Best movie of this year hands down!

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

What makes it different from others?

Such a frustrating disappointment

Olive Kitteridge features a tour de force performance by Frances McDormand. She is a cold, distant cantankerous school teacher who has had a 25 year marriage with Henry Kitteridge (Richard Jenkins) a kindly pharmacist in small town Maine.I doubt the marriage has been a happy one as she had an affair with a fellow teacher. They have a son Christopher who barely wants to be with his misanthropic mother. It seems Olive comes from a family with a history of mental illness. However she has to reassess her relationship with her husband when he falls ill due to a stroke and needs to care for him. Olive also tries to mend her relationship with her son but that proves to be more difficult.Some time later Olive wants to end it all herself but comes across a wealthy, drunk eccentric Jack Kennison (Bill Murray) and finally feels some tenderness.This is a slow burn series, well acted but at times it does feel like a slog.

I sat through all four episodes last night, drawn in by the two leads - McDormand and Jenkins are of course worth watching in anything. All the performances in the piece are excellent,in fact, beautiful casting across the board. I haven't read the book (nor do I plan to), but the biggest hurdle for me to come to terms with in the story is why such an exquisitely compassionate man like Henry would fall for and marry Olive in the first place.He's not actually portrayed as a masochist, so that couldn't have been his underlying and perhaps subconscious reason for teaming up with this repugnant and relentlessly horrific sociopath; maybe when they were younger he saw something in her that appealed to his compassionate nature, who knows. I just had a problem accepting it. And it wasn't like she was mean and unappreciative just to him (as some spouses are, or come to be - they treat everyone outside the relationship relatively decent and save their ugly side for the one closest to them, because that's the only person who would put up with it). Nope, she was an equal-opportunity abuser who caused serious pain - or at the very least, horrendously negative vibes - to everyone in her path, including her son Chris, who finally told her to take a hike after relaying how miserable and utterly worthless she had made him feel his entire life.I had very little sympathy for this worm of a woman, even though I understood that she was apparently 'clinically depressed' and she was shown with glimpses of humanity, cracks in the stoic facade. On some level she did care about others, like when she helped save someone from drowning. And toward the end, her interactions with Bill Murray's nearly-equally-bitter character were at least bordering on something human, so perhaps there was hope for her - again, who knows.It was sort of superficial, the teleplay, in that it never delved into why she was like that and of course why Henry chose to marry her. They just laid it out for us with a take-it-or-leave it attitude, and at the end, I was relieved that it was over. There was one really good black-humored line: ~-~ SPOILER ALERT ~-~ It came toward the end, when Olive grunts to Bill Murray's character, 'I'm just waiting for the dog to die so I can shoot myself.'

I've just read some of the negative reviews about Olive Ketteridge. I thought it was obvious what we were getting into in the first 30 minutes of this brilliant mini series. Yes it's a bit downbeat. But Olive Ketteridge is about real people and real situations, and let's face it it reflects certain areas of real life. I think we've all known characters like the ones portrayed in Olive Ketteridge. All the performances are spot on. Plus there are many areas of Olive Ketteridge that made this viewer smile. So I don't see the negativity. Maybe the negative reviews come from people who wanted to see a Deloris Claybourne or a True Detctive. Olive Ketteridge is about love, loss and what ifs, and that's about it.. But it's told so well that one almost forgets that the story's so simple.

Rather than an explicit film review, I'd like to lend some substantiation to the content of it. First, I knew little about the mini-series when I began watching but, I'll check out anything Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins are in. After 30 minutes or so I almost changed the channel because it was all too familiar…I had already lived a similar story….so it was going to be a tough movie for me. But, I stuck it out because I guess some part of me felt that I needed to see it. I'm glad I did.One of the very important aspects of the movie is the WAY Olive is portrayed. What I mean is that most people (incl many Doctors) remain significantly unaware of the spectrum of depression behavior. People think it only has to do with sadness, withdrawal, hopelessness, etc. But, it affects some people in mostly other ways and, therefore, is often unrealized.I come from a family of depressed people but most of them don't know they are. We are like Olive in that we're working, functioning people but who also have very little patience, irritability, varying degrees of paranoia and anger, an overall negative outlook and quick physical fatigue. Doesn't sound like the typical descriptions of clinical depression, does it? However, read those symptoms a second time and notice that they all do have a common thread…..a feeling of futility.My siblings and I grew up in such a competitive, negative household with only a random crumb of encouragement and plenty of verbal undercutting from every direction. There was no Henry (the buffer) in my house. Now in my 50's I understand that mental illness was the driver behind most of it. But, you know what folks? It's amazing how people adapt to their own mean-spirited, glass-half-empty attitudes and feel like it's normal (because for them and their family members, it is!). Whereas Olive had some understanding that she was depressed, she either didn't REALLY get it or thought that by sheer force of will she could manage it. She had adapted to it; it was her norm. I think that happens to lots of people. But, it is a really sad path because, like her adult son, I too have been helped *enormously* by medication. It has made all the difference and I feel so lucky to be alive in an era that these medicines are available! The symptoms I mention above in paragraph 4 are primarily gone in me now. It has been an absolute life-changer. Olive and many others never seek the help and that is SO tragic. As is the fact that people pull away when you have those difficult behaviors, like her son did. Depressed people are hard to reason with and are cloudy in general, that is why they need help. A clinically depressed person cannot WILL themselves out of it any more than someone can will away diabetes, thyroid disease, epilepsy, etc.The reviewer below, rich muller, didn't seem to watch the mini-series very closely. Of course some of them are miserable characters! They are struggling mightily with a physical problem; their brain is not balanced right. Mr. Muller would be cranky too, if he also had this issue, left untreated. This is a very relevant film for providing both a broader view of what clinical depression can look like and the varying life outcomes depending on choices made of how to handle the condition.