Pieces Of A Woman puts Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf through every parent’s worst nightmare
Film Features Toronto International Film Festival
The raves for Nomadland at the Toronto International Film Festival have resparked excitement for Chloé Zhao’s next movie, the Marvel franchise hopeful The Eternals. That discussion, in turn, has raised the open question (including here in The A.V. Club comment section) of whether a big superhero movie is really the best application of this particular filmmaker’s perspective, talents, and sensibilities. Zhao can, of course, do whatever she wants with her career, and who knows, maybe she’s made an artful and even somehow personal film under Disney’s supervision (though what we know about the studio’s micromanagement of the process doesn’t bode especially well for the latter possibility). Perhaps the larger point here is just that it’s a little disconcerting to see acclaimed independent filmmakers jump so quickly into the mega-budget blockbuster game. Call it snobbery if you must, but that’s generally not a realm where big ideas and big artistic gambits flourish. Not anymore.
That said, there are some independent filmmakers who maybe really should just go Hollywood already. Today, I’m thinking specifically of Kornél Mundruczó, the Hungarian festival darling whose first five features all premiered at Cannes. Mundruczó sometimes tackles heavy themes (he directs theater and opera as well as movies), yet he’s increasingly done so with a showboating flair that seems better suited to the multiplex than the art-house. His last movie, for example, was Jupiter’s Moon, a heavy-handed take on the Syrian refugee crisis that doubled as a kind of stealth superhero story with big, virtuosic action scenes and winding, elaborate Steadicam shots. He’s now returned, three years later, with his first film in English, the domestic drama Pieces Of A Woman (Grade: C), and while the content is intimate, wrenching, and possibly personal—it’s based on a play by Kornél’s partner, Kata Wéber, who also wrote the screenplay—it’s still (over)directed like a damn action movie, to the point where the actors often seem to be competing against the camera moves.
That’s especially true, perhaps, of the centerpiece sequence, an unbroken 23-minute oner that proves that the Alfonso Cuarón hero worship of Jupiter’s Moon was not a passing phase. Pregnant executive Martha (Vanessa Kirby) bellows and writhes through a home birth in a Boston apartment, construction-worker husband Sean (Shia LaBeouf) at her side. Something goes wrong, the midwife (Molly Parker) is blamed, and after the late arrival of a title card—an emerging trend at this TIFF—the film settles into the aftermath of tragedy. Pieces Of A Woman unfolds over the year that follows, as these expected parents’ grief is compounded by or misdirected into alcoholic relapse, infidelity, money problems, familial strife, and other melodramatic developments.
The problem isn’t all in the execution. Though Mundruczó and Wéber (who share a “film by” credit) have opened up the material—the play was two long scenes, each its own act, both run through here in a single take—they haven’t used the change in medium to zero in on the day-to-day nuances of Martha and Sean’s ordeal. The film keeps skipping forward in time, dropping back in on the characters every few weeks, but it never alters its strategy of loudly announced turmoil; every scene of this movie is cranked to 11, either in concept or staging. There’s a hint of a fascinating conflict concerning funeral arrangements, but the movie resolves it quickly and moves on. One might be tempted to praise the filmmakers for sidelining the criminal trial coming together on the plot’s margins… that is, until, nope, we’re suddenly watching a bombastic courtroom drama, too, complete with eleventh-hour speech.
Kirby won the Best Actress prize at Venice a couple days ago, and she’s by far the most recommendable element of the movie—not just for her bravura simulation of someone going painfully through labor but also for making some sense of the tangled mess of emotions Martha carries around like a surrogate child. All the performances are solid, in fact; the supporting cast includes Sarah Snook, Benny Safdie, and the always reliable Ellen Burstyn, who gets a showstopping monologue during the other extended keep-the-camera-running passage. But everyone here is stuck in a movie that never lets its emotions breathe, in no small part because its director insists on gussying up a small character drama with plus-sized gestures, like the close-ups of people’s hearts pounding in their throats during confrontations or a Sigur Ros needledrop (which should really be illegal at this point). Somebody hand this guy a big budget and let him loose on a story with no subtleties to smother.
There are times when the behavior in Pieces Of A Woman borders on the unbelievable. (It occasionally takes “everyone grieves in their own way” too far.) But the film looks like a model of psychological realism compared to Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time (Grade: C), the second feature by by Lili Horvát, who served as casting director on Mundruczó’s White God. Her premise is certainly grabbing: Two decades after moving to America to further her career, fortysomething neurosurgeon Márta (Natasa Stork) returns to her native Budapest—in part, we quickly learn, to start a relationship with the fellow doctor, János (Viktor Bodó), with whom she’s fallen in love. But when he’s a no-show at their predetermined rendezvous point, she finds him at the hospital… only to discover that he appears to have no idea who she is and no memory of the plans they made two days earlier.
