Image courtesy of Collider
“All the lonely people, where do they all belong…”
The titular character of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby follows her Beatles counterpart’s story not at all, and yet exudes the same mysterious melancholy as the song. From the first verse to the third, the Beatles’ Eleanor goes from putting on a face for the world to dying alone and already forgotten. Something happened to her in between. Similarly, Jessica Chastain’s Eleanor Rigby is in the throes of we know not what when we meet her (or, rather, when we meet her at present-day… the movie opens in a flashback to happier times). She and Conor (James McAvoy) were a couple and are now sort of not a couple, used to be happy and are now in a sad-tinged, “I’m really trying to be okay” kind of emotional limbo. They were split by a shared trauma, driven like a wedge into their happiness. As the current versions of themselves, they are unsuited for each other, and yet neither can entirely let the other go.
It is beautiful in parts, and yet tonally fractured, for one very major reason: the version of the film being released this weekend (fully titled The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them) is not the final version first-time director Ned Benson intended to show audiences. To explain this, the full pre-production back-story works best. Mr. Benson approached Ms. Chastain with a script for the film told entirely from Conor’s perspective, hoping she would play Eleanor Rigby. She found Eleanor in that form to be underdeveloped, unexplained, and unexplored, and asked for a more fleshed-out female character. Mr. Benson responded by writing a new script, entirely from Eleanor’s perspective, of the same sequence of events. What he had created was a vast undertaking of form, screened for audiences one year ago as The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him/Her, which featured both full-length movies back-to-back for a combined run time of 3 hours. He filmed them as two separate movies; subplots in Him do not appear in Her, and vice versa. When the two characters interact in a scene, he changed the clothes or set or line delivery ever so slightly to reflect how memory can be faulty.
Him/Her succeeded at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013 and was acquired by the Weinstein Company, well known for intervening in editing processes to ensure their movies are marketable and populist. In this case, it is pragmatic to acknowledge that not everyone is interested in seeing a 3 hour-long, dark, relationship-focused movie where the two leads rarely interact. And so, Mr. Benson set out to create a third version of the story, a combined version, a more neutral version.
Mr. Benson made conscious choices to express Conor and Eleanor’s perspectives while filming, so forcing the two perspectives to fit together sequentially after the fact causes tonal problems. I didn’t feel as if I was living in either character’s world, but rather jarringly thrown from story line to story line. Sometimes the shift is literally startling; when a scene with Conor, filmed in cool blues and dark nighttime locales, cuts to a scene with Eleanor, with bright, abrasive daylight and harsh colors, I had to squint through the first few seconds of the scene before my eyes adjusted. Having not seen Him/Her yet, I can’t comment with certainty, but I believe strongly that the original version will fix some of Them‘s problems.
For the few scenes they have together, Chastain and McAvoy have great chemistry. William Hurt, Isabelle Huppert, and Bill Hader shine in supporting roles, and Mr. Benson promises they will have their own story arcs in Him/Her. The emotional story is told well in Them, but the story is bleak, slow, and lacking in style. Even though Them was finalized after Him/Her, Them feels like a work-in-progress. At the end of the day, this good movie has the potential to be a great movie. The pieces are there, they just need to be arranged in a different sequence.
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