I’m finishing off the Best Leading Actress nominees today. These days, Vanessa Kirby is probably best recognized for playing Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of The Crown, but my go-to association for her is always going to be the first role I saw her in, which was Estella in Great Expectations. I hadn’t heard anything about this movie before she got nominated for it, but it’s a powerful film about an extremely difficult subject.
After traumatically losing their baby during a difficult home birth, Martha and Sean are struggling to cope. While Sean is forever searching for some sort of “action” to make things better and Martha’s mother is hyperfocused on seeing the midwife punished in court, Martha herself isn’t ready to think about retribution or “getting past it” or moving forward or much of anything. Numb in her grief, she drifts ahead and struggles against the many people around her who are trying to “handle” how she interacts with her trauma.
First things first. When the very first face I saw onscreen was that of Shia LeBeouf, I didn’t say anything out loud (I was watching with someone else,) but I did think, Oh, goddamnit, very loudly. It aggravates me when abusers show up in movies and shows, especially when I didn’t realize they were in the project, and it aggravates me even more when it’s a female-centered story. This movie would’ve been made before the allegations against LeBeouf came out, so I don’t really blame the production for casting him, but he was still an unwelcome sight (though he did make Sean even more punchable for me.)
Despite that pall cast on the proceedings, this is a well-made film that handles a delicate topic with a lot of nuance. It looks at multiple sides of grief and the unfortunate fractures that can result when people grieve in incompatible ways. Sean’s constant need to be doing something is suffocating to Martha, who still needs time to just sit in her sadness, and even though her mother’s litigious quest for revenge is seemingly carried out on Martha’s behalf, it’s not something Martha asked for or wants. And because none of them recognize how one another need to grieve, it causes them all to hurt each other amid their own hurt.
There are a lot of little details in the film that I really appreciate, like Martha’s postpartum underwear and the way her milk comes through when she sees a child while she’s out shopping. Also, this film does a really nice job of laying out the dynamics of this family in subtly-effective ways. You can tell there’s layers of stuff going on between Martha, Sean, and her mom, and things just get thornier when you throw in Martha’s sister, brother-in-law, and cousin. The film demonstrates their dynamics really well without spelling anything out.
Naturally, the main attraction in the cast is Vanessa Kirby as Martha, and she’s excellent. She really captures that numb-to-the-point-of-paralysis feeling, which causes Sean to accuse Martha of being “cold,” but at the same time, you see these continual small hints of her heartbreak, everything she’s trying not to show just so she can keep dragging herself through another day. There’s a definite “For Your Consideration” scene near the end, and Kirby nails it. Additionally, the film features Ellen Burstyn, who’s very effective as Martha’s domineering father, and Molly Parker (who I love-love-loved in Iron Jawed Angels) as the midwife.
Warnings
Strong thematic elements, sexual content (including one disturbing scene in which consent felt very secondary to proceedings,) language, a graphic depiction of a birth, drinking/smoking/drug use, and the involvement of an alleged domestic abuser.
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