Pieces of a Woman

The screenplay and the resulting formal structure of the movie left me a bit puzzled. Did they try to parallel the experience of this young woman, surpassing a deep life crisis after a miscarriage, on the formal level and the structure of the movie? The film never recovers from its strong first 30 min, after this you have the feeling it breaks into pieces, like the life of this young woman itself. Sequences seem fractured and shattered, not really motivated or combined in a convincing way. Dialogue and acting often seems loosely improvised and unconnected. La Beouf's part for example, the most unconvincingly motivated character for me, suddenly loosing any connection, vanishing out of sight. But that's exactly the way the grieving mother must have felt it herself! Maybe they did that intentionally to give us the feeling of loss, pain, anger and emotional estrangement this woman is going through. Strong supporting acts by Ellen Burstyn and Molly Parker. But the movie's core and center is Vanessa Kirby here, giving a breathtaking performance, she carries this film almost alone. In the end it doesn't leave you frustrated, it seems there's enough hope left for a new beginning in life.

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.

It's a well acted tragic story that starts off excellently, but falls apart bit by bit the longer it goes until it ends on a whimper, as if the story got tired. Vanessa Kirby is equal parts excellent, and yet underacted in a sort of apathetic manner, where it began to hurt the story itself because her behavior was not shown to have anything underlying it, but her surface level was her entire level. Shia was excellent, as was the Mother. The film is very much in the style of Hungarian films, as the director is, and I say this in the way that this film could and would have been shot as a Hungarian film and played out exactly the same, if it had not been North American. In fact, it feels like an American adaptation of an existing Hungarian film, but this is it. The tone of the film jerks around somewhat, going with hard, every day realism, with odd smatterings of symbolism that just don't mesh well and come up like worn down speed humps on your drive, so instead of you getting seamless symbolism, they are stark and you are slapped aware of them when they show up. The dialogue is very good and realistic, except for a few instances where they get speechy and you start to fall out of the immersion because of it. The cinematography is very great, and the music works well. I think with some tweaks this could have been a great, even excellent movie, but what we got is a hampered result.

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.

People are saying that this movie is fantastic for the first half and then kinda looses steam. I kinda of agree but I think that it is much more up and down than that. The opening is really good but is a little manic at time. This bothered me a little bit but then I got the feeling that maybe it was on purpose to sort of drag us into the feelings of the characters at that moment.

I do agree that this film does start to sag after the opening but it does have more peaks especially the scenes between Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn. The scenes in the later parts of the movie between them characters were so good to watch. It was just such a showcase of great acting.

One small thing I found Shia's character to just be unlikable but that may be the fault of Shia I don't know. He was just so boring and flat and terrible.

The film does look good and I think some of the small production design choices were really well thought out and I enjoyed the other little techniques that the film makers used to make it a little bit more Interesting.

The score was just a tiny, tiny little bit off for me. It was so close for me but when I was enjoying it there would be a turn and I would be like oh no that wasn't right.

The issues above are all pretty minor as I have one major one and that is the dialogue. It was so soggy. It was just like sluggish. Some of it was better than other parts but the clunkers were really just bad. There was a lot of "hi how are you" "I am good" "oh good me too" "that's good" "yeah that is good".

I think you could watch it for the acting and especially the first half and parts in the latter half.