Eliza Hittman (2020)
Halfway through writer-director Eliza Hittman’s third feature, the seventeen-year-old heroine Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is interviewed by a counsellor (Kelly Chapman) in the Planned Parenthood clinic in New York where Autumn is about to have an abortion. The counsellor asks multiple choice questions about past and present sexual partnerships, inviting Autumn to answer with whichever of the four words of Hittman’s title is the most appropriate.
In the spirit of that MCQ session …
Q: Does the film give a clear picture of Autumn’s personality and backstory?
A: Never.
Hittman’s previous film Beach Rats (2017) is somewhat elliptical but nothing like this. Autumn lives in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, with her mother (Sharon Van Etten), father (Ryan Eggold) and younger sisters. (The latter may be half-sisters and their father Autumn’s stepfather but that’s only a guess.) Though still at school, Autumn works part-time in a local supermarket alongside her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder), the only family member she tells about her pregnancy. Skylar, who’s fiddled cash receipts before, uses supermarket takings to finance Autumn’s trip to New York, and accompanies her there. They spend two nights away from home, during which time there’s little curiosity from parents as to their whereabouts. There’s even less curiosity from Skylar about who got Autumn pregnant or, if Skylar already knows this, whether Autumn has told him.
Autumn sings at the high school concert that opens the film – she’s a startling, dissonant contrast to the Elvis impersonator and the trio of clean-cut boys who precede her on stage. The lyrics of her song, The Exciters’ ‘He’s Got the Power’, announce Autumn’s predicament: ‘He makes me do things I don’t wanna do/He makes me say things I don’t wanna say …’ The presentation of males in Autumn’s home and school life, though cursory, is enough to cast suspicion on them. One teenage boy in the concert audience makes others snigger by heckling Autumn’s performance. In the pizzeria where she goes with her family afterwards, the same boy makes faces at her; she chucks a glass of water over him on her way out. (No one comments.) Back at home, her father, when he’s not sexually stimulating the family dog that he then laughingly brands a ‘slut’, gives Autumn unpleasant ‘meaningful’ looks.
For Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman, the lack of information is one of the many virtues of Never Rarely Sometimes Always (which I’ll call NRSA for short). The script, according to Gilbey, ‘fills in the blanks without resorting to anything as prosaic as straightforward exposition’. Not so: the script leaves blanks for viewers to fill in, relying on their predispositions to draw an appropriate conclusion. For this viewer, Hittman’s approach is doubly exasperating: she pushes gender politics buttons without elucidating character. Everything we learn about Autumn’s sexual history comes from that clinic interview: she first had sex at the age of fourteen, has had a total of six partners to date, including two in the last year, and has practised vaginal, oral and anal sex. The MCQs include ‘Your partner has refused to wear a condom’ and ‘Your partner has threatened or frightened you’. Though Autumn remains reticent, she gets increasingly upset as she stutters out her one-word answers to these questions. That’s as far as Hittman goes. Her approach ensures that her protagonist, while she may be sexually experienced, remains victim intacta.
Q: Does Sidney Flanigan’s facial expression change?
A: Rarely.
Autumn is quite a misnomer: Sidney Flanigan’s frozen pallor has winter written all over it. Flanigan is a singer-songwriter whose first acting role this is – it’s anyone’s guess as to whether she wears a gloomy mask because she thinks it best conveys Autumn’s lack of agency and helplessness, or because her acting ability is limited, or both. While Julia Garner is likewise mostly unsmiling in Kitty Green’s The Assistant, Garner at least leaves little doubt that she’s a capable actress. In spite of these films’ quasi-documentary features, the main character’s message-bearing face in both is strikingly unrealistic, given how much of normal everyday life tends to involve dissimulation of negative thoughts and feelings. Garner has an advantage in this, of course, because her character is a PA and has to summon a bit of brightness, at least in her voice on the phone to clients. The excuse for Autumn to look bleak is that she often feels physically lousy, which Flanigan sometimes suggests well. But since she’s anxious, especially at home, not to invite questions as to what’s the matter, it’s surprising she never puts a false brave face on things.
In the later stages, Skylar manages to make Autumn’s face crack a couple of times. Until then, her displays of emotion are limited to the Q&A at Planned Parenthood. (Autumn barely winces even when she tries to bring about a self-induced miscarriage, repeatedly punching herself in the stomach.) NRSA also has in common with The Assistant a standout, virtually standalone interview sequence that allows the young actress in the main role her best opportunity to shine but in which her interlocutor is just as memorable. Here, it’s Kelly Chapman, an actual social worker at a Queens, NY clinic called Choices, whom Eliza Hittman met and talked with in developing the film.
While they’re in New York, the two girls, because they’re short of funds, spend time with a boy called Jasper (Théodore Pellerin), who chatted up Skylar on the coach journey from Pennsylvania and, in spite of her reluctance, managed to get her phone number. The three go together to a bowling alley then a karaoke bar, where Autumn sings Gerry and the Pacemakers’ ‘Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying’. This would have more impact if we’d not had her bitterly whingeing number at the start of the film and if the sentiments of ‘Don’t Let the Sun …’ chimed, even a little, with Autumn’s demeanour, which they don’t. Never mind that (needless to say) sunshine is nowhere to be seen in this film: the Pennsylvania skies are grey and it’s usually pouring down in New York.
Q: Does the film feel like a sermon?
A: Always would be pushing it – more often than sometimes wouldn’t be.
As Autumn arrives at the first of the two NYC Planned Parenthood facilities she visits, a group of Catholics stand in the street outside, chanting Hail Marys in unison. This is presumably an anti-abortion demonstration: the people don’t carry placards to make that explicit but their chants are resoundingly pro-life. A Catholic presence is apt too because there’s a Stations-of-the-Cross flavour to Autumn’s journey from Northumberland County to New York and around the big city.
When she goes to a local clinic for a pregnancy test, Autumn is struck by the very basic test equipment and asks, in one of her more expansive moments, if it’s the same test you can buy in supermarkets. The medic in charge (Mia Dillon) says it is. This clinic will soon be revealed in its true, aggressively anti-abortion colours, and the woman medic as its egregious spirit of place – so even the use of a supermarket test is made to seem underhand (though it made me wonder only why Autumn hadn’t already tested herself). It’s after finding out online that abortion for under-18s is illegal in Pennsylvania without parental consent that Autumn confides in Skylar and they plan the trip to New York. Autumn has further tests at the first Planned Parenthood clinic; it emerges from these that the Pennsylvania medic deceived Autumn when she told her she was ten weeks pregnant. She’s actually eighteen weeks and will therefore need to go next day to another Planned Parenthood facility that’s able to carry out abortions at this relatively advanced stage.
She reports to the larger clinic where she’s told the abortion will entail a two-stage procedure, carried out on consecutive days. Although she thought her family’s medical insurance would cover the costs, she now learns that her mother would receive an itemised bill – and Autumn’s priority is to keep her abortion, like her pregnancy, a secret. From this point on, the film’s emphasis is on how tough it is for her and Skylar, stuck in a place they don’t know and with no money, Autumn having used all their funds as an up-front payment to the clinic. There’s no denying Eliza Hittman illustrates Autumn’s plight emphatically but she does so at the expense of bringing the teenager to individual life: she’s on the screen purely to make a point. I watched NRSA on Amazon Prime Video and turned on the subtitling as a (wise) precaution. Whenever Julia Holter’s score was playing, the screen indicated just a musical symbol. This is a better idea than the comically diligent attempts subtitles sometimes make to describe music – ‘eerie’ or ‘suspenseful’ or ‘intense’. In this case, there would have been no need to ring the adjectival changes. The score is always miserable.
The moments when the film doesn’t feel like a sermon are supplied by Kelly Chapman’s persistent, concerned counsellor and in the lighter-hearted interactions between Skylar and Jasper at the bowling alley. Talia Ryder is more emotionally animated than Sidney Flanigan. The storyline is always working up the sex-pest side of Jasper and it’s strongly implied that Skylar eventually has to have sex with him in exchange for Jasper’s paying the girls’ bus fare home to Pennsylvania. Even so, Théodore Pellerin plays Jasper well, giving him a neediness and an awkward humour, as well as a quiet determination to press home his financial advantage.
Q: How often do you find yourself agreeing with Armond White reviews?
A: Sometimes.
It’s a worrying trend. Not only is White’s political standpoint objectionable; he’s also disingenuous. He complains that Eliza Hittman’s film is the ‘latest example of politicized filmmaking as the Hollywood norm’. White is exercised not by politicised filmmaking as such but by the fact that its current practitioners tend to be liberals. (Praising the work of the publicly right-wing Clint Eastwood in his recent review of Richard Jewell, he’s careful to describe Eastwood’s movies as ‘not so much political as they are morally conscious’.) White nevertheless offers a kind of refuge on Rotten Tomatoes, where, as I write this, 170 of the 172 reviews for NRSA are ‘fresh’. I largely agree with his analysis of the film (and with that of Dustin Chase, the only other dissenter). And although White is too determinedly contrarian, he’s railing against a critical and industry-insider consensus whose reactions are hardly less automatic – and which explains, as well as the Rotten Tomatoes profile, the major prizes already awarded to Hittman’s polemic at this year’s Sundance and Berlin festivals.
White is naturally happy to ignore the powerful evidence that the Hollywood politicising he claims to detest has become more prevalent and crudely problematic since Trump became President. There are obviously strong grounds for thinking that #MeToo energies and momentum were increased thanks to Trump – a man who evidently enjoys abusing a position of power in relation to women and who suffered no electoral disadvantage (perhaps the reverse) in the light of public exposure of his appetite for sexual harassment. It’s entirely understandable that filmmaking liberals, like liberals in any other walk of life, feel angry and largely powerless in the face of Trump’s (and others’) rampant right-wing populism. But using these frustrations to fuel films in a way that, as Armond White accurately puts it, ‘overwhelms storytelling craft and reason’, isn’t the answer – it’s a culturally retrograde step. We’re already living in a dark time politically. The last thing we need is creative tunnel vision and evasion, as exemplified by films like The Assistant and Never Rarely Sometimes Always, to send us into artistic reverse too.
21 May 2020
