Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

There are multiple levels of potential difficulty for viewers of Pieces of a Woman, an exploration of grief in the wake of a young mother losing her baby in childbirth. That alone is enough to be a kind of heaviness that some may not be down for. On top of that, the parents are played by a very good Vanessa Kirby, and an adequate Shia LaBeouf. So, in the case of LaBeouf, here we are tested with a case of how to separate “art” from “the artist,” given recent revelations of his abusive behavior. It doesn’t particularly help that in one scene he throws a blow-up exercise ball right into Vanessa Kirby’s face.

But, okay, let’s just say we can look past who Shia Labeouf is in real life, and take his character, Sean, at face value onscreen. Sean is racked with grief himself, and much of the story here explores his heartache as well. It strains his relationship with his wife, Martha, as anyone might expect. Complicating things for good measure is Martha’s casually passive-aggressive mother, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth is one character I found to be a bit of a needless distraction. She’s played by the legendary Ellen Burstyn, and very well, but did director Kornél Mundruczó think much about how old she is? She must be playing far younger than her actual age, because Burstyn just turned 88 in December. Vanessa Kirby was born in 1988, when Burstyn was 55 years old. She’s quite easily old enough to be her grandmother, and not an especially young one at that. Curiously, Elizabeth’s aging and early signs of dementia become a minor plot point, even though presumably we should be assuming Elizabeth is in her sixties; perhaps her seventies at the most.

Elizabeth also drives much of the plot overall, as she obsesses with using the in-home birth midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), as a scapegoat, someone to be “accountable” for the death of the baby. The story meanders toward and ending in a courtroom, which is the furthest thing from anyone’s mind during the birth scene itself.

I should mention that birth scene, though, because without it Pieces of a Woman would be a much lesser movie. It’s a single-shot, thirty minutes of intense storytelling that starts hopefully, gradually moves to shaking ground and finally winds up harrowing. It’s virtuoso filmmaking I wish the rest of the movie could have hoped to match. There is an emotional blowout much later in an extended dinner scene at Elizabeth’s house, but it also includes a monologue by Elizabeth that doesn’t quite ring true. She tells extraordinary details about how she survived her own nearly tragic birth, and all I could think was: she really never told her daughter this story before?

Pieces of a Woman also features comedian Iliza Shleshinger, unrecognizable as Martha’s sister, and Succession’s Sarah Snook as their lawyer cousin. The movie really belongs to Vanessa Kirby, though, who is up to the task. To its credit, this film effectively illustrates how grief can make people behave in often incomprehensible ways. There’s an incredibly awkward (in more ways than one) scene in which Sean is begging Martha to touch him, until they make a failed attempt at having sex. In another scene between Sean and cousin Suzanne, Sean, who builds bridges, gives a pretty succinct explanation in layman’s terms for the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse.

Sean is from Seattle, but it takes until the courtroom sequence at the end for his and Martha’s home to be in Suffolk County, Massachussets—location of Boston—although apparently the movie was mostly shot in Montreal. I know I’m certainly in the minority as someone who thinks about these things, but production details aside, I can’t figure out why we needed that monologue about the bridge collapse. (Which, incidentally, occurred when Ellen Burstyn was eight years old! She was in Detroit.)

In any event, once that memorable birth sequence is over—all of which comes before the film’s title card, fully a quarter of the way through the movie—Pieces of a Woman meanders, just as much as I am with this review. It’s compelling enough, but in the end it leaves you wishing it had a bit more cohesion in its linear narrative. Although it’s held together with fairly loose ties, at least it rests on very strong performances.

*This movie barely holds itself together. Which I guess is part of its intrigue.*

Overall: B