Conversations With Friends is no Normal People

Sally Rooney’s prose, self-effacingly simple as it may appear, is most alluring because of the complexity it can contain. In the first chapter of her novel, Conversations With Friends, her narrator, a young woman named Frances, sketches out her temperament for us in quick flashes. “I couldn’t think of anything witty to say,” she says at one point, “and it was hard to arrange my face in a way that would convey my sense of humor.” Frances’ constant self-examination makes her a thrilling, vexing narrator. But what’s great on the page isn’t necessarily the best fodder for what’s great on the screen. On the heels of Hulu’s Normal People, another Rooney adaptation directed by Lenny Abrahamson (Room) that was an achingly tender take on budding and built intimacies, the streamer is back with Conversations With Friends. And the results are mixed at best.

As Frances, the wayward poet who falls for a dashing married man (an actor, of course), Alison Oliver had an understandably difficult task ahead. Frances lives in her head, constantly mulling over her actions, her words, her fears. She’s the kind of person who’d rather do spoken word for fear of jotting down anything in print and have it live on outside herself. (“I like the impermanence of this,” she confesses.) She’s an inward-looking character, a witness to her own life. To Oliver’s credit, she finds ways of making such inwardness legible throughout Conversations With Friends, managing to capture it in a sideways glance or a furtive blush. And yes, she does come alive when she meets Nick (Joe Alwyn). Suddenly, she’s no longer on the sidelines or playing second fiddle to her gregarious friend Bobbie (the always sunny Sasha Lane). With Nick, she finally feels seen, even as she knows that such glances are necessarily fleeting. He is married, after all. And perhaps just as aloof as she is. Their awkward flirtations at the start are charming and more grounded than such scenes often tend to be. “What do you write about?” Nick asks her before immediately regretting it: “That’s a terrible question.” They bumble their way into an affair where her need to be seen is so nakedly transparent that she knows she’s in too deep.