapid robots who walk around with an unearned sense of superiority and refer to a certain style of interior decoration as \u201cmid-cench.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which brings us back to Libby, who should have been the star of the series (and, I presume, the book). Caplan gives the one truly good performance of anyone here, and it\u2019s partly to her credit and partly because Libby is the only three-dimensional character. The winter of her discontent should have been enough to carry the movie, without the pointless mystery of Rachel\u2019s disappearance (which gets an answer, but in a very unsatisfactory way). Libby is 41, with two kids who are approaching the point where they don\u2019t need her like they did probably two or three years prior, and no longer has an active career. It\u2019s the age and the point in life where feelings of regret over past choices you can\u2019t unmake and the closing of future possibilities just due to age and circumstance are common. It\u2019s a midlife crisis. It shouldn\u2019t bother you, but it does. And Libby is aware of this, on some level \u2013 she knows her life is, if not great, solidly okay, and privileged, and even that she has unusual agency to make things better for herself. She even has the agency to choose to leave it through divorce, if she wants. The series isn\u2019t interested enough in going deeper with her character, instead spending time with some of the worst sex scenes you will ever see as we follow Toby\u2019s adventures in dating. There are some good parts of the Libby story, with one episode that\u2019s primarily dedicated to her, but for every bit that\u2019s telling (the freezer) there\u2019s one that\u2019s absurd (the pancakes).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cinematography in Fleishman<\/em> is a disaster too; the series relies way too much on a spinning camera gimmick that wasn\u2019t just overused, but was nauseating, and that added nothing whatsoever to the story. It becomes the series\u2019 crutch any time it needs to speed up time, or try to show a character\u2019s confusion, rather than just doing so via dialogue or narration. I\u2019ve seen action and sci-fi films\/shows that were less reliant on camera movements, and can\u2019t remember feeling like I had to turn away multiple times to avoid getting disoriented myself. This is supposed to be a realistic story, and all this gimmick does is detract from that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ultimate failure of Fleishman<\/em>, though, comes down to where it rests its eye. The story puts us in a tiny niche of society \u2013 a very narrow subset of upper-class Manhattanites, where almost everyone around Toby and Rachel is a social climber obsessed with status and money, getting their kids into the Right Schools and using the right decorators and so on. (I was glad to see Ashley Austin Morris, who played Francine on the Electric Company<\/em> reboot, appear as a side character; she doesn\u2019t have a lot to do, but she does it well.) The script substitutes character quirks, like having Toby on some sort of weird keto or paleo diet for his entire adult life, for real depth, to the point where we don\u2019t get to know any of the principals, let alone empathize with them beyond Libby. Caplan gives by far the best performance of anyone in the series, which makes it even more galling that the story doesn\u2019t center her character outside of one episode, and even at that it\u2019s never quite explained why Libby puts up with Toby when he’s consistently horrible to her. Libby is in Turmoil <\/em>would have been a much better series, and then she could have just introduced Toby and Seth as her jerk friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fleishman is in Trouble, streaming now on Hulu, is an adaptation of the 2019 novel of that name, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the title character and Claire Danes as his ex-wife. It\u2019s bad. In fact, it\u2019s bad in a lot of different ways, but none more so than the fact that it doesn\u2019t even seem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,102,306],"class_list":["post-9736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-adaptations","tag-disappointments","tag-tv","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9737,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9736\/revisions\/9737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}