Chemistry lesson by the side of the road

 

Brie Larson in "Lessons in Chemistry." Photo by Michael Becker/Courtesy of Apple - © Apple TV+ 2023 via IMDB.com

Of all the movie goddesses I've been fortunate – more like crazy lucky – to meet in this lifetime, Brie Larson stands out. 

It was the 2013 Maui Film Festival at Wailea where she was receiving the Rising Star Award. I was slotted to interview her before the award presentation, but when we ran into each other in the driveway leading up the festival's offices and spectacular outdoor amphitheater, we decided to just do it there.

No photographers. No personal assistants. No festival staffers impatiently watching the clock. Just the two of us. From first introductions to a smiling farewell twenty minutes later, the entire encounter happened by the side of the road

Just 23 at the time, Brie was hardly the biggest name on the honorees list. But according to the festival staffer wrangling the celebrities, she was the coolest. Hands down. No entourage, no airs. Unassuming…smart… funny – she was a pleasure to be around, he reported.

Still in the early stages of her career, it would be a couple years before she would win the best actress Oscar for “Room.” A few years after that, she shattered Marvel Universe's glass ceiling, gender bending the role of Captain Marvel.

But in 2013, she had just broken out of supporting ranks to star in “Short Term 12,” a gritty drama about a young case worker managing a residential care facility for troubled youth. Written and directed by Haiku homeboy Destin Daniel Cretton (who would make his own mark in the Marvel Universe a few years later), it was destined for heaps of prestigious prizes.

The breakout performances introduced audiences to what would become Brie Larson signatures:

Emotional honesty, forged of equal measures of vulnerability and courage. A naturalism that never feels like “acting.” A presence so unassuming and yet so powerful on screen, that it transfixes, guiding her fellow actors to new heights, leading her audience to epiphanies.

Magic hour was descending as we concluded the interview, still standing by the side of the road. Surrounded by tropical foliage in the gauzy air, dappled sunlight tinted everything gold.

“We artists are in such a luxurious position, we're forgetting what the point of art is,” Brie said, “which is to remind us of the core, what human existence actually is.” 

In those days, when movies still lived on big silver screens, she celebrated “the true beauty and importance of being in a theater and watching something that is twenty times bigger than you. Whatever you want to call it — religious, spiritual, personal, whatever that bigger thing is for you — it's that feeling of letting something wash over you, and be bigger than you. And hopefully, for an hour and a half, or however long it is, if we're doing our jobs right, you care about other people. You care about somebody else more than yourself, and it transcends.”

A decade later the screens have shrunk, some to the size of your palm. 

Brie Larson is still thriving.

In “Lessons in Chemistry,” an eight-part miniseries on Apple TV+, she plays Elizabeth Zott, a 1950s heroine aspiring to be a chemist. Although she's usually the smartest one in the room, she's up against the morals and mores of her times. Male chauvinism has rarely looked more arrogant or smarmy than it does among her colleagues in the Southern California university and college chemistry departments where she is trying to pursue her career.

Developed by Lee Eisenberg, the show revels in period details of the '50s, as well as the 1930s when the scripts provide backstories for Elizabeth, and her eventual lab partner Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman). 

The storyline is nothing if not surprising. Along with being a chemist, Elizabeth is a master chef. Chemistry and cooking are closely related, after all. Her culinary talents pave a pathway to romantic love, and later to a career that rewrites the feminist playbook. Discovering that she's pregnant without a husband just adds to the challenges she molds into a unique life.

The conventional wisdom of the time was that a woman's place was in the kitchen. Elizabeth's kitchen happened to become a studio centerpiece in the young medium of television.

Just as each segment's music changes under the innovative, award-winning opening credits, so do the tone and mood. Ranging from tragic to whimsical, “Lessons in Chemistry's” themes aren't limited to sexual politics and stifling gender roles. There's also the matter of the way racism was built into urban planning and development. And the toll fundamentalist hypocrisy can take on the innocence of youth. And the cost of pursuing a career. And the staggering weight of grief. And the challenges of motherhood. And the rewards of same. And the place of Miles Davis in American culture. The list goes on and on …

As with Elizabeth herself, the series' sweeping ambitions may be its one weak link. By trying to take on all the social themes of America in the '50s, it hits some and misses others. Still, its visuals almost match those of period-piece gold standard “Mad Men” – only seen from the other coast, and the other gender. And the riveting power of its heroine invites comparisons to another recent classic from those times: “The Queen's Gambit.”

There are memorable performances in the supporting ranks, but they are like planets, revolving around and powered by the sun.

The sun is Brie Larson – vulnerable, powerful, brilliant, flawed, transcendent as ever.