Expats review: Nicole Kidman leads a sluggish tale of emigrant grief

Expats — the new Prime Video drama about a group of well-to-do foreigners living in Hong Kong — caused quite a bit of controversy when it began production several years ago. Residents were angered that the government granted star Nicole Kidman an exemption from the city’s strict Covid-19 quarantine rules when she arrived in August 2021. Local media also noted the uncomfortable optics of shooting a prestige drama about privileged expats in Hong Kong while the government continued its crackdown on civil rights in the wake of massive protests.

Now that the six-part limited series has finally arrived, it’s somewhat disappointing to report that those controversies are far more interesting than the show itself. Based on Janice Y. K. Lee’s novel The Expatriates, Expats is a grand-looking character study that is meditative to the point of soporific, despite a spectacular performance by costar Sarayu Blue.

Clarke Woo (Brian Tee) is turning 50, so his wife, Margaret (Kidman), is throwing him a lavish party at one of Hong Kong’s top venues. Her in-laws (Gabrielle Chan and Edmund Ng) think the whole thing is a bad idea, but Margaret insists. “We’re just trying to create a sense of normalcy around here,” she says. A year ago, Clarke and Margaret’s youngest son, Gus (Connor James), went missing, taking all semblance of “normal” with him. Their sullen daughter, Daisy (Tiana Gowen), spends her time obsessing over a flight that disappeared off the coast of Australia, while their son Philip (Bodhi del Rosario) draws pictures of Gus holding hands with Jesus, much to Margaret’s dismay.

The effects of the tragedy reach beyond the Woo family. Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), a Korean American twentysomething, finds her life upended after a chance meeting with Margaret on a yacht. And Hilary (Blue), a fellow expat and Margaret’s former best friend, is barely holding her marriage together after a secret about her husband, David (Jack Huston), comes to light in the aftermath of Gus’ disappearance.

Adapted for the screen by Lulu Wang (The Farewell), Expats shifts between two timelines — before Gus vanishes, and after — as it follows the lives of Margaret and company. The drama is particularly focused on the mystery of human connection, and how even the most tenuous bonds can be difficult to break. To that end, every one of the main characters is coping with some kind of emotional stasis, which contributes to the narrative’s lethargic pacing. Like so many American wives in Hong Kong, Margaret feels adrift in the city, having left her job as a landscape architect in New York when Clarke’s company offered him a position overseas. But leaving Hong Kong, Gus’ last known location, is now unfathomable. Exacerbating Margaret’s existential despair is her creeping ambivalence about the family’s Filipino “helper,” Essie (Ruby Ruiz), a live-in housekeeper and nanny whom the kids adore.  

Conversely, Hilary has a successful career, but her marriage to David is stagnating. He’s hoping for a baby, but she can’t bear to admit to him — or herself — that she doesn’t want kids. And Mercy, weighed down by guilt and a deep-rooted conviction that she’s inherently unlucky, stubbornly keeps her life in neutral. She works dead-end jobs despite her college degree and struggles against any semblance of joy, including a budding relationship with a student activist named Charly (Bonde Sham).

Sometimes all this inertia leads to explosive truth-telling. Stuck for hours in a waiting room in mainland China, Clarke erupts at his wife with painful, pent-up resentment — “All you had to do was keep track of the kids!” — and instantly regrets it. Trapped in an elevator with her needling, judgmental mother (Sudha Bhuchar) and a neighbor (Jennifer Beveridge), Hilary reveals a grim family secret in a blistering outburst that begins with an innocent invitation: “Wanna hear a story?” It’s one of several standout scenes for Blue, whose last lead role was in the underrated NBC sitcom I Feel Bad in 2018. (Shame on you, Hollywood.) The actress brings a bitter pathos to Hilary, who has learned to survive by holding a part of herself back from everyone who tries to love her.

These moments of catharsis are rare. It seems that Wang wants viewers to sit with difficult feelings — guilt, doubt, fear, isolation — as her characters do. But Expats largely communicates their struggles through long, lingering shots of people sitting in silence, or dialogue-free sequences of Mercy making her way through the city, rather than real character development. The penultimate episode attempts to cram in new subplots into its 97-minute-long runtime, including a vaguely defined storyline about “student-led protests” involving Charly’s friend, Tony (Will Or), that feels like a sop to critics who called the project “tone-deaf” in 2021.

We’re also offered a too-brief glimpse inside the lives of the domestic workers. Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla), Hilary’s housekeeper, joins her friends for a raucous round of bingo and gossip in the city’s Statue Square Park, and returns home to an ugly fight between her employers. She spends the rest of the night patiently allowing a tipsy Hilary to give her a makeover and sipping wine because her boss doesn’t want to drink alone. It’s the show’s most affecting depiction of the ill-defined relationship between the upper class and those whose job it is to meet their needs — domestic or otherwise. I wanted more.

This is not a missing-child mystery, and like life, the series doesn’t offer viewers clear resolutions or easy closure. Oddly enough, that may be the most cohesive thing about Expats, which feels, in the end, like many separate stories looking for a home. Grade: C+

Expats premieres Friday, Jan. 26, on Prime Video.

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