Monthly Archives: January 2021

  • Pieces of a Woman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kornél Mundruczó (2020)

    A few minutes into Pieces of a Woman, the main character goes into labour.  This continues for the next twenty-five minutes – hardly real time but filmed as if it were, in one take; and certainly an exceptional amount of screen time to devote to a single birth.  Martha Weiss (Vanessa Kirby) is having her baby at home – her partner Sean Carson (Shia LaBeouf) and a midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), are on hand, although Eva is deputising for the midwife who should have been there, which makes Martha nervous.  The sequence ends with a medical emergency as the newborn stops breathing and an ambulance arrives.  The remaining hour and a half of Kornél Mundruczó’s drama deals with the painful aftermath, over the next few months, of the baby girl’s death.  Martha’s labour is, in effect, the prologue to Pieces of a Woman (the film’s title doesn’t appear on screen until the labour is over).  Yet the starter in this case is also the main course.  Ten years ago, Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours became famous as the movie-where-the-man-cuts-his-own-arm-off.  Mundruczó’s film, recently arrived on Netflix, will be renowned for its marathon childbirth scene.

    What would be lost from Pieces of a Woman if Martha’s labour lasted five minutes rather than twenty-five?   (Apart from a chunk of time that helps make this 128-minute picture feel overlong.)  First, the technical feat of the single shot; second, plenty of all-stops-out acting.  The restless hand-held camerawork in shorter preceding scenes – Sean at his work on a building site, Martha at an office party to celebrate her impending maternity, the couple taking ownership of a car bought for them by Martha’s mother, Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn) – lays the ground for the visual relentlessness of the childbirth episode.  (The DP is Benjamin Loeb.)  Once it’s over, the film’s visual tempo slows markedly.   The acting is another matter.  Shia LaBeouf works up a lather even in the opening exchange between Sean and his workmates but the birth sequence is much more a taste of things to come.

    Each section of the story, set in present-day Boston, is introduced by a specific date and a long, wide shot of the Charles River, with grey skies overhead.  The prospect might seem to express Martha’s and Sean’s benumbed outlook after the loss of their baby.  So does a brief moment between them as they sit in their car just before an appointment at the coroner’s office.  When Sean says, ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ Martha struggles to find any words of reply.  The soundtrack (for once) is bereft of Howard Shore’s overwrought score.  Once they’re in conversation with a medical examiner, though, Sean quickly erupts into a yelling jag before rushing from the room.  Soon after this comes a family meeting about a headstone inscription, on which the name that Martha would have given her baby is misspelt.  Elizabeth has arranged the inscription and, when her daughter points out the error, dismisses it as ‘a small detail’.  The phrase is repeated by Martha with quiet incredulity.  Does she then subside into exhausted, eloquent silence?  No chance.  She strides away, exclaiming ‘A small detail!’ in sarcastic anger, at increasing volume.  And she too storms out.

    There’s plenty more shouting to come in Pieces of a Woman, more of it from Sean than from Martha, as their relationship falls apart.  She’s often bleakly disengaged from him – and from her talkative mother, though she resists Elizabeth’s vigorous efforts to take charge of things.  Already admired for her theatre work, Vanessa Kirby received well-deserved plaudits for her portrait of Princess Margaret in the first two series of The Crown.  It was a bold piece of casting – there’s a six-inch height difference between the actress and the original, and they’re hardly facially similar – but Kirby’s confident, uncompromising playing banished doubts about her rightness for the role.  Her physical authority, which recalls the young Helen Mirren, was evident even in Mr Jones (the only feature film I’d seen her in before this one) though she wasn’t able to bring much else to a weakly written part.  Kirby does remarkable things in Pieces of a Woman but her character, whether expressing or suppressing emotion, is continuously in extremis.  She has next to no scope for suggesting the person Martha was before having the baby.

    For much of the film, you feel that Kornél Mundruczó must have been exceedingly keen to work with Ellen Burstyn, who’s now eighty-eight.  She looks younger than that but it’s still hard to accept her as the mother of thirty-two-year-old Vanessa Kirby.  Burstyn turns out to be closer than she appears to her character’s age when it’s revealed that Elizabeth is a Holocaust survivor.  Mundruczó is Hungarian, as is his wife Kata Wéber, who wrote the screenplay.  According to Wikipedia, the film ‘is directly related to’ their stage play of the same name, performed in Warsaw in 2018.  The Shoah resonances of those central European connections are attenuated by relocating the story to Boston; even so, there no doubt are elderly Bostonians with Elizabeth Weiss’s background and, if she was born during World War II, she could have had a daughter now in her early thirties.  It’s for another reason that Elizabeth’s start in life is unconvincing.

