Grace and Frankie

This week’s selection from the vast list of Netflix original content was Grace and Frankie.

The creative introduction shows a large multi-tiered wedding cake, with two sets of wedding toppers. These figures provide a generic backstory, showing the two couples, Grace and Robert, and Frankie and Sol’s symmetry in their lives, getting married, having kids, and the progression of the soon to be revealed relationship between the two husbands, Robert and Sol. There is a lot movement between the figures as well as the movement of the camera spinning around cake to showcase the individual scenes. At the end of the introduction, the cake breaks apart potentially prefacing the ”collapsing” their lives are about to endure.  The wedding cake scene shows the surface differences between wives, one being very business like with a very formal personality (Grace) and the other being more of a calm free spirit and artist (Frankie). This helps implant the background of the characters and general story flow in your mind before the character development really starts.

The opening scene shows the couples meeting for dinner, dominated with high tension between Grace and Frankie. You can tell they aren’t friends but are cordial to one another because their husbands are friends and business partners. This one scene where they greet each other, the tension, body language and tone that they use with one another is exceptionally forced. At the dinner, the husbands announce they are gay, and have been in a relationship for twenty years and then the camera angles begin to build anxiety and drama before the characters start to react. They flip back and forth between all four characters very quickly, where you barely get a glimpse of their reaction before it changes to another character. This plays very heavily with your emotions as you are also feeling lost and confused with what is happening, as Frankie is having an asthma attack, and Grace is chucking food at Robert.

Another scene that is worth some discussion is when Grace and Robert return home and Grace is talking about their relationship, saying that she thought they were normal. She is sitting at a vanity in the bedroom, so it seems she is looking into the mirror and back at her husband to have this conversation. Upon deeper reflection, you can interpret it as she is talking to herself, trying to comprehend their situation and solidify her emotions about the relationship between her and her husband, rather than talking to her husband. Seemingly parallel to this, later in the show this scene is referenced again as Robert watches his wife in a reflection of his computer

screen. She is walking around his home office, noticing details she has never noticed in there before. This seems to signify the attitude of their relationship, her not noticing what he was doing with his life.

Robert and Grace have a weekly brunch with their daughters and their families. Grace asks that it not be cancelled, so they can have one last brunch together as a normal family. The scene starts as they are both seated in their dining room, in silence with all of the food on the table already. Anticipation builds from the silence as you hear the doors of the car open and shut outside. The daughters burst into the house and the anticipation turns into instant drama. They rush in yelling about the situation, making Robert and Grace, and frankly even yourself feel attacked. As they are sitting around the table discussing the situation, I noticed that everything on the table for brunch is a circle. I then went back to the initial dinner scene and saw that everything on the table during the dinner that they told their wives was also a circle. This could be merely a coincidence or tie into what may be the most memorable sentence in the entire episode was as Frankie was crying near the end, Grace pulled a tear off of Frankie’s face and said “Wow, there’s a whole world in here”.