Kirby’s performance is the best thing about the movie: in the moments when Martha is most numbed by grief, her blank gaze invites both terror and empathy. (LaBeouf’s performance has a somber, unsettling gravity that’s touching, at least when his character isn’t behaving like a complete heel.)
#PIECES OF A WOMAN MOVIE#
Sean, suffering in his own way, engages in some despicable behavior: the movie works a little too hard at making him a villain, when just showing a fragile human in pain would have been enough.
Elizabeth interferes, in everything from the baby’s gravestone to the lawsuit she pushes forward in order to punish Eva. She and Sean fight with icy words and icier actions: they’re grieving at different speeds, and in different ways, and they lose sight of one another. The rest of Pieces of a Woman deals very specifically with Martha’s inability to cope with her loss. The scene is dexterous and accomplished it’s also draining to watch. Mundruczó tastefully sets up the impending disaster we know is coming. Mundruczó follows the action in a long, tendril-like take: Eva gently guides the suffering mother-to-be from the living room to the bathroom to the bedroom, and the camera follows the effect is one of blurry intimacy, as if we’ve taken up residence in the couple’s apartment. Things seem to be going well-until they don’t. The midwife they’ve planned on is in the middle of an emergency childbirth her substitute, Eva (Molly Parker, in a fine and delicately balanced performance), arrives almost immediately, attended by an aura of extreme calm and capability. Not long after these particular tensions are established, Martha goes into labor.
It rankles Sean that Martha’s upper-crusty mother, Elizabeth (a crispy-cool Ellen Burstyn), has bought the couple a new car in preparation for the birth of their child, but he grudgingly accepts it. Martha, we learn much later, works at some unspecified job in a posh-looking office. An early scene establishes their class differences: Sean works some sort of construction job, specializing in the building of bridges, a gig that apparently doesn’t bring in much money. Kirby and Shia LaBeouf play Martha and Sean, a Boston couple who have chosen to have their child at home. But movies about tough subjects don’t need to be torture, and if Pieces of a Woman proves anything, it’s that too much is sometimes also not enough. It may be a movie that takes the wrong route for all the right reasons: if the death of a child is a horrible event to suffer in real life, it’s also hard to dramatize. Unintentionally, the film’s opening also does a disservice to the subtlety of some of the performances, particularly Kirby’s.
Even if you force yourself to watch, as I had to, you may feel beaten up afterward, rather than devastated by a pure rush of feeling. The first half-hour or so of Pieces of a Woman-directed by Kornél Mundruczó and starring Vanessa Kirby as a woman whose child dies just minutes after birth, and now streaming on Netflix-is so emotionally grueling that it’s almost unbearable. It’s one thing to have emotions coaxed out of you it’s another to feel punished into submission. But a work can sometimes beat its audience into a kind of glassy-eyed retreat from feeling, even against a filmmaker’s best intentions. There’s a strong argument to be made-maybe it’s the only argument-that art should make us feel something.
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