THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 75
“Pieces of a Woman,” with Burstyn and
Kirby in full cry. I regret not seeing Kirby
on the London stage, as Elena in “Uncle
Vanya” and as Stella in “A Streetcar
Named Desire” (an obvious influence
on Mundruczó’s film), but, even in the
minor part of the White Widow in
“Mission: Impossible—Fallout” (2018),
she kept us guessing. Was her poise no
more than insouciance, or were potent
forces being held in check? Now we
know. In the new movie, Martha seems
frighteningly stunned and glacial in the
wake of her private disaster, yet Kirby
releases regular hints—as much with
passing gestures as with words—of the
pressure that is building beneath the ice.
Burstyn has more to say, and some
of Elizabeth’s lines are of such practiced
cruelty that you wonder whether she
notices what she’s doing. She can’t ask
one of the family to baste the duck with
out casting aspersions. We sense a deep
exasperation at human failings, and
some of that depth is disclosed when,
in a lengthy speech, she harks back to
another difficult birth—her own, as a
Jewish child, at the time of the Shoah.
This kind of declaration is extremely
hard to pull off, and it’s shot in an un
broken closeup, yet Burstyn holds steady,
without grandstanding, and leaves us
with the impression of an ironclad sur
vivor who retains even less pity for oth
ers than she does for herself. Hence
the alarming decisiveness with which
she gives Sean a check and tells him
to get lost.
In short, this is magisterial stuff, the
only hindrance being the neatness of
the moral design. In Mundruczó’s
“White God” (2015), rebellious dogs
raced through Budapest, snapping at
any attempt to treat them as allegori
cal, but here, for some reason, the var
ious strands are tied together in care
ful symbolic patterns, the effect being
to deplete rather than to strengthen
the narrative. We understand, for ex
ample, that Martha is determined to
create a new life, but does she really
have to be shown entering a bookstore,
buying a guide to germination, and pa
tiently coaxing apple seeds to sprout?
More flagrant still is the coda—a rosy
and ridiculous epilogue, which must
have been tacked on by the Head of
Happiness at the studio. The good news
is that the film is embarrassed, not mor
tally harmed, by such superfluities. For
the most part, “Pieces of a Woman” is
a model of concentration and clout,
fired up by actors of unstinting ardor.
What it will do to the popularity of
home births, on the other hand, I hate
to think.D
ennis is a player. He hangs out at
a pool, in Florida, hoping to pick
up rich single women and, just like
that, move in with them. Right now,
he’s sleeping on the rear seat of his van,
so he needs a place to stay. He can’t go
back to California, where he came from,
because of a D.U.I. charge. “I wanted
to live fast, love hard, and die poor,”
Dennis says. Frankly, the guy means
trouble, and he’s not done yet. Why
should he be? He’s only eightyone.
Then, there’s Reggie. Same sort of
age, different problem. Reggie gets
busted by the cops with marijuana on
his person and cocaine in his wallet.
He goes to court, says that he wants
to represent himself, and praises the
judge for having “a nice, shiny face.”None of this is easy for Reggie’s wife,
Anne, especially when he comes home,
announces that he’s God, and hits him
self on the head with a rock, but she’s
had time to acclimatize. They’ve been
together for fortyseven years.
Welcome to the Villages—“Ameri
ca’s largest retirement community,” ac
cording to “Some Kind of Heaven,” a
new documentary directed by Lance
Oppenheim. The Villages, northwest
of Orlando, took root in the nineteen
seventies, blossomed in the eighties, and
now houses a population of around a
hundred and thirty thousand. The com
munity is described onscreen as “God’s
waiting room,” though the emphasis
is strictly on living to the max rather
than getting ready to die. Just ask the
belly dancers, the synchronized swim
mers, or the Villages Golf Cart Preci
sion Drill Team.
Oppenheim doesn’t waste much space
on the upside. He aims straight for the
undergrowth, and treats the Villages as
one big Carl Hiaasen novel waiting to
happen. I kept expecting to see an alli
gator slouch across the golf course with
the bottom half of Reggie in its mouth.
The star of the show is Barbara, a Bos
tonian widow with no savings left; lonely
but stoical, she laughs merrily when her
Yorkshire terrier, Fifi, makes out with
her cat on camera. (My guess would be
that Fifi sees more action than Dennis.)
Midway through the film, Barbara meets
a sprightly gent named Lynn. “He talked
a lot about margaritas,” she says. Uh
oh. Not your kind of heaven, Barbara.
Move on. NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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