When Subjectivity Is the Subject: Film Review of ‘The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby’

Stephen Wozniak

The subjective is all a matter of perspective. This notion drives Filmmaker Ned Benson’s remarkable feature film debut The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them. Or is this his third feature? Prior to Them, which stars Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy, Benson wrote and directed The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him. These two films present an intentionally lopsided story from both halves of a young couple whose lives separate after the loss of their infant son.

When the Weinstein Company purchased Her and Him at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, an executive decision was made to combine the films and reduce the running time for easier viewer consumption. The result is Them, which provides audiences with a delicate, tragic and elegant piece of cinema that highlights how each of us subjectively sees life.

The movie opens with a late-night dine-and-dash, as a mischievous married couple, Eleanor and Connor, playfully test their mettle against the establishment. After their escape, they laugh and kiss in a nearby park before the narrative shifts its perspective to Eleanor and her attempted suicide jump from a Manhattan bridge in an unspecified place and time. As she later recovers at her family’s suburban Connecticut home, we discover what happened via a series of dialogue-peppered scenes between friends, family, co-workers, teachers and others populating Eleanor’s world.

Them also enters Connor’s world and explores the loss of his and Eleanor’s baby son. Connor runs a failing café bar in the city with his best friend Stuart (played by “SNL” alum Bill Hader), and as Connor contemplates closing the place down, the friends talk about love, loss and separation. Stuart’s comical advice is a highlight, as it features song lyrics from Pet Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield.” Throughout the film, the people in Eleanor and Connor’s world have their own flaws and compromised life experiences, humanizing their responses to the couple’s tragic loss.

The film score created Composer/Producer Son Lux provides hauntingly mournful yet enchanting atmosphere to the story. And Cinematographer Christopher Baluvelt elegantly captures both present-day and flashback moments, as the cool colors representing Connor’s point of view sharply contrast the balmy warmth of Jessica’s experience. But it is the acting of the two leads that provides the momentum to make the movie sing. Chastain and McAvoy have created their best performances to date. Ripe with emotion, they convey such a strong connection between their characters that it’s truly tough to believe that the actors only share a few scenes together. Other performance highlights include Isabelle Huppert as Eleanor’s lamenting French mother and William Hurt as Eleanor’s benevolent scholar father.

To understand and connect with the characters inhabiting The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, it simply takes acceptance. In life, we trade our perspectives of those around us in order to know who they indeed are, and accepting their experiences will bring us closer together. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them closes the gap between Her and Him, as Eleanor and Connor learn to accept the truths about others and themselves.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby opens in select movie theaters nationwide on September 12.