Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway in Eileen
EILEEN
Its setting may be wintry New England in the early '60s, and its story may conclude on Christmas Day, but don't even think about mistaking director William Oldroyd's Eileen for feel-good seasonal fare: It's a cup of eggnog deliciously laced with strychnine. Between this psychological thriller's unexpectedly brutality and salty language, its horrific fantasies and mercifully un-visualized realities, you'd be hard-pressed to find a cinematic gift less appropriate for the holidays. That's precisely what some viewers, myself included, will dig about it.
With Ottessa Moshfegh, alongside husband Luke Goebel, adapting her 2015 novel, our titular figure Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) would initially seem the sort of person whom no one would ever make a movie about – a sentiment actually verbalized by her hateful, alcoholic father (Shea Whigham). A mousy 24-year-old living in near-poverty in an unnamed Massachusetts town, Eileen spends her days buying booze for her dad, retreating to her bedroom to chomp on and promptly spit out candy, and doing her best not to get caught masturbating in public. What meager salary she earns comes from her clerical position at the nearby boys' correctional center, where her fellow staffers, if they notice Eileen at all, treat her with universal derision. Clearly, this pretty, troubled young lady is in need of a serious shakeup in her life, and it comes with the arrival of Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), a chic, Harvard-educated career woman who joins the facility as its new chief psychologist. Eileen is instantly smitten, and amidst the relentlessly grim surroundings, Rebecca's platinum-blond hair should be all the hint you need to correctly predict juicy, capitalized Trouble ahead.
Films about timid young brunettes becoming obsessed with tall, confident blonds have forever been a staple of noir – McKenzie herself filled the former role, opposite Anya Taylor-Joy, in 2021's Last Night in Soho. Yet it's hard to recall the last time one of these things packed such an unsettling punch. Even before Rebecca enters the scene, our equilibrium is off due to Oldroyd's refusal to stage fantasies as fantasies. Very early on, a torrid workplace encounter between Eileen and a handsome guard seems completely genuine until the tryst is revealed to be mere wishful thinking, and on at least two occasions, I audibly gasped after shocking blasts of violence that, again, appeared absolutely real in the moment. It's a clever strategy, mirroring Eileen's increasing inability to separate truth from fiction. But what's most enjoyably vexing about Eileen is that we only gradually realize that our allegiances may have been misguided from the start. To be sure, given her distasteful habits and frighteningly active imagination, we're never entirely comfortable around McKenzie's wallflower. Eileen hardly seems dangerous, though, and certainly doesn't deserve her father's and co-workers' abuse. It consequently makes sense to think of Rebecca – the picture-perfect Hitchcock Blond – as the inevitable conduit to bad times ahead for our heroine. Yet what if she's not? What if, as with Eileen's twisted fantasies, even that “heroine” tag can't be trusted?
As few films this year have so thoroughly benefited from narrative surprise – my jaw literally dropped at the stunning storyline twist that lands two-thirds of the way in – I'm being purposely vague about the particulars of Eileen's plot. All that really needs to be said is that it eventually involves one of the correctional center's inmates (Sam Nivola), his mother (Marin Ireland), a confiscated pistol, and a beater car whose windows need to be rolled down to prevent engine-smoke asphyxiation. Better to simply know that the storyline progression continually keeps you on your toes, with Moshfegh's and Goebel's chewy dialogue – most of it delivered with amusingly harsh Bostonian aggression – loaded with ticklish, nasty hidden meaning. (“He killed a cop!” “He killed his father. There's a difference.”) While the material is somewhat slight, it's ideal for a film that runs just over an hour-and-a-half, and happily, it also provides McKenzie and Hathaway with two of their richest roles to date.
Like Eileen herself, McKenzie can sometimes be too passive for her (or her movies') own good, and she doesn't yet boast much in the way of arresting screen presence. (In one particularly important closeup here, with the camera inching in on Eileen's determined expression, McKenzie also blinks with such inappropriate frequency that I began to lose track of what was being said to her.) The actor's “invisible” quality, however, is what makes her so right as Oldroyd's lead, and what gives the film its pungent astertaste; McKenzie's slow-boil portrayal is a wicked stealth bomb. Hathaway, meanwhile, is initially glamour incarnate, her posh mid-Atlantic dialect ladling Rebecca's words with honey she can stamp her omnipresent cigarettes in. Yet after the veneer of Rebecca's highly polished act begins to fade, Hathaway lets us read signals of desperation and terror, and the scene of her psychologist's Christmas Eve “date” with Eileen features some of Hathaway's most subtly layered work in years.
