Notebook: The Disappearance(s) of Eleanor Rigby
All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong?
The first time (though hardly the first time) these questions were posed, the “Her” and “Him” were a forlorn spinster interred without mourners and a clergyman whose heartfelt sermons find no audience. The Beatles took two minutes and eight seconds to blend the two narratives into an overarching “Them,” with telling details (he darns his own socks) and subtle connections (she died in his church). Nearly fifty years after Revolver, Eleanor Rigby—or, rather, her namesake (Jessica Chastain)—is again the feminine half of a wistful, symbol-heavy, bifurcated tract on loneliness. Only this time we have the option of observing the aggrieved parties together and apart, and deciding if their stories play better dovetailed or regarding one another elliptically.
When writer-director Ned Benson’s feature debut premiered in Toronto last fall, it was as two discrete films, designated by gendered pronouns. The story of a traumatic event and its effect on a married couple—she runs away, as the title implies, and both stumble toward solace and catharsis—was told from first one perspective and then the other, with scenes repeated to show how the same exchange can yield different understandings. On acquisition by The Weinstein Company, the films were stitched together as an alternating-POV amalgam, shorn of 70 minutes but retaining the driving sense of subjectivity. A month after the limited release of the composite (subtitled Them), we get the original pair, which raises many questions, the most practical being: which version should you see?
Well, as you might expect your therapist to say, that depends on what you’re looking for. There’s no categorically bad choice. The shortened cut is not an incoherent mess like that of Leone’s mutilated Once Upon a Time in America, nor a glaring Frankenstein—in fact, one can scarcely imagine a less conspicuous suture—but it does hasten certain discoveries and shortchange the supporting cast. The full experience is richer and of greater formalistic interest, but the project in any guise lacks the psychological insight of Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage, and the prevalent flaws in Them (arch dialogue, characters reductively defined by their problems) are more pronounced for the broader canvas.
Whichever version you watch, the chief virtue is Chastain, one of the most compelling figures in movies today. If you disagree—as I might have done a month ago, when I appreciated her ethereal presence (perfect for Malickian incarnations of grace) far more than her range (less perfect as Jack Bauer Barbie in Zero Dark Thirty)—her extraordinary work here is sure to change your mind. She conjures a fascination surpassing mere beauty; her wordless embodiments of grief and rage, and numb disavowal of the same, would put her at home in a silent film (as would her porcelain complexion, high cheekbones, and delicately cleft chin). Her pensive mien salvages even the most narcissistic scripting. When she asserts, “I need to try some other version of myself,” her sensitivity rescues the line from its coy and self-regarding connotations; you feel that she’s speaking from Malick’s cosmic shore of reconciliation, but with full cognition of her own fragility. (By contrast, the more terrestrial James McAvoy, as her husband, lacks her Rumpelstiltskin-like facility with lines like, “There’s only one heart in this body, have mercy on me.”)
Owing chiefly to the gifts of its translucent leading lady, Her (not to be confused with Spike Jonze’s 2013 meditation on heartache) is the more accomplished and satisfying half; one suspects at least two-thirds of Them is drawn from the distaff portion. Where Him is more straightforward, Her is impressionistic in design; clues to the nature of the tragedy arise in such details as Chastain’s affection for her young nephew—from the way she kisses his head, and watches him drink milk—and from the guarded behavior of her perplexed parents (William Hurt and Isabelle Huppert), to whom we suspect parental love has never come naturally.
This expositional restraint generally mitigates the schematic nature of the piece, though not much can be done with the device of Chastain’s character being named Eleanor Rigby (except perhaps to situate the film in a universe that doesn’t acknowledge the song, which is far from Benson’s MO). To everyone’s credit, Chastain’s account of her naming—which scans like an act of profound parental thoughtlessness—is tossed off cavalierly on a walk-and-talk with her jaded professor (Viola Davis, finding the truth in her sounding board role), but the choice remains grievously overdetermined. One also wonders about the poster of Claude Lelouch’s 1966 melodrama A Man and a Woman in Chastain’s childhood room. Yes, it’s a popular film, especially among nostalgic baby boomers, but would an American girl whose teenage years comprised the mid-Nineties—especially one whose mom is Isabelle Huppert—opt for that to adorn her bedroom wall? Or might it be clumsy cultural sampling to telegraph the lovers-can’t-escape-their-past trope? (The set design is otherwise beyond reproach, particularly the too-perfect arrangement of photos of a red-haired girl—presumably the young Eleanor—going up the stairs of the antiseptic Rigby home.)
Splitting the story allows for more breathing room, and fuller exploration of the secondary roles. This is especially true in Him, where the excised footage is much more apparent (making up at least half the film). In the compound work, McAvoy’s father (Ciarán Hinds) is essentially a mope, given to vague philosophical pronouncements couched in discomfort. Here his added scenes lend him tragic dimensions. Broadway wunderkind Nina Arianda is barely glimpsed as a bartender in the shorter cut, but her rapport with McAvoy in Him illuminates her character’s centerpiece act of brazenness. Chastain’s dynamic with Jess Weixler, as her single-mom sister, is already complex and believable in Them, but it becomes the most important relationship in the first half of Her.
Perhaps Benson’s most intriguing choice is perceptible only to viewers of both films. When Chastain and McAvoy, after months of separation, meet and impulsively embark on a drive in the rain, a confession emerges which plays out differently between Her and Him. In one edition, the injured party intuits the act and the wrongdoer rejoins defensively; in the other, a guilt-racked revelation is met with feigned indifference. Beyond variances in camera positioning or other visual emphases, the dialogue itself diverges here, intimating that at least one of our surrogates is unreliable, but more likely that the truth of everything we witness is refracted through the eyes of the subject. (Them retains his account; surprising, as overall it tends to favor her.)
What the unified film gets right, the separate films get right as well. We’re not inundated with flashbacks and we never learn the particulars of the tragedy—one keeps fearing they will inform a third-act soliloquy—because Benson realizes what’s important to this piece is not specifically what happened but how those happenings reverberate. He also eschews martyrdom. We empathize with the suffering of everyone onscreen, but acknowledge (with them) the privilege they enjoy at being able to try out different versions of themselves. Most of us are denied that luxury, but Benson makes their insulation inherent to their story, and even intrinsic to their suffering (“Tragedy is a foreign country; we don’t know how to talk to the natives” is the manner of compassion on display, suggesting the emotional cost of an ivory tower existence.)
At its worst, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (every version) fails to reconcile its heightened emotional pitch with its often trite, equivocating dialogue. There’s too much firefly symbolism and unimaginative staging (two-character scenes haltingly circling whether it’s okay to be okay). In other words, it’s a first film. At its best, it’s a deeply felt, fervidly acted, location-specific study of feelings not easily compartmentalized, mandating a messy presentation. In other words, it’s a first film. Ah, look at all of the lonely people, it asks us earnestly. Where do they all belong?