If you watch to the end of an episode of the new series Hal & Harper, you’ll see the name Cooper Raiff three or four times before you see anyone else’s name at all. He wrote the show, directed it, and stars in it, which is how he handled things for his first feature film, which he made when he was 19 and which has a title I can’t say on air, and for his second feature, Cha Cha Real Smooth, which came out three years ago and showed off the kid’s enormous heart and the infectious charisma of his particular goofy charm. All of that to say he's got confidence in himself, and you can pretty easily see why when you watch what he does.
Here he plays Hal, who’s a senior in college and acts a lot like a senior in college might, going to parties, periodically getting high, not having all that much direction, and making some erratic emotional decisions. His sister is Harper, who’s a few years older, and she’s got a good job but a six-year relationship she’s not too sure about continuing, especially now that she’s got a thing for a coworker. They’re close to their father, who’s somewhere in his 50s and is about to have a surprise baby with his younger girlfriend. And the series centers on the siblings and their dad and the ways each of them puts up barriers to real emotional connection with other people—because, you see, Hal and Harper’s mother is gone for good, and has been for some time, although for a while we don’t know why. We do know it’s had a major impact.
The show jumps around in time from the present day back to around 2004, and at various points in between, sometimes just for a few seconds, sometimes for an entire episode. This leads to us filling in some holes that eventually help bring the entire situation into focus, although it’s all less of a puzzle to put together, and more of us simply better understanding everyone and their individual experiences, thoughts, and pain. Raiff drops in fragments of memories, sometimes cutting off a scene almost mid-sentence, and uses a device in which he and Lili Reinhart, who plays Harper, play themselves as children, ostensibly to show how they had to grow up far too early, although we also come to realize that in a lot of ways they were frozen emotionally and still haven’t come through that, even as adults. Mark Ruffalo plays their father, and all three actors have an exceptional emotional intelligence as performers that pulls us into their feelings and experiences even as their characters are trying to keep everyone out.
Raiff’s success with all of this is wildly uneven—sometimes what he’s doing makes perfect sense for what he wants us to feel, and sometimes we wonder why he’s still doing it at all, but when it comes together it hits hard. I’m most fascinated by Raiff himself—in his two earlier films, he shows his astonishingly disarming charm in a way that pulls us straight into his character. He’s almost irresistible. Here, though, his character uses precisely that amiability to hold everyone around him at arm’s length, to avoid having to engage with any true connection. It’s kind of incredible to watch this intense attractive quality be used for polar opposite purposes, but Raiff pulls it off, and it makes me suspect he’s far more aware of his own abilities than we might have thought. There’s even a moment late in the show when he uses this peculiar facial expression he has that looks sort of like he’s smiling and then smiling a little extra, and if we’re paying attention, we see that Hal’s doing it on purpose and he knows the effect it has on everyone around him. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but it’s more proof that Raiff really knows what he’s doing.
New episodes of Hal & Harper are being released Sundays on Mubi through November 30th.
