EILEEN @ NASHVILLE FILM FESTIVAL
Because film festivals are mostly about independent films, the actors and actresses who comprise the A-list are not usually present on film festival screens. My ears, therefore, pricked when I saw that one of this year’s films would feature Anne Hathaway, the pale, winnowy ingenue who has been a known commodity at my house since my daughter, as a teenage, developed a fondness for The Princes Diaries and, acting on that fondness, watched it again and again. Hathaway has built a career playing the charming heroine, the damsel in distress (although in these modern times, she tends to save herself), the girl who could make your day by laughing at your jokes. In William Oldroyd’s Eileen, based on the Ottessa Moshfegh novel of the same name, she has matured beyond the winnowy heroine into a complex, enigmatic adult–and she’s not even the main character.
The titular Eileen is played by Thomasin McKenzie, late of arthouse heavy hitters like Jojo Rabbit and Last Night In Soho; Thomasin is still in Winnowy Heroine mode, and for this story, she needs to be. Her Eileen Dunlop is a young woman working as a receptionist at a juvenile facility in Massachusetts in 1969, and her life is awful–and endless circle of thankless work at the prison, and taking care of (eg, buying booze for) her father, a retired police officer, who is verbally abusive to Eileen on the occasions that he is in fact conscious. Her only outlets are pining for one Leonard Polk, a sad-eyed inmate at the facility, and copiously masturbating; the very first shot of the film finds Eileen sitting in her car watching a couple in another car make out, and her response is, inexplicably, to grab a handful of snow from outside the car and shovel it into her pants. It’s clearly an awful life, and we need to feel for the person living it. We do, in her case.
One fine day at the facility, the longtime in-house psychiatrist retires, and there is then a reception for his replacement, who will be the first female member of the staff in a capacity other than secretarial–Dr. Rebecca St John, played by Hathaway with platinum blonde hair and red lipstick she leaves on her cigarette filters. Eileen’s reaction to the new doc is a perpetual doe-eyed shock, one that could easily be mistaken for a crush if we didn’t already know about Leonard; then again, it almost appears as though the attraction may run the other way–St John takes Dunlop under her wing as readily as Dunlop is to be taken. In an extended set piece, we see St John invite Dunlop out for a drink; the two ladies fight off drunk townies, drink together, dance together (St John’s idea), and kiss outside the bar (also St John’s idea). Eileen finds herself barely sober enough to drive home afterwards, and she doesn’t seem wholly drunk on booze.
Unfortunately, she is drunk, and drives her car onto the front yard of her house, throws up, and passes out, none of which is missed by her father (Shea Whigham, brilliant here). His tirade at her–which includes throwing things at her–further drives home the misery of her life, but at the same time strengthens her resolve to find some new way to live, and if that new way involves Dr St John, so be it.
Now. I have a challenge before me here. I try to tell you as much as I can about a film when I review it; if, however, you are likely to see Eileen, I really can’t go a lot farther here. There are a few more narrative strands I can bring up, I suppose, three to be specific. One of Dr St John’s main tasks is to get Leonard Polk, he of the sad eyes, to actually discuss his crime, to explain why he found his father (a cop, like Dunlop pere) asleep in bed and stabbed him repeatedly, about which he has said nothing to no one. Because that means she has to access Polk’s files, including crime scene pictures, she enlists Eileen to retrieve those files, and does not question it when Eileen decides to peruse them herself. That’s narrative thread one. Thread two concerns Eileen’s father, who winds up hospitalized after a drunken fall, and given the warning that he’s going to die if he doesn’t sober up; also, because of his afternoon habit of sitting in his upstairs window and waving his old service revolver at kids in the street, he is forced to turn over his gun to Eileen. In other words, Eileen now has a gun, in addition to her car, about which I forgot to share a fun detail: the exhaust comes in through her vents, so if she doesn’t drive with the windows open, she’ll die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Relevant? Ask Chekhov.
Narrative thread three, I think I’ll go further with than I had planned. St John, suddenly, before Christmas, announces a leave of absence, which means Eileen has to go some time without seeing her…and then does see her, when St John invites her to her house. So far, it probably sounds as if I have been describing a quirky, indie take on a rom-com, possibly one with queer themes. That’s because so far–by this point in watching Eileen–the film has looked like and presented itself as a quirky, indie take on a rom-com, possibly one with queer themes. All of that comes to a screeching halt when Dr St John makes a bit of a confession to Eileen, specifically that the house they’re in is not Dr St John’s house: it’s the Polk residence, and Mrs Polk–Leonard’s mother, the wife of the slain cop–is tied up in the basement.
There is a moment onscreen of total silence after this, mostly devoted to a reaction shot of Eileen, and that moment was one of the moments it’s still worth seeing movies in theatres–you could feel the air suddenly leaving the room in that theatre as much as you could see it on screen. Further than that, I will not say, except that Oldroyd has taken Luke Goebel’s taut screenplay and Nick Emerson’s deceptively repetitive editing and made a movie that turns on its own head, and depicts a bigger story arc for Eileen than we thought; I assumed her life would change by the movie’s end, but no one viewing Eileen will be ready for how much it changes, and certainly not for how it changes.