The first few episodes of Netflix’s new coming-of-age series Penelope make you want to complain about what feels like an unbearable petulance. The show is an eight-part tween riff on “Into the Wild” (down to a mumbled monologue about the novel itself later in the series), co-written and executive produced by mumblecore darling Mark Duplass. It took me a while to settle into the atmosphere. There are fewer unpleasant wavelengths. It’s a show ostensibly aimed at a younger generation, a freeform-sanctioned version of “Walden,” with tough discussions about faith and identity, about a precocious blonde girl discovering herself and her relationship to nature. It’s something like this. But what’s most shocking about Duplass and co-writer/director Meg Eslin’s show is that, like its title character, you find yourself consumed by the quiet majesty of what’s right in front of you.
16-year-old Penelope (Megan Stott is best known for playing a young Reese Witherspoon in Little Fires Everywhere, so the film is a bit of a Wilde prequel. When I first met her, she seemed happy in her silence. I was making a lot of noise in the woods, music was coming from my headphones, but it was actually quietly swaying among the people around me. Wordlessly, we witness her alienation from her peers and the modern world into which she was born. Only through these glimpses, and Stott’s deep expression, are there any clues as to why she silently took $500 worth of camping gear from an outfitter and rode the railroad tracks deep into the Washington woods. You can get it. “I’m not running away,” she murmured in a rush to a final voicemail to her parents. “I feel like I’m running toward something.”
I feel like the point is that we know very little about Penelope’s story until she becomes Jeremiah Johnson. She’s a blank slate, which initially makes her as a protagonist feel dark, but the season’s deliberate pacing reveals that blank slate to be her fundamental flaw. She feels that something is missing from her adolescent life and hopes to fill that terrifying abyss by reconnecting with nature. Her pull towards Mother Nature is an indescribable, unstoppable, indescribable feeling. Eventually, she chose to sneak into a national park in the Pacific Northwest and live off the land without a camping permit. “Hello, old friend,” she says, sleeping under a moss-covered redwood at the end of the first episode. She finally returned home.
Unsurprisingly, her quest to survive in her newly chosen home is at the heart of “Penelope’s” 25-minute vignettes, and interestingly, Elsin and Duplass initially place no urgency on her path. and poses little risk. Although she is unaccustomed to nature’s ways of survival, she still acts with determination, thanks to a helpful wilderness survival guide and her own tenacity. These set pieces often form the backbone of individual episodes. For example, we see her spend all of episode two learning how to start a fire and pitch a tent. (Her final victory dance is reminiscent of Tom Hanks in Cast Away.) Eventually, she upgrades her home to a makeshift log cabin in a 20-minute montage midway through the series. I will.
These episodes go on almost without words. These are meditative and are the perfect kind to get some relaxing substances into your body. They can sometimes be too precious. The dialogue is the kind of thing that would feel profound to a teenager, and while Nathan M. Miller’s cinematography occasionally gets lost in a kind of flatness, the forested surroundings are surprisingly idyllic. It gives the atmosphere. The score, by Danny Bensi and Sandor Julians, is layered with Julia Piker’s chatty vocal textures, and has to do a lot of heavy lifting to keep Penelope’s inner monologue alive. But it’s a joy to see Stott deeply infusing Penelope with such loving, straight-forward emotional beats and carrying the show so thoroughly. She mutters to herself, screams into the rain in frustration, and fumbles and tries desperately to interact with people her age and older. This is a very vulnerable performance, and Esslin deftly maintains focus.
But she is never alone throughout the show. “Penelope” intersects with many lost souls who are also seeking purpose. An eccentric guitarist (Austin Abrams) who tries to help her before she arrives at the sanctuary, a trio of pious teenagers (led by Renji Feliz of “Penguins”) who also come to the forest to find themselves ). Most notably, “Krisha” star Krisha Fairchild appears as an elderly conservationist who lives in the forest and is dedicated to protecting the preserve’s large trees from loggers. (When someone is finally defeated, she grieves it like a murdered child.) All of these figures are vehicles for Penelope’s personal and spiritual journey, her own self-discovery. is a catalyst for exploration.
Indeed, this premise itself is unbelievable. Skeptical viewers may scream at the screen that she should run away from the black bear cub she befriends in one episode, and wonder how she’ll survive a particularly “Revenant: The Revenant”-esque encounter. Maybe. But “Penelope” doesn’t care about realism. It’s a flight of fancy, no different from the adventures of her possible namesake. This is a classic fable in which a spoiled protagonist escapes from the comfort of civilization and tests himself in the wilderness. Plus, when you see how adorable the bear cub is, you’ll understand why Penelope fed him oatmeal too.
Like many of Duplass’ joints, “Penelope” is self-funded, so it’s hard to say whether a second season will be produced. It’s slower, more glacially paced, and maybe a little too meditative for what you consider to be YA readers. (This feels like the kind of show that adults think kids would like, but perhaps the only one that does is Girls5Eva’s “Lonely Boys of New York.”) But Penelope’s past and family life The series ends after we learn a little too much about. , a necessary fork in the road for this young woman’s maturation. Will she return to a world where she might not be so lonely? Or will it remain in a more natural and dangerous state? The ideas and conversations that occur in “Penelope” are not the content of the paper. But those are fundamental, fundamental questions about the human condition, and few shows explore them with such raw emotion.
The entire limited series will be screened for review. Currently streaming on Netflix.