Hathaway's and McKenzie's is a sensational performance duet, and one augmented by the biting turns of Ireland (despite her big monologue being too nakedly presented as a Big Monologue), Siobhan Fallon Hogan as a bitter secretary, and especially Whigham, who manages to give his loathsome train wreck a touch of poetic soul. While it's a bit too modest to qualify as a great movie, Eileen is still a very good one – a blunt lump of Christmas coal that routinely shines like a diamond.
THE BOY & THE HERON
Every year brings with it at least one movie whose widespread critical adulation utterly baffles me, and I hate to say it, but my biggest “Huh?!?” of 2023 is currently reserved for The Boy & the Heron, the new animated fantasy by Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. By any metric, the 82-year-old, Oscar-winning Japanese auteur is a legend, and devotees will no doubt be thrilled that his announced retirement with 2013's The Wind Rises proved relatively short-lived. Yet as someone who has always been more of a casual fan than an acolyte, and conceding that his latest production looks and sounds gorgeous, I can't quite see what all the B&tH fuss is about.
It certainly starts beautifully, and chillingly, with our 12-year-old hero Mahito suffering the death of his mother in a World War II hospital fire. Not long afterward, he's sent to live in a sprawling countryside estate with his aunt – the spitting image of his mother, and a woman whom his father has recently impregnated. All is comfortable but lousy for Mahito until the arrival of a mysterious heron that appears to be taunting him, and that is ultimately revealed to be a bulbous-nosed creature in a heron costume who tells the kid that his mother is still alive and trapped in a nearby forest castle. I was on-board with The Boy & the Heron through all of this: the inspired visual expressions of Mahito's loneliness and grief; the septet of diminutive “grannies” who collectively act as a busybody Greek chorus; that perverse bird with razor-sharp fangs. But then Mahito took his figurative tumble down the rabbit hole into the Wonderland of that enchanted castle, and despite the ravishing sights on display, any hopes for narrative sense seemed to vanish. That's not necessarily news in a Miyazaki. But so did all hopes of resurrecting the early scenes' emotionalism. Mahito does indeed encounter likenesses of his mother and other relatives, but while characters' eyes occasionally filled with tears, mine stayed conspicuously dry. I was reminded of that classic Chandler Bing-ism when he was reprimanded for not crying when Bambi's mother died: “Yes, it was very sad when the guy stopped drawing the deer.”
As someone who'll readily go to his grave defending even the most outré David Lynch offerings, I hardly need my films strictly devoted to plot logic. But with rare exceptions such as the floating Warawara who look like happily inflated balloons but are actually the souls of babies waiting to be born, none of Miyazaki's visual magic here made me feel much of anything. The gigantic, man-eating parakeets; the younger, piratical version of Mahito's maid Kiriko; the fire-engulfed vision of his mother in her youth; the endless buckets of guano … . I admired the detail and invention, but none of it had any particular affect, and the editing sometimes left me even more confounded than the fantastical images. An apparently profound conversation between Mahito and his great-granduncle leads immediately to the sight of the boy chained to a wall – when and how and why did that happen? The film's final seconds, too, suggest that several scenes went unaccountably missing; when the end credits roll, it's as though Miyazaki himself stopped drawing the deer.
Look: I appreciate the artistry behind the project, and am even semi-thrilled that, in a slow weekend, a colossally strange Japanese animation managed to top the domestic box-office chart with some $10.4 million in the bank. That's cause for rejoicing even if The Boy & the Heron, for me, wasn't. But nothing on-screen wowed me the way I was frequentlky flabbergasted by, say, Miyazaki's Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle. And in an admission that I'm sure will soon land me in Studio Ghibli jail, I was at least delighted to catch the movie's dubbed version as opposed to its subtitled one, because the assembled vocal talents were just dynamite. Luca Padovan was a wonderfully mature, aurally expressive Mahito, but my bigger kick came from hearing the sprightly, easily identifiable readings of Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, and Willem Dafoe alongside additional talents – Gemma Chan, Dan Stevens, and Mark Hamill chief among them – whose contributions I didn't immediately register. Bonus point for Christian Bale's grizzled turn as Mahito's (Welsh, I guess?) stern father. Major bonus points for the hysterical, squawking deliveries of Robert Pattinson as that little weirdo inside the heron suit. Miyazaki's latest may not have given me what I hoped for, but it's tough to turn up your nose at any movie whose cast is front-loaded with Batmen.
