<\/p>\n
\u201cHarper & Hal,\u201d premiering Sunday on the cinema-centric streamer Mubi, is a gorgeous, generous limited series that has nothing to show you other than people, how they are and how they do or do not get along. Its elements are not unfamiliar, because they\u2019re drawn from life, rather than from the movies \u2014 or just from the movies, as they\u2019re subjects to which the movies have often turned. <\/p>\n
But, like this year\u2019s \u201cAdolescence<\/a>,\u201d which it (differently) resembles in its mix of naturalism and artifice, the series, written and directed by and starring 28-year-old Cooper Raiff<\/a> \u2014 writer-director-star of the indie features \u201cShithouse\u201d and \u201cCha Cha Real Smooth<\/a>\u201d \u2014 demonstrates that something fresh can still be done in an oversaturated medium.<\/p>\n While the story spreads out over eight episodes, the cast is compact. Harper (Lili Reinhart) is the daughter of Mark Ruffalo\u2019s character, credited only as \u201cDad\u201d; Hal (Raiff) is her younger brother. Alyah Chanelle Scott plays Jesse, Harper\u2019s longtime girlfriend; Havana Rose Liu is Abby, Hal\u2019s shorter-time girlfriend; Kate (Betty Gilpin) is Dad\u2019s girlfriend. The company is completed by Audrey (Addison Timlin), divorced with two small children, who shares an office with Harper, and Hal\u2019s roommate, Kalen (Christopher Meyer).<\/p>\n In scenes set in the past, Reinhart and Raiff play their younger selves, a la Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle\u2019s \u201cPen15,\u201d<\/a> with less overt comedy, though Raiff\u2019s performance as very young Hal, whom no one in the series describes as hyperactive (though I will \u2014 not a doctor) is often funny. It\u2019s not a gimmick but a device \u2014 much as the one-shot production of \u201cAdolescence\u201d<\/a> was not performative cleverness, but the right fit for the material \u2014 both in the sense of the child being the parent of the adult, and because it allows for a different, deeper sort of performance than one is liable to get from a first or a third grader. (As spookily good as small child actors can be.) Significantly, it unifies the characters across time.<\/p>\n A confluence of events triggers the drama. The house Hal and Harper grew up in \u2014 and which Dad, who spends much of the series seriously depressed especially, can\u2019t let go \u2014 is being sold. (Harper and Hal are in L.A.; the house, and Dad and Kate, are elsewhere.) Kate is pregnant; there\u2019s a chance the baby might have Down syndrome, which leads Dad to reflect that with \u201ca disabled kid \u2026 you gotta meet them where they are every day\u201d and that he might have been a more present parent to his older children. Jesse has a job offer in Texas and wants Harper to come with her. Hal, a college senior who isn\u2019t pointed anywhere in particular, though he likes to draw, breaks up with Abby after learning \u2014 when she tells him she\u2019d like them to become \u201cexclusive\u201d \u2014 that up until then they hadn\u2019t been. And Harper has become attracted to Audrey.<\/p>\n The loss of their mother and their father\u2019s unresolved grief has made Hal and Harper unusually close; she\u2019s a caretaker to her brother, who, even though he\u2019s grown, sometimes wants to crawl in bed next to her; at the same time, Harper\u2019s internalized the feeling that she\u2019s holding everything together, which makes it hard to move on. They\u2019re on an island together.<\/p>\n \u201cAre we friends?\u201d young Hal asks Harper.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re brother and sister,\u201d she replies.<\/p>\n \u201cNot friends.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI guess we can be friends, too.\u201d<\/p>\n There is an almost complete absence of expository dialogue. The characters are not afflicted with speechifying; silences allow the viewer to enter into the spaces between them, and to let their experience echo with one\u2019s own. (If you\u2019ve lived long enough to be reading television reviews, you\u2019ve felt some or all of these things.) There\u2019s no wall of declaration erected between the viewer and the viewed, but the actors, Reinhart and Gilpin especially, can destroy you with a look. (Although some writers and actors love them, there\u2019s nothing that feels less true to life than a long monologue.)<\/p>\n