Did Márta fabricate the connection (and conversations) with this man in her head? Or is János playing some strange game? Preparations inspires intrigue, then curiously squanders it. It’s forgivable that the film isn’t interested in immediately solving the mystery of this unusual encounter. What’s less easy to accept is how promptly Márta drops it too, even after she begins working with János. The film seems to fancy itself an enigma about the human mind—irony alert, even this trained doctor of brains can’t solve the mystery of her own! But what Horvát has really offered is a maddening anti-drama, raising a question and than studiously downplaying its importance to the story or characters. One is left to grasp at possible metaphorical straws (is it about how you can’t go home again, or maybe the gaslighting women endure in professional fields?) and, finally, to admire the almost trollish audacity of its final shot, when Horvát outright winks at how much she’s just left us hanging.
That’s nothing, though, compared to the violation of audience comfort zones Mexican director Michel Franco performs in his new movie, New Order (Grade: B), which is mysterious only perhaps in its ultimate motives. The film is a brisk, brutal culture-war thriller that envisions a Mexico City in the throes of massive protests and demonstrations. Which, of course, makes it inherently timely, though Franco—director of such squirmy feel-bad provocations as After Lucia and Chronic—expresses nothing so clear and simple as solidarity. The film, in fact, unfolds chiefly from the perspective of the 1%, personified here as a wealthy family throwing a swanky wedding reception that’s violently disrupted once armed protestors hop the walls of the estate.
Franco likes to toy with sympathies. His ominous opening act acknowledges the family’s thoughtless privilege without reducing them to caricatures; an inciting incident involving a former employee looking for help with a medical bill strikes that balance perfectly, betraying the family’s reluctant, qualified altruism even as the bride/our nominal heroine (Naian González Norvind) unconditionally tries to help. We can understand why a reckoning might be coming for these people, but that doesn’t make it pleasant or righteously satisfying to see it happen. Likewise, while it’s hard not to abstractly empathize with the revolutionaries (pointedly dark-skinned and indigenous, while the family is light-skinned), New Order doesn’t give them backstories or even characterization; we see them as the family does: hostile strangers storming the castle, like the enemy army of Assault On Precinct 13.
Maybe the film is intended as a prophecy: This is what’s going to happen if income inequality is never addressed and those at the top keeping hoarding it all for themselves. But, again, Franco is too much of a button-pusher to let his audience feel good about the idea of overthrow. His vision of class revolution is disturbing, not inspiring, and his violence is harsh and stark, especially once one of the characters falls into the clutches of the coup and is systematically brutalized for the sins of their tax bracket. The film may upset and incense multiple sides of the political spectrum: those who see protestors as dangerous chaos agents and those who might be offended by a depiction of them that risks reflecting those fears. Ambivalence aside, it works as a kind of gripping apocalyptic horror movie. There are no zombies, but the rich get eaten.
43 Comments
Every parent’s worst nightmare? I thought that was your kid growing up to like Nickelback! Ayyyyoooooooooo
I mean, pretty sure my “ayyyyyooooooo” indicated this was an intentionally dumb joke
I mean, I wasn’t seriously criticizing you either…
Let us then get past this terrible episode and move onward and upward in our lives!
“Perhaps the larger point here is just that it’s a little disconcerting to see acclaimed independent filmmakers jump so quickly into the mega-budget blockbuster game. Call it snobbery if you must, but that’s generally not a realm where big ideas and big artistic gambits flourish. Not anymore.”Maybe we’d see more interesting, diverse blockbusters if the discourse wasn’t dominated by takes like these. It’s like you *want* bigger movies to be dumbed down, and directors to be pigeonholed.
so now critics are responsible for the hollywood meatgrinder turning even proven hitmakers like Lord and Miller into at-best compliant employees like Ron Howard? I doubt that’s foremost in Sony and Disney’s mind.
No, we’d see more interesting blockbusters if the studios, which have all the power here, allowed them to be interesting, and they generally don’t.
It can be two things. “More” is relative, after all.
No, no, it’s totally “the discourse” that makes decisions about which directors get hired, which movies get greenlit, how those movies are revised, and how they’re marketed and distributed. Movie executives and the multibillion dollar corporations that employ them are just puppets of “the discourse.” Just try and disprove that assertion!
“Shut the fuck up, you little indie shits, and stay in your fucking lane.”- Noted gatekeeper of the filmic arts, A. A. Dowd
A) what is a “oner”? Like a…one—-er? One-shot?
B) how’s theBeef? His jones to pretend to be blue-collar is getting kind of ridiculous at this point, he’s coming off more Marky Mark/Vanilla Ice at this point, no matter how many touristy tattoos he gets. Performative authenticity has its limits, and he bumped his head after he converted or whatever to play a character called “Bible.”
