A shattering tour de force captures a mother’s agony
As The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby tugs the heartstrings in gritty drama ...
THE first day of January always feels to me more personal than other days — a day for introspection and making private resolutions (just as January 8 or thereabouts is usually about breaking them).
So forgive me if my review of Pieces Of A Woman starts on a personal note, but a little over 22 years ago my wife Jane and I welcomed our third child into the world. Jane was determined to have a home birth but found it deeply unsettling and upsetting when the wonderful midwife with whom she’d bonded in the weeks leading up to the birth was unexpectedly not available on the night.
That’s just what happens in this Boston-set film’s harrowing pre-titles sequence, with the stark difference that Martha (Vanessa Kirby), a first-time mother, suffers the unspeakable agony of seeing her newborn daughter die. It is an extraordinary scene, shot in an extended unbroken take, encompassing normality, excitement, pain, joy and finally disbelief and despair.
The baby’s death appears to be the consequence of poor decisions by the substitute midwife (Molly Parker), and at first the film’s narrative direction seems clear. There will surely be a trial, WEll, legal manoeuvring, courtroom suspense.
there is some of that; but it turns out that Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo — and his partner Kata Weber, who wrote the screenplay based partly on her experience of miscarriage — have other priorities.
Their focus is on emotions, not legalities, and their effect on the story’s pivotal relationships, not just that of Martha and her husband Sean (Shia laBeouf) but also between Martha and her formidable Jewish mother, Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn).
It isn’t just grief that recalibrates these relationships, however. There are other factors, not least Elizabeth’s long-held conviction that Sean, a blue-collar construction worker, isn’t good enough for her middle-class daughter. She might be right, too, although it is character, not class, that seems to make him unworthy.
Either way, Elizabeth has a low opinion of Sean, only for them to become unexpected allies when Martha takes the ( to them) startling decision to donate her child’s body for medical research.
It’s heady, heavy, intense stuff, all this, and it needs actors at the top of their game. Happily, it gets them. Kirby’s performance is simply spellbinding, and bagged her a richly deserved Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival in September. Soon, we will be able to stop tagging her with the line that ‘she played Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of The Crown’. . . much as she glittered in that, too.
It’s her movie, from start to finish, but what a pleasure also to see 88-year-old Burstyn on such compelling form. Elizabeth gives a virtuoso speech about her own traumatic start in life — as a Holocaust survivor — that alone is worth the Netflix subscription, and overrides the nagging suspicion that she’s a little old to be playing Kirby’s mother.
There are a few other more persistent nags. Sean builds bridges for a living, and the script makes a repeated metaphor of this with a clunkiness that such a good picture does not deserve.
Also, the story meanders slightly at times. But then so does life, and this film, ostensibly about death, is rewardingly full of it.
THERE’S another mother and daughter at the heart of Yellow Rose, in which rising Broadway star Eva Noblezada plays Rose Garcia, a 17-year- old countrymusic devotee, whose life is thrown into the kind of disarray that Patsy Cline might have sung about mournfully, had she come from the Philippines and been caught living in Texas without proper documentation.
That’s what happens to Rose’s ma, leaving Rose, an aspiring singer-songwriter, ‘like a tumbleweed with nowhere to go’. She legs it to Austin and throws herself on the abundant kindness of strangers — a mumsy bar- owner (almost inevitably called Jolene), a white- quiffed old troubadour (Dale Watson, playing himself) — while trying to avoid the clutches of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
Their acronym is ICE, by the way, making it cornier cor than a bad Kenny Rogers lyric that their threat is nullified nul by human warmth. Writer- director Diane Paragas P does her best t to fuse country musi music with illegal imm immigration issues, but they are uneasy bed bedfellows. While vi visually never les less than colourful, fu her debut feature tu is tonally m monochrome.
O Of course, it’s not her fault that les less than two yea years ago there was another, better film a about an aspiring ing cou country-music star also call called Rose ( the excellent W Wild Rose), but the compar comparison doesn’t much help a stor story that, despite the engaging Noblezada, ultimately feels a bit fake. Nearly, but not quite, like a limestone cowboy.
Pieces Of A Woman is in cinemas now and on Netflix from January 7. Yellow Rose is available to download from sony Pictures Home entertainment.