Apples Never Fall Review: Privilege, Parenting, and Personal Sacrifice

Peacock’s latest foray into prestige drama, “Apples Never Fall,” invites viewers into the privileged yet dysfunctional world of the Delaney family. Based on Liane Moriarty’s 2021 novel of the same name, the series chronicles the sudden disappearance of matriarch Joy Delaney (Annette Bening) and the cascading revelations that follow for her husband Stan (Sam Neill) and their four adult children. This miniseries marks the third Moriarty book to receive the television treatment after the blockbuster success of “Big Little Lies” and the more muted reception of “Nine Perfect Strangers.”

With Oscar nominee Bening headlining a talented ensemble that also includes Alison Brie, Jake Lacy, and “White Lotus” alum Conor Merrigan Turner as the Delaney offspring, “Apples Never Fall” possesses all the ingredients for another juicy hit – simmering family tensions, dark secrets buried beneath a polished veneer, and the ever-tantalizing promise of truth being stranger than fiction. Yet as this tightly-wound mystery gradually unspools, it becomes evident that some shiny apples unavoidably contain a few too many bruises and blemishes.

While undeniably engrossing at times, the series suffers from tonal dissonance and a failure to fully substantiate its larger ambitions, resulting in an uneven viewing experience. Savor the production’s finer elements, but prepare for disappointment once the core conundrums are finally resolved.

The Puzzle Pieces of Joy’s Vanishing Act

On its surface, “Apples Never Fall” presents a straightforward mystery – affluent tennis coach Joy Delaney inexplicably goes missing, leaving her equally affluent family reeling. But this bare premise is merely the entry point into a richly layered exploration of privilege, resentment, and the cracks that fester beneath even the most polished of familial veneers.

When Joy (Annette Bening) fails to answer her children’s calls, her husband Stan (Sam Neill) and their four grown kids are forced to confront not just her disappearance, but the cascading secrets that suddenly come tumbling into the light. For the workaholic father they idolized and resented in equal measure, and the quietly devoted mother eternally relegated to second billing, the threads holding their brood together begin unraveling at alarming speed.

Enter the fractured Delaney brood – venture capitalist Troy (Jake Lacy), the resentful black sheep; new age healer Amy (Alison Brie), desperate to finally find purpose; struggling physical therapist Brooke (Essie Randles); and aimless marina worker Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner). As they trade perspectives through a masterful weaving of past and present timelines, it becomes excruciatingly clear that one’s truth was another’s oblivion within this ostentatiously perfect nuclear unit.

And hovering in the periphery is Savannah (Georgia Flood), the enigmatic younger woman whose recent and unsettling presence in Joy and Stan’s home only compounds the riddles swirling around the family’s strange implosion. With detectives circling and tensions combusting between the siblings, the hunt for Joy evolves into a confrontation with the costs of upward mobility, the weight of parental sacrifice, and the notion that loyalty may shatter as easily as a fallen apple.

Bringing the Delaneys to Vivid Life

At the core of “Apples Never Fall” beats an impressively realized ensemble, with the principal actors breathing dimensionality and nuance into characters who could have easily devolved into caricatures. Leading the charge are Annette Bening and Sam Neill, both operating at the peak of their considerable powers.

As the vanished Joy Delaney, Bening masterfully captures the weariness and quiet indignation of a woman who sacrificed her own dreams to sustain her family’s aspirations. Through deftly deployed glances and inflections, the veteran actress imbues Joy with a simmering melancholy that adds profound pathos to her eventual disappearance. Bening’s is a masterclass in sketching an everywoman stretch to the breaking point by the twin taxations of thankless domesticity and unrelenting self-abnegation.

Her foil arrives in Neill’s magnetic yet unsettling turn as the effortlessly charismatic yet obtusely blustering Stan. The consummate father figure whose singular obsession with tennis glory comes at the expense of truly seeing those closest to him, Neill’s Delaney patriarch dances along the precarious line between protagonist and antagonist. His brooding physicality and propensity for erupting into consuming rages hint at capacities for darkness that persistently shadow the overarching mystery.

While the parental figures impress, the Delaney children likewise avoid reductive stereotyping in the hands of their respective performers. As the aggrieved eldest Troy, Jake Lacy wields his knack for boorish arrogance to surprising emotional effect, gradually shedding light on the insecurities fueling the character’s antagonistic bent. Alison Brie embraces a welcome opportunity to subvert her comedic persona, imbuing the wounded yet relentlessly optimistic Amy with poignant stirrings of hope and hard-won wisdom.

Essie Randles and Conor Merrigan Turner fare best in bringing shades of complexity to the more thinly-conceived Brooke and Logan. Tasked with representing opposing perspectives within the Delaney offspring, the young actors wring authenticity from their characters’ resentments and allegiances toward their embattled parents. Across this talented ensemble, even seemingly surface-level dynamics like sibling rivalries attain startling emotional depth through finely-etched performances.

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Slick Visuals Can’t Smooth Over Narrative Turbulence

“Apples Never Fall” paints a sumptuous portrait of privilege through its lush cinematography and keen eye for upper-crust opulence. The sunny vistas of West Palm Beach provide an inviting canvas for the Delaneys’ tennis-centered lives of manicured lawns, pastel countryclub ensembles, and sprawling homes worthy of Architectural Digest spreads. Directors Chris Sweeney and Dawn Shadforth ensure the central mystery unfurls against a visually intoxicating backdrop of potent Florida sunshine and Floridian affluence.

This aesthetic richness, however, cannot fully compensate for the jarring tonal whiplash that plagues the narrative direction. The storytelling skips erratically between soapy family theatrics, simmering whodunit tension, and sobering examinations of generational trauma, often within the same scene. Any sense of cohesion is further undermined by the disjointed editing required to sustain the fractured dual timelines of past and present-day.

