Director – William Oldroyd – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 97 m
***** Most of the film
* The last five minutes
NSFW
In the 1960s, the life of a young woman working in a Boston boys’ correctional facility is turned on its head by the arrival of a radical, young woman prison psychologist from New York – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 1st.
I don’t usually start with the ending of the film – and I’m not about to deliver a spoiler – but the ending of Oldroyd’s otherwise enthralling drama (if that’s the right term – I’m not sure it is) takes everything that has gone before which appeared to be building up to something and unceremoniously dumps it, as if there were another twenty minutes that had been written but not shot and an unsatisfactory ending had been tacked on.
There’s always that feeling with a truly extraordinary movie when you watch it for the first time that you don’t want the filmmakers to screw up and let go of whatever it is that’s working. Well, this one is extraordinary right up to the last five minutes, when it completely loses it. Prior to that, it starts out as one thing, turns into something else then swerves and moves about all over the place, taking the viewer with it on a strange, unpredictable journey. Yet, for me, the closing minutes prove less than satisfactory after what went before.
And what went before is this. A strange image of what appears to be dry ice floats over a car dashboard. (We’ll later learn that this car has a tendency to overheat and pump smoke into its interior.) Sitting behind the wheel of the stationary car is Eileen Dunlap (Thomasin McKenzie from Last Night in Soho, Edgar Wright, 2022), and she’s watching a couple necking in a car parked maybe 10 or 20 feet away. She picks up snow from the ground and puts it down the front of her dress.
It’s Boston in the 1960s and Eileen lives with her alcoholic, widowed father Jim (Shea Whigham), an ex-cop given to disturbing the neighbours by waving his gun around or pointing it at passing children, causing local cop on the beat Buck Warren (Jefferson White) to regularly visit and caution him. Jim regularly tells her she should have made something of her life, like her sister did, by getting married and leaving home.
Eileen holds down a secretarial post at the local juvenile boys’ prison, in an office presided over by unyielding matriarch Mrs. Murray (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), where Eileen periodically watches a prisoner who lounges in a corner of the yard beneath her office window and surreptitiously masturbates to fantasies of one of the prison guards forcing himself upon her sexually.
The prisoner is Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), in for stabbing his father to death his father in the bedroom one night. The dowdy-looking and unassuming Eileen does her job but doesn’t socialise with her co-workers, however much she may entertain fantasies about some of them.
This none-too-healthy balance is upset by the arrival of new prison psychologist Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), a power-dressing New Yorker with radical ideas. Overriding the institution’s paperwork protocols for visiting prisoners, she invites Lee Polk’s mother Rita (Marin Ireland) to meet and talk with her incarcerated son, a session which goes disastrously wrong.
Perhaps attracted by her nature as an outsider, Rebecca at the same time takes a shine to Eileen, asking to be shown where, for example, the lockers are and even going so far as to ask her out for a drink. Someone taking a personal interest in her, and the possibility of a friendship or maybe even a romantic attachment, leads Eileen to suddenly open up. This pleasant night results in Eileen’s mixing drinks badly, and waking up in her own car, the seat covered in her vomit. When she gets to work, she learns that Rebecca is off until after Christmas. Then, on Christmas Eve, Rebecca phones and asks her to come over for drinks. However, her invitation is not all it appears…
Eileen starts off sleazy and dowdy, a young woman who dresses to blend into the background rather than stand out from it and stand up for herself. Her father, who has clearly seen better days, tells her there are people who are significant and there are others who simply occupy the spaces between them – and that Eileen is one of the latter. Her days are punctuated by vivid imaginings of taking her dad’s gun and blowing his head off, or ending it all with the same gun by blowing off her own head. Such scenes are shocking, even if they’re in her imagination.
In relation to Rebecca, Eileen’s dowdiness is contrasted by Rebecca’s chic, but when she goes out for drinks with the latter or later visits her at home on Christmas Eve, Eileen spruces herself up, borrowing clothes and coats from her late mother’s wardrobe, while Rebecca at home loses her chic appearance for that of a woman struggling to retain an appearance of normality. There are other things that occur in Rebecca’s home too, but we won’t go into that here because that really would be a spoiler. By this point in the narrative, their relative status has reversed, with Eileen very much in the ascendant and Rebecca on a downward spiral.
As in Oldroyd’s rather more successful Lady Macbeth (2016), in which he coaxed an extraordinary performance out of a then unknown Florence Pugh – in this writer’s opinion, the best she’s given to date – he confirms himself a terrific director of actresses. Both leads are extraordinary, particularly McKenzie who demonstrates a hitherto unimagined range as she goes from downtrodden worker to gleefully in control (or out of control) young woman. Mentions should go to Whigham as her father, who bravely goes for broke getting his teeth into a hugely unsympathetic role, and Marin Ireland (you’ll see why when you watch the film).
If it weren’t for its closing misstep, this would be a masterpiece. As it stands, it’s a frustratingly near miss: almost, but not quite, the most challenging Christmas movie since Bad Santa (Terry Zwigoff, 2003).
Eileen is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, December 1st.
Trailer: