The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them

I love a good gimmick…when it works.  Some might say that Richard Linklater’s new film, Boyhood, and it’s 12-year shooting schedule chronicling the evolution of it’s family of characters is… gimmicky. Perhaps…but it’s brilliant and revelatory in execution.  Both in title and production, Eleanor Rigby is the newest gimmick in filmmaking and although brazen and respectable in ambition, it achieves little.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby is a film that has been released at various film festivals in three different cuts : Him, Her, and Them.  In all three films, writer and director Ned Benson discusses the intricacies of a married couple, essentially uncoupled by the death of their baby son.  Him captures the husband’s perspective, Her capturing the wife’s.  Them opens with one of the only two scenes capturing both Connor (James McAvoy) and Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) together. It captures the two of them early on - youthful, in love and in a relationship completely pure and uncomplicated by life’s complexities.

What I do love about the film are the themes it explores.  Connor and Eleanor grow up together, in a sense. They have a child together, and it is not until they lose that child that their relationship is put through trying times. Eleanor feels the losing of their child differently than Connor, who it seems chooses to ignore that it happened. He picks himself up and keeps “moving forward” as he mentions in a discussion with his father. Eleanor deals with her grief deeply…the second scene of the film shows Eleanor walking on a bridge, and jumping off in an attempt at suicide.  Benson is making a film about what happens when you grow up with someone, and what happens when one or both of you stops growing, or grows away from the other. Connor, for a large portion of the film, is living a life completely stagnant – he ignores the death of his son, his business is drowning, and in contrast,  Eleanor continues to move on by feeling everything that is happening to her to the point where she attempts suicide, leaves Connor, and decides to live with her parents and take University classes. At one point, Connor says he was lost without Eleanor and that once he met her, he thought he had it all “figured out” but feels lost again without her. The film also explores what happens when you depend on another person for your happiness. 

The motifs – those are the parts I loved. But those are all deductions I made through inference. My biggest issue is that not enough is seen or discussed on camera. The film is put together in various pieces, one scene a bit disjointed from the next and some of the most significant occurrences in the film are never talked about.  The fact that Eleanor has lost a son is not mentioned until more than twenty minutes into the film, and even throughout, it is rarely discussed. Most of the conversation is focused on Eleanor simply trying to figure out what to do next in her life, or Connor trying to find Eleanor and understand why she left him. Little is said about the actual reason for their current circumstances and the question I find myself asking the filmmaker is, why? What purpose does the lack of discussion of their lost child serve? The film has been compared to the Nicole Kidman drama, Rabbit Hole, based around a husband and wife’s struggles after the loss of their child. Unlike Eleanor Rigby,  Rabbit Hole leaves the audience moved and truly feeling for the characters because we actually get to know who they are and what they have been through. We know that a teen driver kills their little boy. We’re exposed to the accident. We see everything that happens before and after the accident. We do not see any of those elements in Eleanor Rigby. We do not know their son’s name, we don’t know how or why he died. We are also not aware of the last thing that happened between Connor and Eleanor before Eleanor tried to kill herself. We are exposed to two flashbacks of Connor and Eleanor’s past life throughout the film. Both of those flashbacks capture Connor and Eleanor in the prime of their relationship – young, carefree, potentially unmarried, and without children. They are the most well-acted and directed scenes in the entire film because we actually get a sense of the two of them together. There is an intimacy in these two scenes that I find myself yearning for throughout most of the film.

In the same vein, after Eleanor attempts to kill herself, we see her get out of the hospital and go straight to her parent’s house. No one verbally acknowledges what has just happened to Eleanor, but her parents go on to suggest her taking classes at the school that her father is also a professor at, and in the next scene, Eleanor has cut her hair and is headed to class with her Dad.  An attempt at suicide is a major life event. I do not understand why this topic is not made a bigger deal in the film. Why isn’t Eleanor in a mental health facility? Why isn’t she in counseling? I do not think the fact that Eleanor and her family, including Connor skate around this fact is realistic or believable. But more than all of that, the film’s consistent disregard for such major events that the storyline revolves around gives the audience nothing to hold onto in terms of the characters in the film. I left Eleanor Rigby feeling very little for Connor or Eleanor, because the screenplay chose to omit everything real, tragic, and heartbreaking happening in their lives. That’s not real life – we don’t get to fast-forward past the bad parts. We have to experience those too. Isn’t that the beauty in seeing a movie, especially in seeing independent cinema? It explores topics and subject matter that commercial filmmaking will not always do. Perhaps some will say that Eleanor Rigby leaves something to be desired. To that, I say “Yes, certainly…a little too much.”

And lastly, aside from extreme moments of predictability, my final grievance is that every character in the film is a mess. There is no moral center, or guiding light as Eleanor and Connor embark on these difficult chapters in their lives. Viola Davis plays the unhappy and disgruntled Professor Friedman. She and Eleanor eventually become close, in a very distant way. Professor Friedman has no husband, hardly talks to her son, and is not sure why she is a professor anymore. Connor’s best friend is Stuart, played by recent SNL alum, Bill Hader. Hader is great, and again proves himself as a comedian with real dramatic chops. Stuart is also Connor’s fledgling, uninspired restaurant chef. Each of these characters is so lost on their own that they’re unable to provide Connor or Eleanor with any real guidance or moral grounding.

I respect Ned Benson and the great amount of ambition behind this film. He took on a huge feat, making something of this magnitude and turning it into three films, but perhaps that is where the problem lies. Most of the meat, the heart of the film was probably left on the cutting room floor.