Monthly Archives: January 2025

  • The Three Faces of Eve

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nunnally Johnson (1957)

    Is it a character study or a case study?  That’s a question sometimes asked of a based-on-a-true-story film or play whose protagonist is psychologically unusual or disturbed – with the implication that a case study is dramatically inferior because, rather than imaginatively exploring personality, it merely records behaviour.  Nunnally Johnson’s film makes no bones about what it is.  It’s introduced by Alistair Cooke, who appears as himself.  In his familiar, rather pompous tones, Cooke (announced in on-screen text as the ‘distinguished journalist and commentator’) informs the audience that what we’re about to see is the true story of a young housewife who, in 1951, began to show signs of multiple personality disorder.  He doesn’t name the real woman in question – Chris Costner Sizemore – but he does mention the actual doctors involved, Corbett H Thigpen and Hervey M Cleckley [sic – both of them!], whose account of Sizemore’s symptoms and treatment was presented to the American Psychiatric Association in 1953.  Their subsequent book is the source of Johnson’s screenplay (on which Thigpen and Cleckley advised).  Cooke points out that much of the film’s dialogue is taken from the clinical record.  The Three Faces of Eve is unashamedly a dramatised case study.

    Chris Costner Sizemore has become Eve White, an unassuming wife and mother in Georgia, whose husband Ralph (David Wayne) brings her to see psychiatrist Dr Luther (Lee J Cobb).  The Whites have a little daughter, Bonnie (Terry Ann Ross); Eve’s uncharacteristic behaviour, which began shortly after the recent loss of a second child, gets odder and more worrying in the months following her first meeting with Luther.  She spends far more money than the household can afford on glitzy dresses and shoes.  She tries to strangle Bonnie and is thwarted only by Ralph’s hearing his daughter’s terrified screams.  Eve doesn’t remember either of these aberrations.  She is aware of suffering severe headaches and she occasionally blacks out, which is very much the operative phrase.  During one of her conversations with Luther, Eve suddenly becomes a different woman – a pleasure-seeker and shameless flirt who calls herself Eve Black.  This alter ego knows all about mousy Eve White and thoroughly despises her.  Eve White knows nothing about Eve Black.

    The violent attack on Bonnie lands Eve White in a psychiatric hospital.  After her release, Ralph gets a job in Florida and leaves his wife in a boarding house while Bonnie is cared for by Eve’s parents.  Ralph doesn’t believe the multiple personality mumbo-jumbo and the marriage breaks up.  Luther in the meantime negotiates between the two Eves until, during hypnosis, a third woman emerges; at first this personality is nameless and has little memory but she’s stable and reasonable compared with the diametrically opposed Eve White and Eve Black.  She subsequently takes the name Jane and Luther prompts her to access a trauma in Eve White’s childhood, when she was forced by her mother to kiss her dead grandmother, in her coffin.  This unlocks other memories and, when Luther now asks to speak with Eve White or Eve Black (his usual practice in exchanges with the patient), Jane tells him they’ve gone.  In the closing scene, we see Jane happily married to Earl (Ken Scott) and reunited with Bonnie.

    There were probably honourable reasons for involving Alistair Cooke (he also supplies bits of signposting voiceover narration throughout) – as a trustworthy figure, stressing to mid-1950s mainstream-movie audiences that the story of Eve is no invention and (therefore!) demands to be taken seriously.  But that prologue also seems a bit of a cheat – or, at least, to vindicate prejudices against case-study drama.  Don’t argue:  all is ‘true’ – regardless of whether it’s dramatically convincing within the story being told.  And while The Three Faces of Eve seems superficially different from contemporary Hollywood psychodramas, it is in important respects conventional.  Once a single, key traumatic event is brought to light, the heroine’s problems are solved – even though it remains unclear how Eve White functioned throughout the years when her behaviour wasn’t causing alarm.  Jane’s emergence and eventual triumph neatly reflect a Goldilocks approach:  Eve White is too drably repressed; Eve Black is too exuberantly id; Jane is just right.

    As the psychiatrist, Lee J Cobb may be in the film for reasons not dissimilar to Alistair Cooke – as someone whose presence lends credibility to proceedings without intruding too much on them.  Dr Luther smokes cigars:  that’s about as much detail as Cobb is given to create an individual, as distinct from a compassionate interviewer.  This works well enough; the underwriting of Eve’s husband Ralph is more of a problem.  With the events described so recent, this may have had to do with not upsetting people like Chris Costner Sizemore’s first husband, still very much around.  Whatever, we never know enough about Ralph or about Eve’s marriage to him:  she tells Luther it hasn’t been a happy one although OK in parts, and that she doesn’t know why she hasn’t been able to satisfy her husband.  The relationship remains a largely unopened book and David Wayne, not surprisingly, flounders in the role of Ralph.  A scene between him and Luther, in which the latter tries to explain Eve’s condition and Ralph is a complete dimwit, is especially awkward.  I wished Ralph had been bright enough to ask Luther why his wife suddenly started acting funny.  Nunnally Johnson doesn’t, of course, want that question raised.