C) re: Zhao, everybody says they’re going to do “one for them two for me” or take the money and the exposure and run away to make their own stuff forever, and then they don’t. God bless Kelly Reichardt and Debra Granik. Not saying I blame Zhao in any way, it’s theoretically just a few years of your life for good pay. But there are few filmmakers whose ultimate aesthetic perfectly aligns with the Superhero flood the way James Gunn’s does. And at some level selling out is selling out…like I’m glad the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are getting paid for that car commercial, but somewhere I still think that’s a little gross. Btw: they announced that the screenwriter for Justice League Dark is the filmmaker behind the phenomenal and forgotten “Housebound” from 2014.
“And at some level selling out is selling out”Because god forbid artists get to make a living.
“Not saying I blame Zhao in any way, it’s theoretically just a few years of your life for good pay.” dumbass.
“like I’m glad the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are getting paid for that car commercial, but somewhere I still think that’s a little gross”You’re saying you’re not judging them, and then judging them.You’re also equating *making a big-budget/franchise project* to *having your music used in a car ad*, as if they aren’t completely different things.
Dude, don’t you know? Art with broad appeal isn’t art. ESPECIALLY if the artist is from an underrepresented group in Western cinema, they are only artists if they devote a career to making only art that performs at a loss, and thus they have to suffer through years of slogging & selling their ideas to distributors that in turn want products with the broadest appeal. Representation will only come to those who suffer enough!(sarcasm ends here) Fuck this dude.
Hipsters gonna hipster.
I was just hearing raves for “Housebound” while listening to a podcast about the more recent “Come to Daddy”. I should really see that someday.
I couldn’t make it past the Elton John conversation in “Come to Daddy”Housebound is fucking gold from start to finish
That conversation is probably its peak moment of comedy-of-discomfort, which I don’t care for either. But after the first act it turns into an entirely different movie.
It wasn’t that it was uncomfortable, it’s that it was hackneyed. The whole conversation was really trite and what it was saying was trite. I turned it off right when the plastic bag hit him in the face and it did seem like it might be about to get more interesting, I’ll keep in mind that you feel it was different from there out, I’ve sat through worse.
Maybe I have super low standards, but I feel like Marvel at least have allowed some of their directors to make films that very much bear their stamp, and play into their concerns as filmmakers – Thor Ragnarok feels as much like a Taika Waititi film as anything he’s done (and I’ve seen all of his films; I think there’s a law that we have to in NZ). Black Panther feels like a logical extension for the types of themes and concerns that fed Ryan Coogler’s work; just on a bigger, more commercial canvas. James Gunn’s Guardians films feel very much of a piece with his other work (albeit with less gore). The Marvel films that are less like that are either very early on, or have been made by filmmakers who don’t necessarily have a stamp (the Russo’s did a great job on their films, but there’s nothing they had done before that spoke to particular themes that they had). I almost feel like if you’re an arthouse with a specific perspective you would be better off trying to do a Marvel film than almost any other big budget studio type thing. I mean there’s no guarantee, coz you still have to link in with the bigger continuity, but I think there looks to be quite a bit of scope for filmmakers to pursue their own visions within that.
Having not seen Chloe Zhao’s films, I couldn’t say whether her particular themes and concerns seem like they’ll dovetail with what Marvel does, but I wouldn’t bet against it.
Zhao went to film school and I’m sure she can make any kind of film she puts her mind to, but her style is about as far from Marvel as it gets. I think Marvel movies are great, I think I’ve seen every one of them, you’re still giving up your artistic independence to work for a machine. Some directors give up more than others in order to do that, especially when it comes to, as you’ve pointed out, if their sensibilities are a great fit anyway (Waititi, Gunn). I think this thread has continued because since Kinja and Trump, there have been more and more people on the boards here who seem to think artistic integrity doesn’t exist at ALL or that disdaining widespread cancel culture means you should NEVER stop paying attention to an artist no matter what they do (even sexual assault or being JK Rowling). First of all I am 100% betting those people are hypocrites who boycott or censure things that they care about (like Trump trying to cancel GM for not letting their workers wear ANY political clothes including MAGA hats). Second of all, it’s on a spectrum, but giving up your independently financed successful films you have full control over in order to make a blockbuster about BOOM ZAP ZOW for a giant corporation (who just made a movie right next door to concentration camps performing ethnic cleansing in China), no matter how fun or educational it is, is “selling out” to some degree, and your 14 year-old self was right: there is such a thing as selling out. The people who are acting as though independence is completely unimportant are troubling. It’s troubling when somebody goes to work for Goldman Sachs to pay off student loans and it’s troubling when somebody gets to a point where they are about to have all the independence in the world and decides to feed themselves to the machine, even only for a short snack.
