LOOK OF LOSS
Vanessa Kirby gives a shattering portrayal of raw grief in Netflix’s uneven ‘ Pieces of a Woman.’
In the bruising melodrama “Pieces of a Woman,” Vanessa Kirby does something remarkable and rare — or at least, she makes it seem rare. She brings sharp emotional definition to a character who, in the throes of a devastating loss, refuses to make her feelings easily readable, or consolable, for those around her. Not for her partner, who can scarcely contain his own spasms of grief. Not for the nosy family friend who pulls her into a hug at the supermarket, promising her that justice will be served. And least of all perhaps for the viewer, whom the movie sometimes brings in agonizingly close and sometimes keeps at an equally painful distance, as if to suggest the limits of our understanding and maybe even our right to understand.
Even before tragedy strikes, Martha ( Kirby) isn’t particularly expressive by nature. We first meet her on her last day at her Boston office before she goes on maternity leave, enduring her coworkers’ belly pats with a weary smile and then dashing off to meet her partner, Sean ( Shia LaBeouf ). They’re picking up a new minivan, that totem of the cozy middleclass domesticity into which they are about to settle, with amused resignation but also real excitement. Tellingly, the van is something of a family affair: Martha’s brother- in- law, Chris ( Benny Safdie), works at the dealership, and her mother, Elizabeth ( Ellen Burstyn), is footing the bill — a generous but emasculating gesture, Sean notes, from someone who’s never liked him much.
There’s a blunt class tension at work here, one that will be immediately apparent from the casting of Kirby, the willowy English actress who played the young Princess Margaret on “The Crown,” and LaBeouf, a not- so- willowy American actor burying himself here in blue- collar scruffiness. The difference between Sean and Martha feels curiously echoed by the movie itself, which sometimes strikes grace notes with deft, elegant precision and sometimes handles them with power tools. Benjamin Loeb’s sinuous cinematography is both an aesthetic feat
Rated: R, for language, sexual content, graphic nudity and brief drug use Running time: 2 hours, 7 minutes Playing: Starting Thursday on Netflix