The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them

"Where are we?"

"Someplace good."

(Edit: This film isn't that someplace.)

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them

119 minutes

Written and directed by Ned Benson

Starring Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, William Hurt, Bill Hader, Viola Davis, Isabelle Huppert, the Astor Place subway station

Ned Benson began writing what would eventually become the ambitious, sprawling screenplay for The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby when he was 27. When Benson first put pen to paper, his vision concerned the corroding life of a young man whose wife tries to commit suicide after their young son dies. It was told from the man’s point of view (of course), and the wife was essentially diluted into a MacGuffin. Jessica Chastain eventually took a peek at the screenplay, informed Benson that his film needed to somehow incorporate the view of a woman (apparently a revelatory moment for the young Benson), and the writer-director began to write a second screenplay that retold events from the woman’s point of view. Nine years later he had a 223-page screenplay and an astonishing cast of renowned actors to flesh out his story of love lost. He collated the two views, showing the same story from his and her perspectives, and told them in two separate halves. Unfortunately, in those nine years Benson never acquired the ability to write decent dialog, and his film suffers gravely.

We meet Eleanor (Jessica Chastain, brilliant even when she’s all but choking on fetid writing) and her husband Connor Ludlow (James McAvoy) as they flee a fancy restaurant, unable to pay the bill. They run and laugh and kiss in the grass, a flotilla of fire flies buzzing around them. They’re a beautiful young couple and their life seems perfect. (I do wonder, though, if we’d care about them at all if they weren’t such incredibly attractive individuals.) In the next scene Eleanor jumps off of a bridge.

Watching The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them is an innately unsatisfying experience because it’s not a standalone part of a trilogy, as advertised: hewn and spliced against Chastain’s wishes (she’s a co-producer and clearly this project meant a lot to her), Them is the bastard child of Benson and uber-producer Harvey Weinstein. They flensed almost an hour off of the original film and conflated the two perspectives. Supposedly Benson hopes the shortened amalgam will provoke interest in Eleanor Rigby, and people will pay to see the 3-hour version, which retains his original two-point perspective vision. As is, Them is a mess, pervaded by unbearably stilted dialog and a disorienting tendency to meld points of view into single scenes. Eleanor and Connor are inconsistent characters because we’re getting the two perspectives at the same time instead of in two separate halves. Sometimes Eleanor is tragic and we empathize with her, other times she’s a bitch because Connor sees her as such. But without a discernible marker telling us which view we’re getting, she seems like a schizoid person instead. Same goes for Connor: sometimes we feel his pain, other times we wanna knock his lights out. (At least I did.) It’s maddening. The ambition of the original elliptical narrative is lost, and Them resembles a hastily-constructed student film more than a decade-long undertaking.

McAvoy has the uneasy task of projecting sorrow and confusion at the same time using the awful writing Benson has handed him. He does an pretty good job (“Pretty good” basically applies to everything he does, though), but he doesn’t fair nearly as well as the prodigiously talented Chastain. She manages to make the flat title character into a living, breathing, crying person, POV-shifts notwithstanding. The legendary Isabelle Huppert, possibly the best living Actress this side of the Seine (her turn in The Piano Teacher is one of the all-time great performances, as scary as it is sad; she does more with a single stoic stare than most actresses can do in an entire film), plays Eleanor’s mother. She isn’t given much to work with, and Benson and co. seem content to let Huppert’s mere presence do the work. It almost works.

The whole cast is sterling, really: Williams Hurt, settling into AARP-age gracefully, plays Eleanor’s father, and he handles his inane dialog incredibly well (particular a story about almost losing his daughter in the ocean). His inability to look at his daughter when talking to her about the death of her son is heartbreaking. Bill Hader is Connor’s best friend and gets by simply because he exudes charisma, and the usually-reliable Ciaran Hinds does what he can as Connor’s father (more of a cipher than an actual father). But Viola Davis, always a pleasure to watch, gets the worst bit of writing to chew on: her diatribe on child-rearing would flunk a freshmen creative writing class, and she looks like she’s in pain trying to add any emotion to such shitty philosophizing.

Benson’s also an inconsistent formalist: the camerawork is sometimes good (particularly in Benson’s control of shallow- and deep-focus), but sometimes oddly blunt and unsubtle, and the frequent information dumping is more annoying than clever. (We only find out that Connor and Eleanor are married after Connor gets hit by a taxi—sadly, he lives—and the delayed relaying of information adds nothing to the story.) Son Lux’s score is lovely, for what it’s worth, but used sparsely. All of which would be forgivable if Benson got someone to re-write his writing, but he didn’t. Seriously, an MFA student from NYU could have rewritten this for a few hundred bucks and an implicit swell of ego. I’m sure many would be willing. The only thing that keeps the film tolerable is the collective effort of the actors, each one of whom brings his or her A-game. Otherwise this would have been an insufferable experience.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them gets two-and-a-half Harvey Weinstein bastardizations out of five