'The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby': Intriguing but not gratifying
Trend alert: couples skipping out on pricey restaurant tabs. First it was Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan in Le Week-end, dodging a daunting bill, stealth-exiting a Paris bistro, laughing, breathless, tearing down the street.
Trend alert: couples skipping out on pricey restaurant tabs. First it was Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan in Le Week-end, dodging a daunting bill, stealth-exiting a Paris bistro, laughing, breathless, tearing down the street.
Now, at the beginning of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them (title to be explained), James McAvoy asks Jessica Chastain, "Would you still love me if I can't pay the check?" Then he and she make a run for it - with maitre d' in hot pursuit.
Despite that cute movie moment, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby is a decidedly melancholy affair, written and directed with a dose of French New Wave artistry by Ned Benson. Chastain's character, the titular Eleanor (call her Elle), has a Francophile dad, played by William Hurt, and a French mom, played by Isabelle Huppert. A poster for Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman still hangs in the bedroom of her childhood home. The pop-art one-sheet for Godard's Masculine Feminine on another wall. Get the theme?
Pieced together with a deft shuffle of past and present, Benson's movie sifts through the rubble of a love gone south - a tragedy that befalls Elle and McAvoy's Conor, and that takes its time revealing itself. But whatever happened, it wasn't good. Early in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Elle really tries to disappear - parking her bike on the middle of a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, she goes for the railing, for the river below.
There is a lot to recommend about the awkwardly titled The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, one of three iterations Benson shot and cut. The others - colon-ized Him and Her, respectively - give us the same story, the same events, from Elle's and Conor's points of view. (The DVD/Blu-ray releases will no doubt feature all versions.)
Chastain, her green eyes filled with sadness, conveys unimaginable ache with a brittle intensity, a soldier-on grin; she's a-tremble, birdlike, beautiful. McAvoy, as the thirtysomething bloke with a famous restaurateur dad (and his own failing bar), is like a heartbroke detective, trying to find out what happened to the love of his life. He, too, is fully immersed.
Viola Davis brings heft and humor to the role of a professor to whom Elle attaches herself, tentatively, needfully. And Ciarán Hinds plays Conor's distant dad - not many scenes, but the Irish actor brings every one of them home with gravitas, without pomp. Christopher Blauvelt's cinematography, too, is striking.
But way down at its core, in the words and scenarios Benson has fashioned, Eleanor Rigby begins to creak and groan. Not even Hurt (especially not Hurt!) can get away with a line like "tragedy is a foreign country - we don't know how to talk to the natives."
Huppert's attachment to her goblets of wine becomes a running joke, unintentional, I think. And it's hard to skirt the cliches at the heart of the story. We've seen this before, in good movies and bad.
The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum: worth it for the talent on display, disappointing for what the talent has been given, or not given, to work with.
The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them **1/2 (Out of four stars)
Directed by Ned Benson. With Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, William Hurt, Isabelle Huppert, Viola Davis, Ciarán Hinds, Bill Hader. Distributed by the Weinstein Co.
Running time: 2 hours, 3 mins.
Parent's guide: R (profanity, adult themes).
Playing at: area theaters.EndText
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