Pieces of a Woman

I almost never watch movies like these -- mega-drama releases during Oscar season. But in my first year reviewing on Letterboxd, movies like this appear so consistently in the "Popular with Friends" feed I find myself drawn to them.

And after forcing my self to watch PIeces of a Woman knowing I'd struggle, I think I'm going with my gut next time around.

I don't really have much to add to what's been said before. The birth scene is heart wrenching. The acting is phenomenal. Shia Lebouf's performance was so excellent I kept wanting to slap myself in the face reminding myself that he's a complete asshole.

But the bulk of the movie after the first act is just painful to sit through. Not because of the depressing subject matter. Nothing really gels.

Overall it felt like a jigsaw puzzle that was half completed.

The lives of two people decimated with the loss of their newborn baby girl. Grabbing the viewers' attention from the off, as every parent's nightmare is lived out in graphic detail at the close of a thirty minute escalation that lays the foundations for a bridge to the unimaginable, a trajectory paved with chaos, veiled and shrouded in turmoil, suspended on tenterhooks as tense and as taught as Tacoma. With anticipation and expectation set, it's a little disappointing to find this resonance, once established and secured soon decays and rapidly fades, from the deeps to the shallows, as the story begins to mainstream with its contemporaries, as opportunity, empathy and originality are lost and the only structure left standing embodied through the performance of Vanessa Kirby, who will surely go on to much bigger and better crossings.

Overall, this movie is pretty decent. I have to say that I expected a bit more but in the end I wasn't really disappointed. Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf were both great but there were moments in both of their performances that were just a little bit off. The highlight of the film has got to be its opening scene which is about 27 minutes long. This scene was absolutely incredible and highly salute them for their work. After that the movie goes up and down over and over again. It's meant to be sad and heartbreaking but I just didn't REALLY feel that when I was watching.

Almost too traumatic to watch at times, particularly the birth scene at the beginning with the impending tragedy.

After this, you find yourself watching a kind of ticking time bomb. I wasn't sure what was going to happen, was it going to end in violence, more tragedy, the tension almost seeped through the screen.

I was not aware of. Vanessa Kirby before this movie, what an outstanding performance she delivered, she left absolutely nothing in the rehearsal room and gave a performance, as powerful as I can remember. She was very well supported by the cast around her.

Grief must never be swept under the carpet, this movie, as hard as it is to watch at times, delivers a very important message.

There are some nice moments late into the running time of "Pieces of a Woman," but you may not think the payoff of those scenes is worth what you had to sit through to get to them.

As anyone who knows about this movie already also knows, the opening is a lengthy and grueling one-shot scene of a homebirth gone wrong. Actually, that's not how the movie opens. There are a few brief scenes establishing the principal characters, namely Martha (Vanessa Kirby), her husband Sean (Shia LaBeouf), and Martha's domineering mom Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn). These scenes quickly convey the dysfunctional family dynamic between this trio, and mostly warns the audience that all of these people are going to be pretty miserable to be around. The film then delivers on that promise. After the birthing scene, which wasn't as unbearable as I thought it would be aside from the vomit anxiety induced by watching Vanessa Kirby burp and almost throw up for 20 minutes, this movie becomes nothing but a mashup of marital misery, and reinforces my belief that you can have empathy for damaged people and understand how they became the way they are, but still not want to be around them.

Martha finds some solace and healing very late in the movie, providing Kirby with a chance to convey an emotion beyond hollowed-out bitterness. Burstyn is masterful and has a monologue that has Oscar clip written all over it. LaBeouf is hopeless, as he always is. He's a truly disgusting actor and he only plays disgusting characters and it's a relief when he abandons his wife and leaves the film. I only wish he'd done it sooner.

Kirby is being lauded for her performance, but she's limited by the material. We don't know anything about Martha before her trauma and anything we learn about her after is filtered through that lens. She's a character defined by her tragedy, and the movie makes it hard to care about her beyond the abstract care one would feel for any random person in similar circumstances.

Grade: B