by Cara Winter
Full disclosure: For whatever reason, on this particular day, I felt like watching something with Jake Gyllenhaal in it. But when I typed “Gyllenhaal” into my DVR’s search engine, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s work also came up, and at the top of the list was her latest Golden Globe-winning tour-de-force, The Honourable Woman. Intrigued by this BBC co-production starring Gyllenhaal along side more than a few British heavy weights (like Stephen Rea, Eve Best, and Lindsay Duncan), I decided to give it a whirl.
Man. I was *not* disappointed. (Sorry, Jake… I’ll get around to seeing whatever you’re up to, another day.)
The Honourable Woman is a six-part miniseries, written and directed by Hugo Blick (and was a co-production with BBC and SundanceTV). Maggie Gyllenhaal stars as Nessa Stein, Baroness of Tillbury, an Anglo-Israeli businesswoman who has taken over the reigns of The Stein Group, the company her late father founded many years prior. What unfolds is the gripping, complicated, and emotional story of Nessa and her family. It begins with the death of Nessa’s father, when she and her brother were children; then, quickly, we are in the present day, and Nessa is announcing her earnest yet misguided attempt to bridge the gap between Israel and Palestine, with Stein Group’s plan to bring high-speed internet to the West Bank. Then, while still basking in the glow of their hopeful promise… the child of the family’s nanny Atika (played by Lubna Azabal)is kidnapped, catapulting the entire family into panic and turmoil.