    The script may be evasive and lack penetration but Joanne Woodward’s Oscar-winning portrait of the title characters, and movement between them, goes deeper.  It’s a great advertisement for the Actors Studio and Sanford Meisner, with whom Woodward studied, and Johnson directs her well.  Each of the three personalities is convincingly realised:  it’s a particular achievement that Woodward makes Eve White, as well as dreary, affecting, though you’re always glad – for the actress as well as yourself – when an Eve Black routine comes along to liven things up.  Woodward doesn’t instantaneously flip between personalities.  Instead, she seems to enter a fugue state, lasting just a few seconds.  During this she lowers her head; when she raises it again, she’s someone different.  The arrangement makes you all the more aware you’re watching and admiring a performance.  But it’s a terrific performance.

    18 January 2025

  • A Real Pain

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jesse Eisenberg (2024)

    Most English-language pictures of the last year have been so ropy there’s a risk of overrating one that bucks the trend.  But A Real Pain – well written, directed and acted (and, at ninety minutes, on the short side) – is a good film.  Thinking about the Holocaust victims and survivors among his own Ashkenazi ancestors led Jesse Eisenberg to devise this story of two present-day Jewish Americans – David Kaplan (Eisenberg) and his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) – on an organised ‘Holocaust tour’ of Poland.  They’re the same age; as kids, they were ‘joined at the hip’.  As adults, they’ve gone their separate ways.  Their short trip to Poland – to honour the memory of their late, much-loved grandmother – is in effect a reunion.

    The cousins are conceived as chalk and cheese.  David, married with a young son, lives and works, selling digital ads, in New York City.  Jobless Benji lives alone in upstate Binghamton:  his main occupation seems to be getting hold of and smoking weed.  En route to JFK, tense, schedule-driven David leaves half a dozen voicemails on Benji’s phone detailing his rate of progress to the airport.  When he arrives, he’s amazed to learn that Benji has already been at JFK a couple of hours though their flight’s not due to leave for a couple of hours more.  Different as they are, he and David have similar speech patterns:  both talk fast, as if in competition.  It takes a while to adjust to this and you may find the rat-a-tat delivery getting on your nerves, Benji’s especially.  This isn’t unintentional on Jesse Eisenberg’s part:  Benji also gets on David’s nerves; once they’re in Poland, his motormouth candour tries the patience of others in the small tour party.  Yet Benji engages his travelling companions – and us – too.  Eisenberg’s script neatly justifies the pair getting back together:  their grandmother, who died recently, left money in her will for them to make the Polish trip.  David and Benji have arranged in advance to leave the rest of the party before the tour’s end to spend an extra night in Lublin and, next day, visit the house there that was once Grandma Dory’s home.  This is neat too, as a means of ensuring they’re left to themselves at the business end of the story.

    There are seven tourists all told, five of them ethnically Jewish.  The other three Jews are all Americans a generation older than fortyish David and Benji – Marsha (Jennifer Grey), a recently divorced ‘lady who lunches’, and retired married couple Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Paul (Daniel Oreskes).  The party is completed by English tour guide James (Will Sharpe), an Oxford graduate in East European studies, and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, who came to the US as a child refugee and subsequently converted to Judaism.  All five contribute a good deal to A Real Pain.  The exchanges involving them, like those between David and Benji, include a mixture of funny, poignant and awkward moments.  Eisenberg orchestrates these well-cast actors beautifully:  their playing is at just the right level and Will Sharpe is especially good.  When James first speaks, his unprepossessing looks and Yorkshire accent seem to promise a cartoon anorak; as the story goes on, James becomes much more.  After Benji has a go at the tour guide – ‘like, the constant barrage of stats is kinda making this trip a little cold … we’ve just been going from one touristy thing to another, not meeting anyone who’s actually Polish!’ – James is winded.  He’s as genial as ever but even less comfortable than before, always seeming to check what he’s saying it as he says it.

