A shattering portrayal of grief
and an athletic one, his camera prowling restlessly after the characters as they walk along the Boston waterfront ( the movie was shot in Montreal) or wander through rooms and corridors designed for maximum visual glide.
Those swiftly navigated interior spaces are crucial to the impact of the film’s most technically staggering and emotionally roiling sequence, which you are advised to stop reading about now if you care to experience it with fresh eyes. The devastating blow that sets “Pieces of a Woman” in motion isn’t especially hard to anticipate; it’s what you might expect from a movie that opens with a mother- to- be who, as the title suggests, is about to be shattered. Martha, who has decided on a home birth, fatefully goes into labor the same September night that her midwife is busy with another delivery. A replacement, Eva ( a terrif ic Molly Parker), quickly shows up at their home with warm smiles, gentle reassurances and the faintest suggestion of nerves.
What follows is a stunningly choreographed highwire act between the actors and the camera, orchestrated by the director Kornél Mundruczó in a 25- minute real- time sequence that contains few visible edits and plays out with astonishing moment- to- moment predictability. It’s the domestic drama as existential roller- coaster, jolting, immersive and merciless.
As Sean and Eva busy themselves with last- minute preparations, Martha, groaning with pain and nausea, moves unsteadily from room to room, stalked by a camera whose movements and rhythms seem to echo her own quickening contractions. And Kirby’s performance hits an early peak of utterly persuasive desperation: At one point, her visible fear and visceral agony give away to an eerie calm, a brief moment of respite before the unspeakable happens.
For sheer emotional tension and cinematic virtuosity, nothing that follows during the movie’s eight- month time frame quite matches the impact of this early sequence, which seems only f itting. Something in this household has broken, and any attempt at life afterward will feel, for a long while, like an exercise in futility. Martha returns to work just three weeks later with no explanation, just cool, stony defiance. She speaks matter- of- factly about donating her baby’s body to science. Her expression barely cracks while Sean noisily mourns, as anguished by her seeming indifference as he is by the cruel injustice of the situation. And her calm f lashes into contempt whenever her mother intrudes, which is often: Elizabeth urges Martha to bring a lawsuit against Eva, whose degree of culpability is a mystery the movie leaves teasingly unresolved.
This ambiguity is not always the movie’s strong suit. In his two previous pictures, “White God” and “Jupiter’s Moon,” the Hungarian- born Mundruczó showed a talent for infusing thriller conventions with virtuosic technique and blunt, topical ideas. In “Pieces of a Woman,” his English- language debut, he and his regular screenwriter, Kata Wéber, achieve a thunderous emotional sweep that sometimes bogs down in metaphor. Sean, a construction foreman, is working on a bridge project whose slow, steady progress the movie will keep returning to as winter bleeds into spring, as if to underscore the yawning emotional chasms separating its characters. The less said about Martha’s apple obsession, the better.
But while “Pieces of a Woman” is not without its false notes — moments when the music rushes in too insistently or supporting characters ( like a family lawyer played by Sarah Snook) who serve too convenient a narrative function — it also has an irreducible core integrity. This movie’s most important pieces work, sometimes terrifyingly well, and it’s no surprise to note that Burstyn’s performance is one of them.
“We need some justice here,” Elizabeth seethes, right before unleashing a stormy tour de force of a monologue that somehow merges a grandmother’s grief, a mother’s rage and a Holocaust survivor’s testimony. It might have seemed overwritten or overplayed in another actor’s hands, but Burstyn rips into it with astounding conviction, brief ly turning the story of a child’s death into a larger ref lection on generational survival.
One of the movie’s slyer insights is that the two characters who resent each other the most, Elizabeth and Sean, may in fact be kindred spirits. And unwittingly or not, LaBeouf holds up a mirror, at once brutish and vulnerable, to some of his own well- publicized demons: Sean is a recovering alcoholic whose anger can f lare into physical aggression, as we see in a tense, abortive sex scene that f inds him and Martha struggling to reconnect. It’s impossible to watch these moments without thinking of the recent abuse allegations against LaBeouf or noticing how wholly and sometimes chillingly he seems to understand his character’s fury. It’s a close- to- the- bone turn that will surprise no one who’s seen his self- lacerating screen work of late ( like in “Honey Boy”); it may, however, disappoint those who like to conflate artistic and moral excellence.
Arrestingly showy though they can be, these performances never threaten to eclipse or overwhelm Kirby’s concentration. While this remarkable actor can unleash hell with the best of them, her most eloquent gestures here are her quietest, whether she’s staring distractedly into the middle distance or def lecting her mom’s affectionate gesture, as if it were a slap in the face. Kirby’s authority is commanding, even unassailable: At times Martha seems at odds with not only her loved ones but with the very movie she’s in, f irmly steering it away from the courtroom drama, or even the portrait of a relationship’s bitter end, that it seems on the verge of becoming. She keeps you off balance right through the dreamlike close, a f inal scene — brave, misguided or both — that suggests nothing is ever truly final.