Eileen

When a movie makes you sort of sigh and say “At least it’s short,” that movie might be in trouble. Eileen is not my idea of a great time, but I can understand why others might dig it. It’s bleak and grungy, full of wet New England snow turned gray by car exhaust; the movie feels irritable, with anger governing many scenes. It left me in a ghastly mood — I felt poked and prodded by the plot turns that play with deep, dark emotions for no very good reason. Whatever happens in the film seems devoid of meaning and grace. It has a kind of integrity, though, and I can imagine mopey young viewers falling under its spell. 

The main problem with Eileen (based on the debut novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, who wrote the script with husband Luke Goebel) is that it has the tone of film noir without the mitigating pleasures — the cold, cruel brilliance, the cynical patter, the style. The dialogue in this movie tends towards the incoherently emotional. Everyone is weak and doesn’t think things through. The titular Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), 23, still lives with her drunken father (Shea Wigham), a retired cop sinking into the wastes of his own self-loathing. For work, she clerks in a boys’ prison, a grim and punitive place housing rude and terrible inmates, except for one kid whose reason for being there is more than meets the eye.

Eileen soon meets Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), a Harvard grad settling into her new job at Eileen’s prison as a psychologist. Rebecca seems an oasis of sophistication in this unnamed town in Massachusetts (the film was mostly shot in New Jersey). Everyone else is ignorant and brays in overdone accents. Set in the mid-‘60s, Eileen maroons two smart women in a time when Rebecca’s new boss says “She may be easy on the eyes, but I assure you, she’s very smart.” Eileen is something of a deranged fantasist, daydreaming about blowing her own head off or her dad’s. So it’s never quite clear whether Eileen is imagining the sapphic sparks between her and Rebecca, or whether it’s legit, or manipulated by one or the other.

Thomasin McKenzie is saddled with the worst Massachusetts accent since Julianne Moore on 30 Rock, but when she’s allowed to be quiet she scores. She and Anne Hathaway get a hushed, intimate rapport going, whispering fondly to each other. They had my permission to leave the dreary film behind and go find fulfillment in warmer climes, perhaps in a film by Greta Gerwig. God knows there’s nowhere for them to go in this film. A little over an hour in, the plot takes a pivot that struck me as flatly unbelievable, to say nothing of stupid. The movie throws away whatever McKenzie and Hathaway had built together, and we realize we’re watching a collection of self-sabotaging dimwits. Sigh. At least it’s short.

Who knows, Eileen might appeal to glum teenage nihilists. There isn’t much poetry in it, though, visual or verbal. Even when I myself was a glum teenage nihilist we had risk-taking stuff like River’s Edge, which at least was about something other than that life sucks and we’re all trying to escape it. (It also debunked that point of view, while Eileen dines out on it.) Eileen is directed (by Lady Macbeth’s William Oldroyd) as a string of blandly composed scenes heightened by abrupt gory shocks. The movie is unpleasant bordering on unsavory. It draws us closer with vague lesbian vibes and then squanders our attention on plot-centered drama that feels (despite a difficult monologue honorably delivered by Marin Ireland) pulpy and something you’d expect to find in a Lifetime movie. Eventually the film and Eileen have nowhere to go, and that’s exactly where they go.

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