    Not everyone is quite as anxious as James to accommodate Benji’s outbursts.  On the railway journey to Lublin, he deplores the ‘irony’ that the party is ‘eating this fancy food – sitting up here when eighty years ago we would have been herded into the backs of these things like fuckin’ cattle’.  He gets up and heads for the rear of the train:  ‘I don’t think you’ll find much suffering back there either,’ observes Mark.  For the most part, though, A Real Pain gets a lot of mileage from the rest of the group preferring to keep things polite, however infuriating Benji is.  Eisenberg pushes this rather too far when, on the same train journey, the Kaplans miss their stop and take a fare-dodging ride (which terrifies David) back in the direction whence they came, to find the others waiting uncomplainingly for them at Lublin station.  Benji reveals himself as nostalgic for childhood, when David, ‘anxious and adorable’, was always crying.  Now, Benji complains, he never shows any emotion at all.  David, who sees this as part of being the grown-up that his cousin clearly isn’t, is increasingly embarrassed by loose-cannon Benji.  He seems always to be apologising for him.

    Jesse Eisenberg originally intended to play Benji, which is undoubtedly the film’s star turn.  Benji has as much screen time as David and the actor playing Benji a lot more opportunities to make a big impression.  While he and Benji tell each other things in the hotel rooms they share throughout, David, in the company of the rest of the party, opens up just once – and suddenly, during dinner at a Lublin restaurant.  Benji, in another fury, has gone to the bathroom.  While he’s away from the table, David tells the others how he feels about himself and about his cousin, and reveals that, six months ago, Benji attempted suicide.  The speech may seem a bit much but Eisenberg cannily disarms criticism with David’s closing line – ‘Sorry, I’m oversharing’.  The next second, Benji is back in the limelight.  He wasn’t the only one exasperated by the restaurant pianist’s cheesy choice of ‘Hava Nagila’ to serenade diners.  Now Benji has somehow taken over the piano, playing ‘Tea for Two’.  These are the only musical interruptions to the Chopin pieces that Eisenberg uses throughout A Real Pain.  Chopin is a good choice – Polish, obviously, and the music is affecting, although it isn’t there to cue particular emotional effects.  There’s no music on the soundtrack when the tourists visit the Majdanek concentration camp.  This doesn’t come over as falsely reverential:  Eisenberg has used the Chopin sparingly enough to avoid that impression.

    Kieran Culkin certainly makes the most of the generous gift Eisenberg has given him.  Benji has the lion’s share of the best one-liners – such as his response, when Marsha laments that her daughter has married a rich man and no longer seems capable of intelligent conversation, that ‘Money’s like fuckin’ heroin for boring people’.  Benji finds other things boring, too – David’s line of work, for example – and his capacity for being bored has a lot to do with the deficits of his own life.  The more volatile and unreasonable he becomes, the more Culkin makes clear that, as his companions also realise, Benji is ‘in pain’.  He has a personal charm, though, that David envies.  When the pair take their leave of the others, James tells Benji, ‘I’ve been doing these tours for five years and you’re the first person to give me any actionable feedback’.  Benji doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about – he was probably off his head when he savaged James earlier – but embraces him.  David looks on; all he gets from James is a ‘Bye, David’.  It’s no surprise that Kieran Culkin, rather than Jesse Eisenberg, is getting acting prizes in the current awards season but Eisenberg’s achievement in portraying David shouldn’t be underestimated.  He brings off something difficult:  he makes David charmless without being in the least dislikable.

    Eisenberg’s screenplay is attracting attention in awards races.  This is well-deserved not just because the script includes plenty of sharp, smart dialogue but also because it dares to be anti-climactic and unresolved.  Lublin cemetery contains what’s thought to be the oldest grave in Poland, that of Jacob Levi Kopleman – ‘a real Polish person – from Poland’, James nervously stresses before suggesting that the group follow Jewish tradition by placing stones on the tombstone to show Kopleman ‘you are not forgotten’.  When the cousins visit Grandma Dory’s former house, David follows suit outside what was her front door.  A Polish man who lives nearby complains that the stones are a trip hazard.  David and Benji sheepishly remove them.  That’s the end of the scene and virtually the end of the trip.  Eisenberg gives the visit to Poland real meaning for David and Benji without this eclipsing the importance of their own relationship – but that, too, is unresolved.  There isn’t a detailed explanation of Benji’s unhappiness or a decisive emotional breakthrough at the end of their week together.  Even though, when they land, David invites Benji to come back home with him for dinner, the two part, as they met, at JFK airport.  David returns to his wife (Ellora Torchia) and son (Jesse Eisenberg’s own son, Banner).  Benji says he’ll hang around in the airport for a bit – ‘I kinda like it here.  You meet the craziest people’.  At the end of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air (2009), the George Clooney protagonist gazed, puzzled and desolate, at an airport departures board.  Like Up in the Air, Jesse Eisenberg’s film is very talkative but it too concludes with a wordless and wondrous close-up on a man’s face in an airport.  Benji sits on a bench, looking around him.  He’s smiling, as if among friends, yet the effect is terribly sad.  Kieran Culkin has a ball with his many lines in A Real Pain but his last, silent moment is the best moment of all.

    15 January 2025

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