{"id":21249,"date":"2023-11-30T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-30T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=21249"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:15:48","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:15:48","slug":"review-eileen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/review-eileen\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Eileen<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Early in William Oldroyd\u2019s Eileen<\/em>, the title character (Thomasin McKenzie) is taking out the trash at the boys\u2019 prison where she works. As she approaches the big dumpster, the bag she\u2019s carrying breaks and dumps all over her, and maybe there\u2019s a more subtle metaphor for her life at that moment, but there\u2019s not a more apt one. She\u2019s 24 years old, in Massachusetts in the early 1960s, stuck in a seemingly inescapable rut; she dropped out of college when her mother got sick, but after she died, Eileen was stuck taking care of her bottle-swilling, pistol-swinging, former police chief father (Shea Wingham, at his most reprehensible). She does filing and other odd jobs at the prison, and occasionally she has bleak, passionless sexual fantasies about one of the guards. And that\u2019s about all she\u2019s got going on. \u201cGet a life, Eileen!\u201d barks her father. \u201cGet a clue!\u201d Oldroyd\u2019s film, adapted from Ottessa Moshfegh\u2019s novel, is about how she does just that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Things start to change when she meets the splendidly named \u201cDr. Ms. Rebecca St. John,\u201d played by Anne Hathaway in straight-up blonde bombshell mode, sporting Marilyn hair, and smoking cigarettes the way bad women used to smoke them in movies. \u201cIt\u2019s a nasty habit,\u201d she purrs later. \u201cThat\u2019s why I like it.\u201d Dr. Ms. Rebecca St. John is the new prison psychologist, straight outta Harvard with some wild ideas about why these boys act the way they do; Eileen is immediately taken with her, and understandably so. Rebecca has the look and style of the classic femme fatale, but it\u2019s more complicated than that, since she\u2019s an educated woman in a respectable job. So she can\u2019t be up to something. Can she?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the finest qualities of this screenplay, which Moshfegh adapted with Luke Goebel, is how it both indulges in the tropes of film noir, and shakes them up. The cat-and-mouse between Rebecca and Eileen is one of the most venerable\u2014the femme fatale and the poor sap who becomes her mark\u2014but we\u2019re not entirely sure<\/em> that\u2019s what\u2019s happening, since we\u2019re also witnessing a same-sex attraction in a period in which those sorts of things weren\u2019t customarily out in the open, and certainly not in the movies. You see that hesitation and confusion in the panic that overcomes Eileen when Rebecca invites her out for a drink after work, and the excitement in her eyes when a guy at the bar gets too belligerent about cutting in on the dance floor, and Rachel elbows him right in the face. Then the song changes, and they\u2019re slow-dancing, and Eileen\u2019s head is on Rachel\u2019s shoulder, and we can be certain of one thing: in some sense or another, Eileen is in trouble. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cYou\u2019re in a good mood,\u201d her father notes. \u201cwhat\u2019s wrong with you?\u201d She can\u2019t tell him, of course, so he continues to say oblivious things like, \u201cLove will make you crazy, Eileen. You\u2019ll probably never understand that.\u201d His callousness renders her a sympathetic protagonist, even as we see, with unnervingly convincing staging, her daydreams of killing her father, or herself. You root for her anyway; her attraction is so intense, her excitement so infectious. Oldroyd (who also directed \u201cLady Macbeth\u201d) lingers on the details of their interactions\u2014a touch, a glance, a pause\u2014just as Eileen does, stages their scenes together in two-person compositions that could be covers for a pulp paperback, and when their exchanges get loaded (\u201cYou really think you\u2019re a normal person?\u201d \u201cNormal, how?\u201d), he just lets that feeling, that tension, that heat <\/em>hang in the air. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then\u2026 well. AND THEN. Moshfegh and Goebel\u2019s screenplay pulls one of the most spectacular 180s I\u2019ve ever seen in a motion picture, just a first-rate bait-and-switch, and in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, and a less accomplished cast, it could\u2019ve absolutely gone to shambles. But that\u2019s not what happens here at all; Eileen<\/em> pulls off the transition from teasing fatalism to something much doomier, and does it with panache. This singular accomplishment is best ascribed to how carefully and attentively the characters have been established until then, and that detail comes back around by the end, when it\u2019s do or die. Hathaway is spectacular, and she\u2019s in a role that feels built for the express purpose of showing what she can do, right at this moment (a midpoint, if that) of her career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the revelation here is McKenzie, whose performances can hit and miss, but has a moment of acting near the end that is absolutely astonishing, and breathtakingly simple: she’s sitting in a window, feeling one way, and slowly realizing what\u2019s actually happening. Oldroyd takes out all the sound, the marvelous Richard Reed Parry score and the crackling dialogue, and in my screening, you could have heard a pin drop. It\u2019s what great screen acting is all about.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“Eileen” is in theaters Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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