Film Review: The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them **
(THIS REVIEW CONTAINS WHAT SOME MIGHT CONSIDER SPOILERS)
A not so subtle secret fuels the need for Conor Ludlow (James McAvoy) and Eleanor Rigby (Jessica Chastain) to attempt to rebuild their lives and rekindle their relationship in the feature debut of writer/director Ned Benson. Ned treats the reason for their eventual separation as if it is a well hidden secret. The film begins shortly after a suicide attempt by Eleanor Rigby who it becomes clear disappeared because of a more tragic event than suicide. We are meant to continually question what casterophia could have destroyed a relationship shown in blissful love through this mental landscape of the ups and downs of a marriage. Only an audience asleep would not figure out that this couple lost a child. A couple of weeks ago, a student in my screenwriting class approached me and asked what is the most tragic set up you can do in a family story and immediately I jumped to the loss of a child. Because this is such a profoundly tragic event, it also allows the director to easily manipulate an audience, exploiting the emotions of a generic situation that causes grief rather than developing those emotions out of the story itself. As a result, this is not a story event that should be used with any frequency but one that should be dealt with absolute care. A movie like Sophie’s Choice deals with this event through an entire film. Nowhere recently was this used to worse effect than in Lars Van Trier’s opening scene in Antichrist.
Leading up to this revelation, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby tries to set up the melancholy and loss of this couple as well as their happy beginning, making the end of their relationship even more tragic. It is in the sequence of earlier in their life that Ned Benson demonstrates that he is in fact a director to watch. His choice of framing particularly, focusing not always on the action, gives the sense of actually being present and in those scene the blossoming love of Conor and Eleanor. Their scenes of the past are so wonderfully acted and filmed that it is effective that they disrupt the depression of the present, making it even more mournful, but the director overplays his hand.
The films ambition cannot be doubted and I would rather see an ambitious failure than a lazy success. Ned Benson attempts to map and chart the emotional destruction and hope of rebirth of a relationship that has seen the worst tragedy a couple can face.
In the beginning of the film, Eleanor has returned to live at home with her father, William Hurt, and her mother, a wonderfully cast Isabelle Huppert. Her journey demonstrates how her parents hinder her recovery while other people she meets aid it, but all of it seems at a distance from the true emotional weight of loosing a child. It is unfortunate that Ned Benson choice this as the precipitating event of both her separation from her husband and her suicide attempt as it becomes too easy and obvious for her to move beyond such a loss with cliché advice and a little tough love from a mentor played by Viola Davis. This is where a film with ambitions to be more like Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage ends up playing more like a lifetime movie (although it is brilliantly shot… sometimes too brilliantly shot and it upstages the emotion).
To be honest, I don’t know why this cut of the film exists. The Weinsteins will be releasing an additional cut, or two cuts, of the film titled Him/Her. In this film, the movie will either rotate or simply separate and tell the same story from two different perspectives, both Conor and Eleanor. This film subtitled Them exists in a weird middle ground, making it too similar to other movies about quirky people trying to recover from tragedy. It veers too easily towards Melodrama and manipulation although Jessica Chastain does her best to right the film. I look forward to seeing both Him/Her and Ned Beson’s second feature film, but I don’t think I will be returning to The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them.
