All We Want Is More Time

"Fleishman Is In Trouble" takes an unflinching, and ultimately hopeful, look at what it means to age as a woman.

Photo Credit: Hulu / FX / Canva

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I have always been a terrible decision-maker.

Need to pick a restaurant? Find five options and insist the other person articulate an opinion first. Wondering what to text a potential date? Ask everyone you know and be paralyzed by all of their opinions. There’s a pre-planned dinner on the same night as a birthday hang? Promise to stop by both and be wracked with guilt when you don’t make it to the latter. Two weddings on the same weekend? Have a car service pick you up in the middle of the night in rural Ontario after the first so that you can catch a 6 a.m. flight to Baltimore and (barely) make the second.

It’s not just that I want to be able to do it all, which I do, or that I am terrified of making the wrong decision, which I am. I think my paralysis around making choices — which has somewhat improved with age — is about the passage of time. It is a terror rooted in the reality that as time advances, we make choices. And those choices limit the formerly endless choices we once had the future opportunity to make. It’s about the contraction of possibility.

This clicked for me while watching the finale of “Fleishman Is In Trouble,” the Hulu series adapted by Taffy Brodesser-Akner for television from her novel of the same name. In one of the final scenes, Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg) and his college friend Libby (Lizzy Caplan) are sitting on the floor at the engagement party of their third friend, Seth (Adam Brody). Libby is trying to articulate the seeds of her discontent to Toby.

The problem isn’t the actual decisions she made during the first four decades of her life, she explains. In fact, “nothing could make her unmake the choices that she made.” “It’s just,” Libby says, through quiet tears, “how can you live when you used to have unlimited choices, and you don’t have them anymore?”

Most portrayals of aging women in our culture center on the distress caused by signifiers of age: unwanted wrinkles, sagging postpartum skin, longing glances in the mirror that conjure the idea that all that has been lost with age is the hope of a hotter, nubile bod. But “Fleishman” does something more interesting. It lets women age as complete people.

The series’ last two episodes move away from focusing on Toby, a recently-divorced doctor whose ex-wife has gone missing, and reveal what the show is really about: two women. It’s the early midlife crises of Toby’s ex-wife, Rachel (Claire Danes, making such expert use of her famous cry face that I thought her performance in the penultimate episode might break me in half), and his college friend, Libby (whose voiceover provides the central through line and true heart of the series), that Brodesser-Akner is most interested in interrogating. Toby still matters in this story — and Eisenberg does a wonderful job of portraying him in all of his angry, gentle, loving, selfish complexity — but the most powerful and revelatory moments belong to Rachel and Libby.

For much of the show, Libby sees herself in opposition to Rachel. She is loose where Rachel is uptight, the brunette to Rachel’s brassy blonde, the reluctant stay-at-home mom to Rachel’s obsessive workaholic. Libby is, after all, Toby’s friend, and he drifted away from their friendship after meeting Rachel. When they reconnect after his divorce, she hears only Toby’s side of the story of his marriage’s dissolution, and his interpretations of why she apparently abandoned her family without a word.

But when Libby runs into Rachel during the show’s penultimate episode, she is forced to confront the gaps in Toby’s unreliable narration — and thus, her own. Because in so many ways, Rachel and Libby are the same. They are both women. They are both in their early 40s. They are both mothers. They both feel like they woke up one day and no longer understood where they were and who they were.

“I feel like a few years ago, I was a person,” Libby tells her exasperated husband in the “Fleishman” finale, trying to explain why she has been emotionally absent. She loves her children and her husband and her life, but she misses her youth, the time in which she was, as she puts it, “so hot for life.” How are women supposed to be people when we are also supposed to be so many other things — mothers, caretakers, emotional laborers, badasses, sexual objects, and eventually, just totally invisible.

Rachel, we learn, did not just walk out on her children, but had a full-blown nervous breakdown. We revisit moments from her marriage to Toby and her subsequent, doomed relationship with a friend’s husband, Sam Rothberg, from her perspective, forced to take a full accounting of all of the moments that men dismissed and belittled and violated her. Toby sees Rachel’s sexual harassment as a matter of personal emasculation. He fails to take seriously the emotional scars of her traumatic birth experience, during which an obstetrician breaks Rachel’s water manually without her consent. Sam leaves her the minute she stops providing “fun” and starts having emotional needs. Rachel, like Libby, just wants to feel like a person.

Both women are bumping up against the power of their own desires, and the ways in which the world has tried to intermittently dismiss, erase and devalue them. They are both grappling with the reality that time is not infinite; that the moments they have wasted, and the moments taken by undeserving others, are ones they are never getting back.

I see pieces of myself and the women in my life in both Rachel and Libby. We too want more time, and we too are denied it. We can dwell on the billion other lives you might have lived if different choices were made, but all that will do is stop us from appreciating the present.

“What were you gonna do with the fact that time was gonna march on anyway?,” Libby asks herself, and those of us watching her at home, forgetting the preciousness of our own fleeting moments. “You were not ever gonna be young again. You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get in every single moment.”

Even those “wasted” moments have value and beauty and purpose — or at least make the great moments shine that much brighter. That is where the hope and magic of “Fleishman Is In Trouble” really lies. It doesn’t sugarcoat the painful parts of getting older, nor does it shy away from the beauty that accrues.

As Libby monologues, we see a furious supercut of moments, significant and mundane. A Bat Mitzvah. A moment of teen angst. A bloody mary being sipped at brunch. Lice being picked out of kids’ hair. A kiss in the rain. A fight in the bedroom. Laughter, endless laughter. All the little things that make a life worth living, even if it won’t last forever.

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