Lessons In Chemistry: Brie Larson Stars in Feminist Cooking Show Fable
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
The new eight-episode series Lessons in Chemistry, which stars Brie Larson as a brilliant scientist facing entrenched prejudices in the 1950s and 60s, has a huge potential fan base.
The series is adapted from the wildly successful debut novel from 64-year-old copywriter Bonnie Garmus, which topped bestseller lists shortly after its April 2022 release, and was picked by booksellers as Barnes and Nobles book of the year.
Presciently, AppleTV+ announced production of the film more than a year before the novel was published, developed by Lee Eisenberg (TV’s The Office), with Larson executive producing and starring.
Following the novel, the series attempts to convey a busy jumble of ideas, both serious and absurd. The serious part is a didactic feminist fable about a chemist, Elizabeth Lott, who is thwarted and sidelined by the male-dominated science establishment that wants to keep her in the domestic sphere.
Then, as host of a cooking show, Elizabeth’s kitchen becomes a pulpit, where she becomes an inspirational figure to other women. If that sounds a bit too solemn, the story is also a romance, pebbled with comic quirkiness including a super-intelligent dog who narrates part of the story, with all of it wrapped in an improbable Dickensian melodrama of orphanages and mysterious benefactors.
The force that mostly holds this together is the cooly understated performance by Larson, in another strong-but-vulnerable role that incorporates elements of her Academy Award–winning performance as a protective single mom in Room and her super-heroine Captain Marvel.
With a fixed, purposeful stare, straight-backed posture, and a tendency to speak in paragraphs, Elizabeth is an intellectual odd duck, whose prickly indifference to convention makes her blunt to the point of comedy.
In the new series, she’s also, apparently, something of a fashion plate. With her side-parted blond hair and chic shirt-waist dresses, she channels the regal poise of Grace Kelly. While the costumes and production values aren’t as extravagant as those in The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel — the hit series about a fictional feminist heroine from the same era — the production values, from the mid-century autos and furnishings, the Tupperware dishes to the pastel pink and blues of a TV studio, are designed for optimal eye candy.
We first meet Elizabeth when she’s working as an underemployed lab tech at Los Angeles’ fictional Hastings Institute. Cruelly forced to drop out of grad school, she clearly knows more than the stuffed-shirt, sexist scientist she fetches coffee for. But at Hastings, she meets her soulmate, fellow nerd Calvin (Lewis Pullman), who looks convincingly starstruck each time he gazes at Elizabeth and happens to be the institute’s most brilliant scientist (“the Richard Feynman of chemistry”) and the key reason for the institute’s funding.
Like Elizabeth, he’s obsessive about his hobbies. In his case, running and rowing, and in hers, cooking, which she pursues with a near pathological zeal. To wit, she makes the same lasagna 78 times, trying to perfect the recipe. The two initially connect over food (she stops his habit of eating out of vending machines), experience a brief period of repulsion because of incompatible lab styles, and then form a deep bond.
Though Lessons in Chemistry shares some elements of the recent genre of the STEM romance (love stories about women in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields), it shifts to more uncertain ground after the first couple of well-paced episodes. After some heavy foreshadowing about the unpredictability of life, tragedy strikes. In its aftermath, a now-pregnant Elizabeth finds herself struggling to support herself and her daughter Mad (Alice Halsey), who soon grows into another genius.
By chance, Elizabeth’s passion for cooking lands her a job as host of a TV show, Supper at Six, which becomes a hit because Elizabeth doesn’t talk down to her housewife audience. Instead, she empowers her viewers used to being underestimated with lessons in chemistry, with forward-thinking views on healthy eating (though her recipes are heavy on meat), along with motivational advice on fitness, beauty tips and further education.
Just in case you didn’t get how special Elizabeth is, her producer (Kevin Sussman) underlines it in bold: “You respect your audience, you don’t talk down to people, you meet them where they are, and you somehow raise them up.”
While the tone is unabashedly preachy, it’s also fun, including Elizabeth’s forward-thinking wisdom and pedantic cooking instructions (“Baking powder is an alkali which will raise the PH levels of your chicken skin…”). It’s too bad that the charm of the first episodes begins to wear off as the series takes on more narrative baggage. In contrast to Elizabeth’s insistence on a pristine, efficient workplace, the scripts seem unable to throw anything out, including the novel’s most sentimental and melodramatic excesses.
The male villains, including The Office’s Rainn Wilson as a portly, moustached TV executive, are two-dimensionally evil. The third episode, narrated by the Labradoodle named Six Thirty (voiced by another Office alumnus, B.J. Novak) is cringe-worthy. A flurry of flashbacks uncover traumatic backstories far darker than what happens in the satiric present-day story. Later episodes focus on the mission by Elizabeth’s seven-year-old genius daughter to uncover the secrets of Calvin’s Dickensian upbringing.
The script trims some of the excesses of novel’s ending but its most significant change from the book is the inclusion of a subplot about Elizabeth’s African American neighbours. It’s at best a mixed success. Aja Naomi King, who becomes Elizabeth’s closest friend, plays Harriet, a lawyer whose career has been put on hold to raise children, but finds new purpose in attempting to stop the Santa Monica freeway from running through and destroying her primarily Black neighbourhood.
On the plus side, the subplot places Elizabeth’s crusade in context of the historical battles for equal rights. Frankly, it also panders, as the relationship between the two women repeats the trope of Black people doing the emotional support work for the benefit of white protagonists, as the film crowns Elizabeth with an extra dose of virtue as an anti-racist ally.
Sorting through the nest of narrative strands, there are certainly things to please here, including the performances, the musical score — which is heavy on period jazz and R&B — and the glowing production values.
Then, there’s the larger picture. Like the book on which its based, the series is an emotional reminder of the many Elizabeth Zotts who, through the barriers of prejudice and custom, were never permitted to show their brilliance.
Lessons in Chemistry. Created by Lee Eisenberg, based on the book by Bonnie Garmus. Starring Brie Larson, Lewis Pullman, Aja Naomi King, and Alice Halsey. Available on AppleTV+ October 13.