There comes a time in each actor’s life—or, let’s say, each film star’s life—when they need to forsake the stress of sustaining bankable relatability and simply embrace the bizarre. That’s the thought I had whereas watching Anne Hathaway within the movie Eileen, a curious literary adaptation from Girl Macbeth director William Oldroyd that premiered right here on the Sundance Movie Competition on Saturday.
Hathaway is just not the lead of the movie, which is tailored from the Ottessa Moshfegh novel, however she is the driving power of it. She performs the fabulously named Rebecca Saint John, a Hitchcock-blonde psychiatrist who’s accepted a place at a shabby juvenile jail in coastal Massachusetts, someday within the early Nineteen Sixties (or so). She instantly catches the attention of the movie’s titular character, performed by Thomasin McKenzie. The place Eileen is mousy, bitter, furtively attractive, Rebecca is a free sophisticate, swanning into rooms and saying what she feels—and, it begins to appear, taking what she needs.
Given the apparent attraction between these two mid-century ladies, one older and blonde, the opposite youthful and brunette, it’s simple to start evaluating Eileen to Todd Haynes’s Carol. There are echoes of that earnest romance right here, however Eileen (provided that it’s primarily based on a Moshfegh novel) is a extra sordid affair than that. Nonetheless, it’s a pleasure watching Hathaway do an addled riff on Cate Blanchett’s iconic object of obsession.
It is a vein the actor works nicely in, sultry however with an fringe of tenuous pretension. It’s finally not very clear who Rebecca truly is, how a lot of her smoothness is an act. She does messy issues within the movie, however even then she carries herself with an otherworldly glide that distinguishes her from Eileen’s small-town skitter. The movie permits Hathaway to play two attention-grabbing sides, the costume jewellery and the actual fur. It’s one in every of her most assured performances to this point, saucy and enjoyable however vibrating with grim rigidity. I’d watch her in a dozen extra issues like Eileen, so completely suited is she to the movie’s mixture of melodrama silliness and real grit.
Sadly, she’s not sufficient to maintain the movie round her. Oldroyd’s oddball impulses serve Eileen not even half in addition to they did Girl Macbeth. Eileen’s brisk 97 minutes conclude, jarringly, midway by way of a sentence. The film is intentionally alienating, however Oldroyd has not executed sufficient to earn our devotion earlier than he pulls the rug out and flashes us a smirk. The film is a provocative tease that doesn’t have the stuff to again up the joke, attempt as its recreation performers would possibly to make all of it imply one thing.
Complementing Hathaway’s grand flounce is McKenzie’s pinched, nervous power, which she employs much more efficiently than she did in 2021’s Final Night time in Soho. Shea Whigham, enjoying Eileen’s alcoholic retired cop dad, offers good New England bitterness with a contact of the brute poet. (He’s virtually pretty much as good on the regional accent recreation as the nice Siobhan Fallon Horgan, who virtually walks off with the film after a mere few line readings.) Marin Eire, a legendary downtown theater actor who’s been shifting towards the middle of the indie movie world in recent times, delivers a vicious monologue with an admirable lack of self-importance.
If solely the movie higher served its ensemble. As an alternative, it tosses away all that positive work with a snicker. It’s doable for a film to exist solely as a puckish wink and a nudge, a short diversion designed to ship a punchline. However the stability is off in Eileen; its blitheness is extra inept than winningly insouciant. It’s uncommon to really feel this manner at a movie pageant, however I discovered myself wishing that Eileen was longer. Its fertile territory is woefully underdeveloped—a lot of the movie’s innate potential goes unutilized. At the least there’s Hathaway’s glowing star flip, each reminding us of what we knew she may do and introducing us to one thing new.
