PIECES OF A WOMAN

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

There are multiple levels of potential difficulty for viewers of Pieces of a Woman, an exploration of grief in the wake of a young mother losing her baby in childbirth. That alone is enough to be a kind of heaviness that some may not be down for. On top of that, the parents are played by a very good Vanessa Kirby, and an adequate Shia LaBeouf. So, in the case of LaBeouf, here we are tested with a case of how to separate “art” from “the artist,” given recent revelations of his abusive behavior. It doesn’t particularly help that in one scene he throws a blow-up exercise ball right into Vanessa Kirby’s face.

But, okay, let’s just say we can look past who Shia Labeouf is in real life, and take his character, Sean, at face value onscreen. Sean is racked with grief himself, and much of the story here explores his heartache as well. It strains his relationship with his wife, Martha, as anyone might expect. Complicating things for good measure is Martha’s casually passive-aggressive mother, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth is one character I found to be a bit of a needless distraction. She’s played by the legendary Ellen Burstyn, and very well, but did director Kornél Mundruczó think much about how old she is? She must be playing far younger than her actual age, because Burstyn just turned 88 in December. Vanessa Kirby was born in 1988, when Burstyn was 55 years old. She’s quite easily old enough to be her grandmother, and not an especially young one at that. Curiously, Elizabeth’s aging and early signs of dementia become a minor plot point, even though presumably we should be assuming Elizabeth is in her sixties; perhaps her seventies at the most.

Elizabeth also drives much of the plot overall, as she obsesses with using the in-home birth midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), as a scapegoat, someone to be “accountable” for the death of the baby. The story meanders toward and ending in a courtroom, which is the furthest thing from anyone’s mind during the birth scene itself.

I should mention that birth scene, though, because without it Pieces of a Woman would be a much lesser movie. It’s a single-shot, thirty minutes of intense storytelling that starts hopefully, gradually moves to shaking ground and finally winds up harrowing. It’s virtuoso filmmaking I wish the rest of the movie could have hoped to match. There is an emotional blowout much later in an extended dinner scene at Elizabeth’s house, but it also includes a monologue by Elizabeth that doesn’t quite ring true. She tells extraordinary details about how she survived her own nearly tragic birth, and all I could think was: she really never told her daughter this story before?

Pieces of a Woman also features comedian Iliza Shleshinger, unrecognizable as Martha’s sister, and Succession’s Sarah Snook as their lawyer cousin. The movie really belongs to Vanessa Kirby, though, who is up to the task. To its credit, this film effectively illustrates how grief can make people behave in often incomprehensible ways. There’s an incredibly awkward (in more ways than one) scene in which Sean is begging Martha to touch him, until they make a failed attempt at having sex. In another scene between Sean and cousin Suzanne, Sean, who builds bridges, gives a pretty succinct explanation in layman’s terms for the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse.

Sean is from Seattle, but it takes until the courtroom sequence at the end for his and Martha’s home to be in Suffolk County, Massachussets—location of Boston—although apparently the movie was mostly shot in Montreal. I know I’m certainly in the minority as someone who thinks about these things, but production details aside, I can’t figure out why we needed that monologue about the bridge collapse. (Which, incidentally, occurred when Ellen Burstyn was eight years old! She was in Detroit.)

In any event, once that memorable birth sequence is over—all of which comes before the film’s title card, fully a quarter of the way through the movie—Pieces of a Woman meanders, just as much as I am with this review. It’s compelling enough, but in the end it leaves you wishing it had a bit more cohesion in its linear narrative. Although it’s held together with fairly loose ties, at least it rests on very strong performances.

This movie barely holds itself together. Which I guess is part of its intrigue.

Overall: B

Advance: THE DISSIDENT

Directing: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

The Dissident is a stunningly illuminating documentary that is by turns horrifying and dispiriting. You should watch it!