    The revelation arrives as the climax to a family lunch organised by Elizabeth and attended by Martha, Sean, Martha’s sister Anita (Iliza Shlesinger), her husband Chris (Benny Safdie) and Suzanne (Sarah Snook), the daughters’ cousin.  Suzanne is there because she’s a hot-shot lawyer who’ll be prosecuting attorney at the forthcoming trial of the midwife, facing charges of criminal negligence and even manslaughter:  Elizabeth wants to work on Martha to engage with the court case.  Her unwillingness to do so has already led to Elizabeth’s dispatching Sean, in spite of despising him, to meet with Suzanne at her office – where they have it off, Sean’s attempts to reignite his sexual relationship with Martha having by now failed.  Tensions at the what-could-possibly-go-wrong lunch build, through halting small talk and needling asides, to a showdown between Martha and her mother, in which the older woman tells the younger to pull herself together and blames the baby’s death on Martha’s insisting on a home birth.  Elizabeth then recalls the shockingly precarious circumstances of her own birth, as told to her by her mother.

    During the first part of this head-to-head, Vanessa Kirby does raise, and deepens, her voice – to powerful effect.  Martha quietly admits, though, that she doesn’t know what to say in response to Elizabeth’s account of her start of life in a shtetl shack, a doctor telling her mother the baby had no chance of surviving, and so on.  I think Martha is speaking here on behalf of Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Wéber, who haven’t worked out how much the mother’s background or Martha’s knowledge of it has influenced their relationship.  Elizabeth’s past is produced, rather, as another opportunity for top-drawer acting.  Mundruczó keeps the camera tight on Ellen Burstyn throughout her big monologue, as if to say, ‘Look how brilliant she is!’  She is, but coercively drawing attention to the fact is counterproductive:  viewers aware of the director’s strong-arming tactics will thereby keep their emotional distance.  Almost needless to say, nothing more is mentioned about Elizabeth’s Holocaust past.  It has served its histrionic purpose.

    The same can be said of Sean by this point in the story.  Elizabeth’s determination to run Martha’s life is fuelled by the knowledge that she has the financial means to do so and a snobbish conviction that blue-collar worker Sean can’t handle things.  (It’s never clear, by the way, what Martha’s own white-collar job is.)  At the end of the lunch gathering, Elizabeth tells Sean what she thinks of him and offers him a cheque, in exchange for leaving Martha and not returning.  Elizabeth’s matter-of-factness in this scene is in startling contrast to much of what’s gone before but Sean’s submissive acceptance of the deal – Martha drives him to the airport and he flies off to Seattle – tells us less about him than about the film-makers, who don’t know what else to do with Sean.

    Shia LaBeouf’s committed playing can’t disguise the shaky writing of his character.  It’s so improbable that Sean would have a fling with Suzanne:  this man, if he was desperate for casual sex, would surely know where in the city to look for it.  (And would the professionally successful Suzanne use her office in this way?)  The construction project he’s working on at the start is the building of a bridge.  Sean sees a photograph of the Tacoma Bridge in Washington on Suzanne’s office wall and tells her the story of its collapse, in 1940, due to the effects of mechanical resonance – ‘the susceptibility of a structure to respond at an increased amplitude when the frequency of its oscillations matches its natural frequency of vibration’.  Those aren’t his words verbatim (they’re from the website howitworksdaily.com) but they give a flavour of the polished articulacy Sean suddenly acquires when he delivers this speech, and which he never shows elsewhere.

    A fragmented structure, echoing the title, may have worked on stage but this screen narrative needs a binding agent.  The obvious candidate is the legal proceedings.   Martha feels financial compensation would be meaningless; her mother sees it as a debt to be fought for and paid.  I didn’t understand, however, the relationship between the criminal charges brought by the authorities against Eva and the question of damages.  The trial itself is poorly done.  It’s not obvious what motivates Martha to change her mind and give evidence at it.  After she’s done so, she leaves the courtroom and calls into a photographic shop.  They’ve been holding negatives left with them under her name, which Martha now asks to be developed:  these are photos of her baby’s few minutes of life.  The emotional release she experiences at seeing the images sends her back to the trial with a request to address the court, to which the judge instantly agrees.  Martha takes the stand and announces that she knows the midwife did her best during the childbirth and didn’t mean to harm the baby.  That seems to be the end of the trial – Eva bows her head in tearful relief – but how would a statement from Martha, who doesn’t seem to have been claiming negligence on the midwife’s part anyway, settle the matter so simply?