What could have been an elegantly braided exploration of the circumstances precipitating Joy’s vanishing instead lurches from one temporary distraction to the next. Episodic cinematography gambits like lingering close-ups of ominous household objects or frenzied cutting to suggest climactic confrontations only exacerbate the pervasive tonal whiplash.

Admittedly, there are moments where Sweeney and Shadforth’s flourishes elevate the psychological subtext, such as employing reflective surfaces to quite literally underscore characters grappling with their warped self-perceptions. But such stylistic triumphs are overshadowed by the overarching narrative turbulence, rendering the cinematic canvass needlessly muddied.

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Striving for Substance Beneath the Soapy Sheen

Beneath its soapy exterior of domestic suspense and familial tumult, “Apples Never Fall” grasps for more substantive thematic commentary on the sacrifices and psychic tolls of modern family life, gender dynamics, and the elusive nature of privilege. The degree to which it succeeds, however, is uneven.

Most potent is the series’ examination of the quiet martyrdom too often expected of mothers and wives. Annette Bening’s finely-etched performance as the increasingly disaffected Joy Delaney transforms what could have been another missing woman storyline into a poignant excavation of maternal erasure. Her children’s casual disregard and failure to truly see the woman tethering their clan together becomes a microcosm for how domestic labor and the surrendering of personal ambition is so frequently taken for granted.

This astute character study doubles as an indictment of rigidly-prescribed gender roles and the pernicious ways societal pressures suffocate individual identities. Joy’s arc posits thought-provoking questions about the costs of subsuming one’s self into the wife/mother archetype – how much of her own personhood did she sacrifice to sustain the family unit? By rendering such heady themes corporeally visceral through Bening’s raw vulnerability, “Apples” transcends mere melodrama.

Less deftly handled, however, are the more overt critiques of class privilege and the insularity of the upper crust that the series halfheartedly attempts to inject. For all the attention lavished on the Delaneys’ palatial homes, country club social circles, and bon vivant lifestyles funded by legacy wealth, these eccentricities of hyper-affluence ultimately come across as set dressing rather than purposeful commentary. Besides some cursory nods to the entitlement and obliviousness such rarefied environments breed, “Apples” never fully reckons with the implications of peering behind this gilded veil.

Likewise, the back-half narrative strides to unpack intergenerational trauma and how it corrodes familial bonds feel scattered and underbaked amidst the convolutions of the whodunit mystery plot. For all its effortful swings at Social Relevance, “Apples” can’t quite overcome its identity as a soapy, if sometimes subversive, exploration of domestic ennui.  When it grasps at more searching profundities around gender, privilege, and the alienating structures of the nuclear family unit, its reach slightly exceeds its grasp.

Hitting the Benchmarks of a Moriarty Melodrama

As the third television adaptation of an original Liane Moriarty novel to arrive in the past six years, “Apples Never Fall” bears all the hallmarks that have come to define the Australian author’s distinct brand of upscale melodrama transposed to the small screen. From the blue-blooded suburban milieu to the gradually destabilizing portrait of a picture-perfect family’s fractures, the series clearly endeavors to scratch the same literary itch that propelled the megahit “Big Little Lies” and its less culturally impactful follow-up “Nine Perfect Strangers.”

Where it falls short of its predecessors is in the alchemic translation of Moriarty’s tightly-coiled prose and intricate character psychologies to the visual medium. The aperture through which audiences experience the book’s intricacies is simply too narrow here, resulting in thinly-sketched individuals and telescoped emotional reckonings that lack the same degree of excavational depth and nuance.

While showrunner Melanie Marnich retains the central mystery premise and web of simmering domestic tensions, her economized translation ultimately sacrifices much of the source material’s texture and insight into the human condition – the very narrative peripheries that elevated Moriarty’s efforts above mere airport fiction. Subtle revelations about the wages of resentment and the fraying family unit don’t quite land with the same searing impact.

This narrative compression, however, may ultimately prove a boon in terms of accessibility for audiences encountering the tale with fresh eyes. Unburdened by the dense literary frameworks of Moriarty’s writing, the onscreen “Apples Never Fall” can be absorbed and digested as a relatively self-contained look at privilege, sacrifice, and the fallout of unchecked domestic toxicity. Even without prior knowledge of the book’s underpinnings, the outlines of the mystery and human truths within still manage to resonate, if lacking some of their intended wallop.

Polished Fruit With a Hollow Core

For all its aspirations toward prestige contemplations of family, identity, and society’s innermost ills, “Apples Never Fall” ultimately registers as a handsomely-produced yet somewhat empty calorie – a series that proves more engrossing in its teasing buildup than its unsatisfying resolutions.

The considerable strengths, from the impeccable performances to the lush visual opulence, deserve recognition. And on a scene-to-scene basis, the narrative machinations possess an undeniable soapy allure in their depiction of domestic implosion. But the story’s failure to fully cohere its thematic ambitions into a cohesive statement on the wages of familial trauma and gender stereotypes leaves the overall product feeling like a beautiful bauble – pleasant to examine yet devoid of a larger raison d’etre beyond titillation.

Viewers enraptured by slow-burn whodunnits and the tantalizing mysteries of the elite class may find ample reason to indulge in this particular batch of finely-polished apples. Those seeking more substantive emotional nourishment or sociological insight, however, may come away still hungry. In a crowded field of recent prestigious dramedies dissecting modern life’s discontents, “Apples Never Fall” lands as a relatively forgettable entry – bruised and blemished where it so desperately wants to dazzle.

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