There is so much in this movie that should be common knowledge but isn’t, it’s shocking. But then, even though this is about the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashaggi at the direction of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salmad (frequently referred to as “MBS”), we’re still talking about a country given unwarranted deference by the U.S. for decades, no matter how heinous their acts. This is the country most of the 9/11 terrorists came from, after all—a detail the film doesn’t even bother to note. President Donald Trump is given relatively little focus in this telling of the story, but then, director Bryan Fogel smartly focuses on arguably the most salient point there: Trump consistently took MBS’s word for it that he had nothing to do with Khashaggi’s assassination, and after Congress passed bipartisan legislation to stop sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia, Trump vetoed it.

But there is a lot more to this story, much of the focus of which is on video blogger Omar Abdulaziz, now living as a refugee in Montreal. Over a dozen of his friends and at least two of his brothers have been arrested in Saudia Arabia and to this day are being held with no formal charges filed against them. In between interview clips of Abdulaziz telling his story, Fogel’s camera follow him walking around the city, intercut with beautiful drone shots of the Montreal skyline. This film has an unusual mind for aesthetic quality, with a couple CGI animations thrown in with sleek designs of their own.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from The Dissident is the level of power Saudi Arabia has over the same kind of “internet troll armies” now commonly associated with Russia. Russia is far from the only country in this business, and here the hundreds of Saudi government employees, each hired to create fifteen to twenty Twitter accounts and then flood any criticism of their government with pro-Saudi messaging and hashtags to drown them out, are referred to as “flies.” Abdulaziz gained the assistance of Khashaggi, himself living abroad from Saudia Arabia after criticizing the country’s leadership in his journalism, to counter these “flies,” with what they called “Army of the Bees.” This was a very organized, activist effort to counter the Saudia propaganda, which ultimately got their freedom-of-speech messaging an hashtags at the top of trending topics in the country.

This is precisely what threatened the Saudi government, and Khashaggi was targeted after being identified via Saudi hacking of Abdulaziz’s phone. Abdulaziz, a much younger man at the age of 27, clearly feels very guilty and responsible. It could be said that he is the greatest living connection to Khashaggi’s legacy, though, so the film’s large focus on him makes sense.

All of this ultimately functions as backstory to the gruesome assassination itself, of which an astounding amount of details are known, thanks to there being audio recordings of it. The entire story is astonishing, not least of which because the killing occurred in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The recordings are something else, though, and although this film thankfully doesn’t feature any of it, it does throw text from complete transcripts on the screen. We’re talking about a man, a clearly decent man whose greatest goal was to give voice to the voiceless—he even says in one interview clip that he’s not even asking for democracy, just “the bare minimum” of allowing people to say what they think—who was killed by suffocation and then cut up with a bone saw. Transcripts reveal casual conversation between the killers as they perform the task.

There are some odd interviews with local Turkish law enforcement. One man in particular is shown twice noting that the killers were just hired goons who were “following orders.” What an odd throwback to the same kind of apologies made for Nazi guards in German concentration camps.

The Dissident certainly offers some insight into how Middle Eastern governments managed to suppress the freedoms and hopes borne of the so-called “Arab Spring” of the early 2010s: organized propaganda and systematic elimination of dissent. Saudi Arabia uses the same social media tools against those initial revolutionaries, with their own hundreds of hired goons, creating bogus accounts and tweets to create a false narrative that outshines and outpaces those of the activists. It’s curious how the conversation in the United States focuses so heavily on Russia, at the expense of other powerful countries doing the same thing. Imagine how many other governments are doing things like this and we just have no idea.

I’m not sure how many I could truly convince to watch The Dissident, but it really should be seen. This touches on much of what the much-discussed Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma covers, but with far greater finesse, real-world potential for global consequence, and narrative force. This is the film with a more effective illustration of the urgency we have of doing something about cybersecurity. And that’s not even the point of the flm; Bryan Fogel just set out to tell Jamal Khashaggi’s story. It’s a story worth telling and hearing, with widespread implications.

Speaking power to truth.

Overall: A-

I'M YOUR WOMAN

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

The crime genre can always use an injection of new perspectives, and I’m Your Woman certainly fits that bill—co-written and directed by a woman (Julia Hart), featuring a woman protagonist (Rachel Brosnahan). Jean, the main character, starts off naive, when she is suddenly thrust into a scenario in which she’s on the run after her criminal husband goes missing. But she learns quickly, and while Brosnahan conveys her fear and vulnerability with straightforward realism, she is a self-actualized woman who does what she has to when circumstances force her hand. This is not a woman who folds, even when terrified, and I love that about her, and about this movie.

We have long needed more movies like this, and we still do, but it’s heartening to see them getting made at least somewhat more frequently. This one has been available on Prime Video since December 11, and it is well worth watching. I’ve seen a few movies since which, looking back, I rather wish I had watched this one sooner instead.

The crime genre just isn’t that appealing to everyone on its own, especially over the holidays. There’s nothing “festive” about this movie. Well, the holidays are over now, so that’s perfect! You should start your new year with a very well-made film that, in so doing, supports women filmmakers. Not that it being directed and led by women is the reason to watch; the film is objectively good in its own right.

The editing in particular is subtly impressive. I’m Your Woman runs at roughly two hours, and it has no dull moments, even with no fewer than three sequences depicting Jean spending an extended amount of time just . . . waiting. First at a hotel as a temporary hideout; then to a house she’s taken to by a colleague of her husband’s; and finally to a cabin in the woods. In every case, the pacing still propels the story forward, never creating the same sense of tedium that Jean surely feels.

Julia Hart’s direction slyly doles out Jean’s story in bits and pieces as her present circumstances unfold, only adding to the tension and frequent suspense. When the film opens, Jean’s husband Eddie (Bill Heck) suddenly shows up at home with a baby, one Jean has never seen before, but Eddie still says “It’s our baby.” Said baby is with Jean for the majority of the rest of the movie. Eddie turns out to have surprising connections to the rest of the principal characters we eventually meet, offering the story a complexity without being contrived.

Hart—and, presumably, co-writer Jordan Horowitz—also fold in certain details, without which, I’m Your Woman would be a lot easier to criticize. American racism is far from the point of this story, but with multiple Black supporting characters, it would be foolish to pretend it isn’t there. Anrizé Kene plays Cal, the man sent to protect Jean, and when they in a car and confronted by a white police officer clearly suspicious of a Black man driving a car with a white woman and a white baby in it, a familiar tension comes into the picture that is both inevitable and unrelated to the story at hand.

Dynamics shift halfway through the film, when Cal has left Jean at his family cabin, and a while later she is met by Cal’s wife Teri (Marsha Stephanie Blake), his father (Frankie Faison), and his young son (Da’mauri Parks, in his first film role). All of them have some connection to Eddie that Jean is unaware of, painting a picture of her husband and his past she never knew, or never thought to examine.

I did find myself wondering how this movie might work if, say, the entire story were told from Teri’s perspective. Marsha Stephanie Blake only exists in the second hour of I’m Your Woman, but the entirety of her story might actually be more interesting. That said, Rachel Brosnahan is excellent as Jean, making it easy to forget she is also the title character in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a radically different character, in both looks and demeanor.

A lot of I’m Your Woman is performed in hushed tones, making it a rather quiet film for much of the time, unless the baby is crying, or the three or so sequences featuring gunfire. One such scene takes place at a dance club Jean and Teri visit, in order to speak to its owner, and the panic that ensues is very well staged. That baby—and the little boy, for that matter—are frequently endangered, but no direct harm ever comes to them, which is both a relief and an added tension. The same could be said of Jean herself, actually, who keeps moving through chaos and life threatening scenarios unscathed, except perhaps for her emotional state.

This movie is an unusually great example of character development, given how different Jean is at the end from the beginning. It frequently puts her in states of tedium in between bursts of terrified excitement, but for us as viewers, there is never a dull moment, because this is storytelling at its best.

Turns out they’re both badasses, who knew?

Overall: B+