The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby releases in Austin, TX on Sept. 19th, 2014
It’s never fun when you can’t figure out why a movie just isn’t doing it for you. In the case of The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby, the script is well above average, the acting is superb, it looks good enough and the characters are complex. Somehow, that wasn’t quite enough. It’s hard to say anything bad about a movie this solid, and I’m not one to sit in a theater looking for problems. After a few days, however, it hit me.
James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain play a suddenly severed young couple. McAvoy’s character is a restaurant entrepreneur who spends most of his time discussing his loss with his head chef (Bill Hader), while Chastain’s character (the titular Eleanor Rigby) has decided to busy herself with taking a class taught by Viola Davis (as astonishing as ever). Should you choose to see the film, it would be a shame for me to reveal anything else plot-wise. Information is revealed to the audience very carefully, and for the first 30 minutes or so, we can’t really be certain what has caused the split between the lead characters. In fact, I am willing to bet you couldn’t even guess before it is spoken in definite terms (not to make it sound like a mind-blowing twist… it’s just well-hidden is all). Having said all that? What the hell was my problem?
For starters… this kind of thing, for the most part, just isn’t my bag these days. Watching a pair of rich hipsters mope around town in scenes scored by an indie band doesn’t get under my skin the way it did when I was a teen. I don’t mean to be insensitive, because mope they should. These people are not experiencing the insignificance of “white people problems” or some young man’s coming-of-age bummer love story. They have been damaged, as any person would be in their situation, and they deal with it somewhat poorly. That’s understandable, and interesting to watch, but by the end, I couldn’t help but ask, “Why should this be on film?”
That’s because, save for a few fleeting moments, the formal elements have gone to sleep. We get some shakey-cam here and there, and some nice lighting in a couple scenes, but none of it adds up to anything particularly meaningful. There is no detectable motif from sound, to image, to editing. Now, that’s not always requisite for great, or even good cinema, but this movie is so indifferent to what makes a movie a movie… that it would really be just as effective as a play. Even a few months from now, I can’t imagine anyone easily remembering much of the film’s contents.
Then I discover the movie I saw was the final stage in an experiment of sorts. Turns out, this is a feature sewn together from three short films titled Her, Him, and Them. Each took the viewpoint of the respective pronoun found in each title, and they were shown separately. Now that, my friends, sounds interesting. There is the art I was looking for. Sure, it’s still something you could do on stage, but at least telling the same story from three different perspectives is a feat aided by the specifics of the film medium. To me, that sounds twice as effective and meaningful. That seems to say something about how truly separated people can be by a challenging event.
Again, I don’t want anyone seeking an effective drama to avoid this thinking it doesn’t get the job done. If you bring the tears, it will bring the sadness and the touching humanity, and it will deal with its subject matter delicately. For those of you who want a little something more out of your experience, you may be a bit disappointed, just as I was.