“Come to Daddy” was disappointing (not terrible just not… terribly much of anything).But “Why Don’t You Just Die!” hit a similar vein (pun intended) and was so much more fun (and funnier… and darker). So maybe try that (if you haven’t already).
I think people who accuse artists of selling out are pretty gross. What’s the crime here? And who are you to pass judgment?
I think people who believe selling out doesn’t exist are gross and probably think they “bought in” fuck off
Ah yes, there it is: resentment cloaked in self-righteousness. It’s OK, buddy, just let people live their lives. It’s not so bad.
Right, selling out doesn’t exist, thanks dad.
Yes, that is pretty much correct, at least in the sense that you are using the term. Obviously plenty of artists do cash paychecks. But there is no moral valence to their doing so. Fans of artists are forever accusing artists of violating some imaginary deal the artist supposedly has with the fan. Some Billie Eilish fans are right now screaming at her for selling out because she took off her tank top in an video. Fans are weird and they think they are owed things that they aren’t owed.Sure, if Billie Eilish decided to become a spokesperson for Exxon, that might constitute an act that I would truly characterize as “selling out.” But that sort of thing tends not to happen.(By the way, I am a dad, but I’m probably not your dad. If I am your dad, though: get off the computer! You’re only six, you can barely read, and you shouldn’t be on this website!)
so Rod Stewart didn’t sell out? The Black-Eyed Peas? Maybe you are saying that you simply don’t believe in artistic integrity. Now I haven’t said that I always think only bad things come out of selling out (hey, a bunch of bar mitzvah boys feel included by the “mazel tov!” in “I’ve got a feeling”), I even think the Marvel movies are some of the better broad release films out there and better than a lot of purported prestige movies. But there is a beshittedness on this site now where somehow there isn’t moral integrity that can even be betrayed and there shouldn’t be any consequences for doing it. The AV Club has never been what Pitchfork used to be but fucking grow a pair, you’re you to judge whatever you want to judge.
It’s weird that you think I’m exhibiting some sort of moral cowardice here. I’d say my position is generally pretty unpopular. You get a lot more high fives for accusing artists of selling out than you do for defending their prerogative to do whatever the fuck they want. I can assure you I’m not afraid to criticize, um, Rod Stewart. I think it’s fair to say I don’t believe in the concept of integrity as you are defining it. It rests on a false dichotomy between art done for “pure” motives and everything else.If a particular artist personally decides to adopt a sort of punk rock, anti-commercial ethos, that’s fine. But even then, I wouldn’t really hold it against them if they later changed their mind.
You wouldn’t hold it against them if their entire success and following was built on anti-commercialism and then they mortgaged the faith of their adherents and leveraged it for that wonderful filthy lucre? It sounds like you want people to not have principles.
You are now positing an artist whose “entire success” is predicated on their anti-commercialism and not, you know, the actual art they produce, which is how I would suggest evaluating most artists. The problem with your supposed principles is that you’re the one deciding on the principle and imposing it on artists as a purity test. I don’t think Chloé Zhao signed on to your manifesto, and I don’t think she owes you anything. Of course, if she makes a shitty movie, we are all free to think less of her as an artist as a consequence. Those are the consequences for a public artist.
Not sure why you are straw-manning the argument so obviously by insisting it has to be 100% all or nothing. Oh wait, I do know why you are straw-manning the argument so obviously. And yes, many people believe artistic independence is a virtue, especially in a context where somebody could have final cut and decides to give it up. “I don’t think she owes you anything” – this is yet another time where you seem to think you’re saying something but you’re saying nothing. No artist “owes” anything to any critic or any fan, that’s a useless way of looking at it. I really don’t know why you’re on a pop culture criticism website, but you should probably find something better suited to your sensibilities…you are probably a Yankees fan so maybe sports? You can tell people there that players didn’t sell out by going to the Yankees, it’ll be great.
This debate about “selling out” was really interesting and I was impressed how it never quite fully went off the rails during the times you suddenly and viciously ripped into each other with the moral restraint of a couple of US senators who are secretly fucking.
awww thanks, that’s what the internet is for 🙂
I don’t even watch movies that have been screened for more than 15 people ever. If you do… Uh, you do you, but what you’re watching isn’t a vision, or art, it’s some sort of ego trip.
The crime is making bad art, and we have the right to say that because this is a forum specifically about discussing the quality of art.
I’d be obliged if you could point out where I ever said that art can’t or shouldn’t be critiqued for its quality.
A)
I read Four-door’s magazine in my two-door house
I’m interested to hear more people’s thoughts on the final scene from Pieces of a Woman. I agree with everything said here about the film’s inability to effectively explore its own subject matter, and to me, that last scene really exemplifies its utter lack of nuance or even empathy for its main character’s experience.
Martha?WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME**This joke brought to you by the year 2015.