Laboured in delivery

SOLID ACTING, BUT ALSO SOME OVERACTING, IS FOUND IN THIS HEAVY FAMILY DRAMA

Pieces of a Woman

Cast: Vanessa Kirby, Shia LaBeouf, Ellen Burstyn Director: Kornél Mundruczó Duration: 2 h 6 m Available: Netflix

In the movies, the miracle of birth often takes place off-screen, or nearly so. There may be some laboured breathing, exhortations to “push!” and perhaps even a sudden cut to a crowning head to shock or surprise the viewer. But for the most part it's over quickly, the newborn bundle of joy wiped off and swaddled and presented for audiences to see.

Not so in Pieces of a Woman, the newest film from Hungarian art house director Kornél Mundruczó (White God, Jupiter's Moon). Almost a full quarter of the movie's two hours is taken up with the birth of the first daughter of Martha and Sean, a Boston couple played by Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf. This includes one unbroken 22-minute single take that goes from labour pains through broken water, contractions, delivery — and death.

As advertising for the film has long made clear, Martha's baby survives only a few minutes outside the womb. Thus does the rest of the film concentrate on the aftermath, mostly for Martha and Sean, but also taking in her mother (Ellen Burstyn, pushing 90 and fantastic as always) and various other relatives, friends and colleagues who try to navigate around their grief.

The death of a newborn is as much an oddity as a tragedy. Most 21st-century deaths involve the elderly, and the closing of a book crammed full of life. We have little training on how to mourn someone whose probable long life is cut short on the first page, a blank book that might have been filled, but now remains merely a hypothetical.

I wish Pieces had done more with the momentum it built up during that bravura opening. It might have done better to focus even more narrowly on Kirby and her stellar performance. Instead, we're pulled aside into a court case that seeks to prosecute the midwife (Molly Parker) who presided over the home birth. And then further aside as Sean, a recovering addict, falls into a decidedly unhealthy relationship with the lead prosecutor (Sarah Snook), who is also his cousin by marriage.

It's a messy plot, and not helped by a twinkly, piano-heavy score I was shocked to discover was by the great Howard Shore. His work was presumably part of what gives this film the “Canadian co-production” label. That and the use of Montreal as an unlikely stand-in for Boston. (Also, where are the accents?)

The actors elevate the work as much as possible, though LaBeouf is guilty of pitching his performance to a place where it takes up all the air in the scene. Kirby's portrayal of quiet, powerful grief, always threatening to explode into something more, and sometimes doing just that, is — I was going to say worth the price of admission, but it's more like the price of a month of streaming fees these days. And Burstyn has a scene that, for better of worse, screams best-supporting-actress Oscar nomination.

The film uses onscreen dates to push us forward a month or two at a time. It's an awkward practice — I always find myself wondering if the exact dates will have some meaning (they don't) — and it's not necessary, since Mundruczó has already included a handy metaphor in the shape of a bridge being constructed over one of Boston's waterways.

Sean is helping to build it, though as its twin decks grow closer to meeting, the couple at the centre of the story drift apart. Like so much else in Pieces of a Woman, it's a little too on the nose without adding any nuance. ★★★

NETFLIX The characters portrayed by Molly Parker, left, and Vanessa Kirby confront what becomes a difficult pregnancy in Pieces of a Woman.