Pieces Of A Woman

Vanessa Kirby¹ deserves a star vehicle, just not this one.

Dysfunctional couples are a Hollywood favorite.  They’re not just the source of heated dialogues and engaging character study, but a handy plot device for contrived conflict.  Consider Martha (Kirby), a successful executive, and Sean (Shia LeBeouf), a construction worker.  Aside from the fact that they likely met in a bar, one struggles to see what common interests they share.  It’s hard to know when the movie doesn’t share anything about them beyond the basic outlines: she likes wine, he likes terrible dad jokes.  We don’t even know what kind of work she does.  Her job seems to exist solely to show how placidly she interacts with a coworker for having the audacity to occupy her office when she returns early from maternity leave.  She’s trying to get back into to work after suffering the devastating loss of her baby.

Earlier in the film, we see precursors of marital discord, as in the way Sean casually drops a remark about Martha’s mother, Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn),”She wants to minimize me; she wants to emasculate me.”

October comes around and everyone’s trying to process where to put their grief.  When a loved one dies, there are friends, memories, a life lived to celebrate.  When a baby dies in childbirth, there’s nothing.  While Elizabeth and Sean pursue legal action against the midwife, Martha tries to move on and make some good come of the situation by donating the baby’s body to the local university’s science department.  Punishing the midwife isn’t going to give Martha any closure.  The obstinacy with which Sean and Elizabeth cling to the baby perplexes us because, again, so little character depth or backstory is established.  The first 32 minutes focused solely on the harrowing childbirth.  It’s supposed to invest us in Martha’s emotions, and it does, until the second act.

While the months go by, we periodically return to a wide shot of a bridge under construction—metaphors don’t get much more ham-fisted than this.  Seasons change, the bridge gets closer and closer to completion, and just then…. Was “Sean bangs the family lawyer” on your BINGO card?  No?  How about snorting cocaine off her coffee table?

A couple beats later, Sean stumbles into the house.

“You been drilling?” asks Martha.

“Yeah,” replies Sean.

“Well I talked to Robert and he hasn’t seen you in three weeks,” Martha rebounds.  “So, drilling what?”

Oof.  If there’s a reason you feel whiplash it’s because Sean’s character arc is so sparsely written it leaps suddenly from the mindful act of framing a sonogram to the day-drunk lawyer-fucker slumped over on the sofa.  Oh, and by the way, there’s a criminal investigation into the midwife who just kind of disappears until the third act.  It’s as though the studio told the filmmakers to cut thirty minutes from the picture, and they didn’t keep track of which half hour they’d snipped.  That’s ok, because character development eventually reaches us by way of courtroom exposition just in time for… a long take of Vanessa Kirby completely obscured by a tree.  That wasn’t on my BINGO card, either.

It’s not a bad movie.  Kirby deserves more lead roles.  But as director Kornél Mundruczó and screenwriter Kata Wéber juggle the criss-crossing subplots—marital trouble, grief processing, courtroom drama—the braid starts to unravel:  How does a criminal trial move forward when the medical examiner finds no discernible cause of death?  How did they allow last-minute evidence in this movie courtroom when every other movie courtroom dismisses it?  Photomats allow customers in the darkroom?  Since when?  The mother tells Sean to get lost and he just boards a plane, just like that?  What about the affair with the lawyer?  Does Martha get remarried?

The worst dad joke isn’t even Sean’s.  The movie begins in a bathtub and ends in a river, so you could say they threw the—

Hey, the bridge turned out nice, though.

PIECES OF A WOMAN is currently screening at the 45th Toronto International Film Festival.

1. Kirby’s performance just won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival.