74 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
THE CURRENTCINEMA
AFTERMATHS
“Pieces of a Woman” and “Some Kind of Heaven.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
ILLUSTRATION BY LAURA LANNES
N
ot until half an hour has passed, in
“Pieces of a Woman,” does the title
appear on the screen. It’s a long wait,
but the director, Kornél Mundruczó, is
hardly idling. He has his hands full. The
bulk of that time is consumed by a scene
of childbirth, which is filmed in a single
take. The mother is Martha Weiss (Va-
nessa Kirby), and she has elected to have
her child in the home that she shares
with her partner, Sean (Shia LaBeouf ).
Their preferred midwife is unavailable,
so a stand-in named Eva (Molly Parker)
turns up to assist. She is kindly and calm,
though her tranquillity frays when the
baby, yet to emerge and clearly in dis-
tress, develops an irregular heartbeat. An
ambulance is called. What happens next
I won’t reveal; suffice it to say that, for
many viewers (and not only mothers),
this first act of the movie will be too
much to bear.
The story, which takes place in present-
day Boston, is divided into sections. Each
of them is prefaced by a date, and by
a wide shot of the Charles River as it
changes through the seasons. To be hon-
est, it doesn’t change that much; in climate,
as in mood, the film amounts to a set of
variations on the theme of winter. Dirty
snow, crunching underfoot, is much the
same color as the sky. Gray succeeds gray,
like ashes after dust.
The trauma that strikes Martha and
Sean, at the outset, is a blow to a life
that was already cracked. As a couple,
they hail from different sides of the
tracks. He’s gutsy and ursine, with a
dense beard, a lunging gait, and a job in
construction. “Here’s a Scrabble word,”
he says, describing himself: “Boorish.”
(Every LaBeouf performance teeters on
the verge of too much; in this instance,
though, the excessiveness aids the role.)
Sean once had a drinking problem but
swears that it’s behind him, meaning
that it can tap him on the shoulder any-
time. Martha is better dressed, more ar-
ticulate, and given to unnerving silences.
We see her in an office, sitting briefly
at her desk, yet what she does there we
are never told. Why do some movies
take such pains to scour the emotional
landscape of their characters and yet—
unless they are astronauts or assassins—
show so little interest in their work?
Of Sean’s family we know nothing.
Of Martha’s, however, we learn all too
much. For one thing, her mother, Eliz-
abeth, is old enough to be her grand-
mother. This would be a serious flaw in
the film’s credibility were she not played
by Ellen Burstyn, who can convince an
audience of anything. We first meet Eliz-
abeth as she’s buying a car for Sean (of
whom she disapproves) and Martha, thus
displaying both generosity and control.
Only later do we realize that the car sales-
man is the boyfriend of Martha’s sister,
Anita (Iliza Shlesinger). Likewise, when
Elizabeth, incensed by what befell her
daughter—“this monstrosity,” she calls
it—decides to launch a legal case, she
gets Martha’s cousin Suzanne (Sarah
Snook) involved as an attorney. Just to
keep things cozy, Sean then has sex with
Suzanne in the offices of the law firm,
which surely counts as contributory neg-
ligence. All of this may sound way too
entangled, but that’s the point; a movie
that opened with two people trying to
have a family of their own gradually
grows, like a creeper, into a movie about
a family, and a history, from which there
is no escape.
There are traces of Elia Kazan and
Sidney Lumet in “Pieces of a Woman,”
and Martin Scorsese, who has cham-
pioned the film, is one of its executive
producers, but what it most resembles
is James Gray’s “The Yards” (2000), an-
other clannish saga, of equal gloom, with
a cast that included Burstyn. The wider
environment of Gray’s tale, which was
set amid the railroads of New York City,
felt grimy and lived in, whereas Mun-
druczó—who, like his screenwriter and
partner, Kata Wéber, is Hungarian—is
at his most assured when he shuts out
Boston and moves inside. Many of the
more torturous events are framed at a
cooling distance, through intervening
doorways, and the unquestionable high-
light of the movie is a gathering at Eliz-
abeth’s elegant house, where she has
cooked a duck for the occasion, and in-
vited her loved ones for a roasting.
There’s nothing like watching two
formidable actresses square off against
each other, pushing what should be a
heart-to-heart to the brink of hand-to-
hand combat. That’s how it felt in “Au-
tumn Sonata” (1978), with Ingrid Berg-
man and Liv Ullmann as a mother and
her daughter, and that’s how it feels in
Vanessa Kirby stars in Kornél Mundruczó’s film.
