The Beauty of ‘My Brilliant Friend’ Was in the Little Things

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The HBO series based on Elena Ferrante's novels, which concludes Nov. 11, was a gorgeous depiction of mid-century Italy. But its true success was in the intimacies between its two main characters

Over the course of its four-season run, HBO‘s My Brilliant Friend has featured gangland killings, sexual assaults, attacks by political revolutionaries, and other forms of violence. Yet time and again, the Italian drama series, based on Elena Ferrante’s quartet of Neapolitan novels, finds itself at its most savage, and powerful, in conversations between its two central characters, Elena and Lila.

Elena (played at various ages by Elisa Del Genio, Margherita Mazzucco, and most recently Alba Rohrwacher) and Lila (played by Ludovica Nasti, Gaia Girace, and now Irene Maiorino) grew up in the same rough neighborhood in post-World War II Naples. They had the same friends and enemies. They had similar mental gifts, and what seemed at first to be similar dreams, but that overlap often did as much harm as good. Lila was always the more glamorous, talented, mentally strong, and intelligent of the duo, which created a lifelong inferiority complex in Elena. But Elena was able to leave the neighborhood, become a famous and successful author, and otherwise enjoy the destiny that once seemed meant for the more stubborn and tortured Lila. So whenever their paths inevitably returned to one another, the reunions tended to be fraught, with each woman both desperately needing yet resenting the presence of the other. And time and again, Lila’s words — whether attacking Elena or the many useless men in their lives — would prove more cutting than any knife, more devastating than any bullet.

The show’s penultimate episode, which debuted earlier this week, adds still more heartbreak onto the burden that both friends have been shouldering for their entire lives. While Elena and Lila’s toxic ex Nino (Fabrizio Gifuni) — among the most loathsome men to ever be featured in an HBO drama, and this is the home of The Sopranos, The Wire, Oz, and Game of Thrones — is in the neighborhood for a visit, Lila’s young daughter (Maria Vittoria Miorin) goes missing. Lila was born with a seemingly bottomless well of rage, and has long struggled to keep it capped, or at least to point it in useful directions. As weeks pass with no news, that anger floods outwards — even Elena’s daughters, whom Lila has often done a better job raising than Elena herself has, aren’t spared — but also turns inward. Her hair rapidly grays, her features blacken, and soon she seems less like a grieving mother than a storybook witch who no longer belongs in our reality.

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Elena, of course, again winds up repeatedly on the receiving end of Lila’s fury, but a fascinating thing happens during one of the rare moments where she and Lila are in the eye of the storm: Lila admits that she has always needed Elena — and, even more, that she has always needed Elena to need her. Those words somehow break the spell that Lila has held over Elena since they were playing with dolls and learning to read. Elena still wants Lila in her life, but she no longer feels desperate for her friend’s approval, nor resentful of having to constantly share the world with this superior version of herself. At times, knowing Lila has felt like the best thing that ever happened to Elena; at others, like the worst. In this moment, she has finally learned to take the bad with the good, and to accept that the latter far outweighs the former. When Lila goes back to attacking her again a few scenes later, you can see Elena shrugging it off in a way she never has before.

Dramatically, this is a very small and subtle development, especially coming in the middle of an episode that begins with Tina’s disappearance and ends with the assassination of the Solara brothers, the local gangsters who have haunted Lila and Elena for decades. Yet because Ferrante and her TV collaborators have so carefully and delicately drawn this portrait of a messy lifelong friendship, Elena’s moment of epiphany lands with proper emotional force. Similarly, Monday night’s finale features several major developments in the lives of the friends and their extended families; yet the most powerful, memorable scene is these two women sitting on a couch and having a quiet conversation.

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It’s an appropriately understated finale to a series that could go big in scope and tone, but that — like Elena always finding her way back to Lila — inevitably returned to the intricacies between its main duo, how they are good and bad not only for one another, but for everyone around them.

Because the series is told from the point of view of an older Elena(*), it can be easy to see the world as she sees it, and to be blinded at times to her faults. Elena is gradually revealed to be spoiled and narcissistic, continually hurting herself and those around her(**) through her fixation on the philandering Nino — which is fueled at least as much by her jealousy of Lila as it is by physical attraction and a stubborn belief that she would be the woman who could change him. Yet My Brilliant Friend keeps finding ways to believe in her. When, earlier this year, she said of the moments she and Lila were together and getting along, “Only we mattered,” it somehow plays as a life goal, rather than just an indictment of her inability to see outside her bubble.

(*) Mazzucco and Girace played Elena and Lila from their teenage years through middle age, before giving way this season to Rohrwacher and Maiorino. Because the beginning of Season Four took place so close to the events from the end of Season Three, the transition was bumpier than when we jumped ahead to the girls as teenagers. Complicating matters further: Most of the new actors playing the show’s male characters this season are substantially older. (Nino and Elena were schoolmates, yet Fabrizio Gifuni is more than a decade older than Rohrwacher, and looks it.) If it was meant to suggest that the women had somehow clung more tightly to their youth than the men, it didn’t come across outside of the casting.

(**) Getting back to the historical HBO comparisons, Elena isn’t the worst HBO mom ever, because Livia Soprano, Brianna Barksdale, and Cersei Lannister all exist. But the chickens of parental neglect very much come home to roost for her in these concluding chapters.

Lila deliberately remained more elusive throughout the series, shown primarily through Elena’s worshipful yet envious gaze, and disappearing from the narrative entirely on occasion while Elena was living elsewhere in the country. But the creative team and the three actresses playing Lila kept her feeling vibrant and present, even in her absences, and always the same fundamental person, whether she was struggling through poverty and single motherhood or getting to act out her version of the young Vito Corleone in the Little Italy sequence from The Godfather Part II. And the series’ own gaze was never as narrow as Elena’s, finding time to subtly but potently advance smaller stories, like Lila’s friend Alfonso (Renato De Simone) struggling to explore their gender identity in a time and place that had no compassion for or enlightenment about such an idea.

That the women’s lives could have such extremes fits a show that could go so big — particularly in its recreations of mid-century Italian life — while remaining so intimate.