    Coming to the film with an idea of its main themes, I immediately suspected Sean’s line of work would lead to relational bridge-building.  This doesn’t really happen (unless the Tacoma Bridge stuff has a symbolic meaning I didn’t get) but Mundruczó and Wéber strenuously overwork their apple metaphors.  In a grocery, soon after her bereavement, Martha picks up an apple and inhales its smell.  Thereafter she eats apples regularly.  She buys a book on sprouting, stores apple seeds on a paper towel in the fridge.  In court, questioned by the defence attorney about her feelings when she briefly held her newborn, Martha says her baby smelt of apples.  Back home after the trial, she finds the refrigerated apple seeds have begun to sprout.  All this paves the way for Pieces of a Woman’s finale.

    A little girl, maybe five or six years old, runs through a beautiful field of grass into a beautiful garden.   She climbs an apple tree and sits in it eating an apple.  Her mother calls her to come in.  There have been previous instances of a significant character in a scene being heard but not seen until near its end – for example, the coroner’s office medic (Domenic Di Rosa) does much of the talking but doesn’t appear on camera until Sean has made his furious exit.  It’s been hard to see any point to this visual mannerism beyond its drawing attention to itself.  In this last case, the disembodied voice means more simply because it belongs to Martha, who eventually comes into view and helps her daughter down from the apple tree.  Who knows whether this idyllic postscript is meant to show Martha’s real future or her fantasy of what might have been?  Either way, it’s an improbably emollient end to a film which, until the courtroom climax, has been at pains to accentuate the negative at every turn.  Kornél Mundruczó may see Pieces of a Woman’s miserablism as a proof of honesty and its healing ending as earned.  I think he’s wrong on both counts.

    12 January 2021

  • Time

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Garrett Bradley (2020)

    Sibil Fox met Rob Richardson, her future husband, when both were in high school.  In 1997, they married and moved ahead with plans to open a hip-hop clothing store in Shreveport, Louisiana.  When their investors pulled out the couple in desperation decided to rob a bank, with the help of Rob’s nephew.  They were caught and charged.  Sibil pleaded guilty, was sentenced to twelve years in prison and was released after serving three and a half.  Rob was tried and sentenced to sixty years’ imprisonment, without parole.   After she came out of prison in 2002, Sibil dedicated herself to raising her children, all boys, and to fighting for her husband’s release.  She also began to videotape family life in the hope that Rob might, one day, be able to partake of these family memories.  She first came into contact with the documentarian Garrett Bradley in 2016, in connection with a short film the latter was making.  When Sibil lent her the collection of tapes she’d made over the years, Bradley embarked on a documentary feature about the Richardsons’ lives and struggle.  Time is the result.

    Fox Rich, as Sibil now calls herself, has campaigned not just on behalf of her husband but for penal reform more largely.  As African Americans, she and Rob have been on the receiving end of an iniquitous prison system that was also the subject of another recent documentary, Ava DuVernay’s 13th  (2016).  Garrett Bradley combines footage from Fox’s home videos with descriptions of her continuing work as an advocate and motivational speaker.  (Both parts are in black and white.)  The film’s genesis and content, and the woman at its centre, are remarkable yet Time, almost universally praised by critics, is exasperating.  What sort of a documentary is it that, after you’ve watched, necessitates an online search for the key facts of the matter?   The information above about Fox’s plea bargain and Rob’s case going to trial, for example, comes from the internet, not the film.

    Dramas based on real-life events sometimes make you think they’d have been more honest and instructive as documentaries (albeit they’d also be seen by fewer people that way).  The non-fiction components of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology were a recent instance of this.  Time, more unusually, is technically a documentary but operates somewhat like a fictional drama.  Fox’s home videos function as flashbacks.  The narrative progresses towards the heroine’s eventual, against-the-odds triumph.  You’re more conscious of this because the factual context and details are skimpy.  Bradley hasn’t made a long film (eighty minutes) but, once you realise she’s not going to be more informative, the main point of spending time on Time is looking forward to the happy ending you’d expect in a fictional piece.

    A drama worth the name, however, would explore its protagonist much more thoroughly than Time explores Fox Rich – might, say, consider the degree of conflict between her fight for justice and her domestic role.  We see Fox’s elder sons involved in the campaign for Rob’s release but there’s no indication of whether their mother’s public appearances have increased only in recent years, as her six children have got older – and not a whisper of tension within the household about the demands of Fox’s activism.  How come she gave birth to her younger sons during her husband’s years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary?  We wouldn’t necessarily think less of Fox’s wifely devotion because she hasn’t lived like a nun the past two decades but Garrett Bradley simply ignores the issue.  The miscarriage of justice in this case consists not in the wrongful conviction of an innocent person but in the outrageously disproportionate length of their prison sentence.  There’s a sequence in which Fox is publicly contrite, in front of the pastor and congregation of the church she attends, about the offence she committed alongside Rob.  (She drove the getaway car from the scene of the crime – another fact gleaned online.)  Yet we get no sense of how they made their decision to carry out armed robbery – who was the prime mover? – or what Fox feels about the length of her husband’s sentence relative to hers.

    The reason for Time’s reticence on these potentially complicating elements is clear enough.  Garrett Bradley’s film has plenty of artful touches.  The narrative’s movement between past and present helps point up different aspects of its one-word title.  Rob is doing time.  Fox’s videos reflect how much time is passing.  As a visual record, they redeem that time.  Bradley’s main purpose, though, is to endorse as well as observe Fox’s campaign.  Instead of the abundant statistics of the much superior 13th, Time supplies a string of assertions by its impassioned protagonist.  She describes the American prison system as, for example, a ‘personal vendetta’ on the part of ‘the white man [who] keeps you there until he figures it’s time for you to get out’.  It’s possible to accept the essential truth of Fox’s arguments while still feeling a resistance to her extravagant rhetoric – which Bradley does nothing to interrogate.  For me, her documentary is the latest addition to a quickly growing list of films, factual and fictional, that are feted not because they’re coherent, convincing cinema but because their political point of view is compelling.

    When Fox Rich talks about crime being a consequence of socio-economic conditions, you may find yourself asking whether this is meant to explain her and Rob’s felony – whether loss of funding for a business venture is ‘poverty’ in the generally understood sense of the word?   You may even dare to wonder if her criminal record doesn’t slightly compromise Fox’s moral authority.  But you’ll also wonder at her fortitude and how anyone in her circumstances could succeed in bringing up a family, holding down a job and fighting a cause at the same time.  Besides, Fox is well prepared to disarm criticism.  As she tells an audience on a lecture tour, it’s only to someone who’s faced the kind of adversity she’s faced that she’s prepared to concede the argument, ‘You do the crime, you do the time’.

    Another respect in which Time resembles a Hollywood dramatisation of a battle for justice is that its leading lady is highly photogenic.  She’s also highly aware of the camera.  Both qualities come through in sequences showing her repeated phone calls for news on Rob’s latest attempt to be considered for parole, throughout which Garrett Bradley holds Fox’s face in close-up.  Her sons – especially the eldest boys, twins she was carrying at the time of the bank robbery – are more quietly charismatic (and a credit to their mother).  Rob, for obvious reasons, isn’t much in evidence until his eventual release from jail.  He was granted clemency in September 2018.  Wearing a T-shirt proclaiming ‘Never Give Up’, he’s barely through the front door of the family home before he seems to be preparing to follow his wife into a career as a motivational speaker.

    Early on in the narrative, Fox Rich affirms her belief in the American Dream.  Its enduring appeal, even for people like her caught up in American Nightmare, is quite something.  One of Time’s most striking features is how strongly it promotes Fox’s individual as well as moral enterprise. (Conjecture, of course, but perhaps that was part of the deal she struck with Garrett Bradley when supplying her home videos?)  A recent article by Kriti Merotra on the website www.thecinemaholic.com  reinforces the film’s celebration of Fox as a mover and shaker – to comical effect.  Merotra’s article starts off sounding like a review but ends up as PR for Fox and her husband:

    ‘With degrees in Bachelor of Science and Master’s in Public Administration from Gambling State University, Fox is well qualified to do what she is doing. Her first-hand experience of seeing how families suffer from the hardships associated with crime and punishment also plays a massive role in her way of working.  Fox and Rob, now public figures, also have a merchandise line, which you can find on their website.’

    7 January 2021

Posts navigation