“The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” is a classic narrative detailing the pain of modern romance wrapped up in a deceptively modern bow. The film, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on September 12, represents a hybridization of two separate films — “Him” and “Her” — both of which screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2013 and tell the story of the relationship between the title character (Jessica Chastain) and Conor Ludlow (James McAvoy) from their own very different perspectives.
Despite the fragmented construction of the new version, which takes the viewer through the aftermath of the couple’s breakup with assorted flashbacks and quietly revealed details sprinkled audaciously throughout, writer and director Ned Benson is not shy about nodding to the simplicity at the core of his film. Look closely and you’ll notice some telling, if trivial, references — a poster for Claude Leloach’s “A Man and a Women” (1966) adorns Eleanor’s childhood bedroom, while a poster for Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculin Féminin” (1966) is seen hanging over the couch in the couple’s former apartment. “Eleanor Rigby,” while not necessarily resembling those two films in formal or narrative ways, is using their titles to highlight its main concern: the disparate male and female experiences.
Maybe the two longer, original versions of the film played back to back would have highlighted this more interestingly. As it stands now, “Eleanor Rigby” appears to be a compression, and the result leaves the film seeming more conventional than it may have originally intended to be. We don’t feel the weight of time that the two separate films would have produced. Not having seen the “Him” and “Her” versions, my guess is that the film suffers from a unique problem — the transfer to one film was too seamless. It smoothed out the rough edges and merged the two perspectives into one. What we’re watching is not the agony of post-relationship life told from two different angles, but one, which in a sense is every other movie about life after love.
Knowing that there are other, more challenging versions of this film that exist (and hopefully will screen for the public), it’s hard to watch this newly crafted merger and not imagine what was left out, or what would have been better. There are lines of dialogue that are extremely silly (“There’s only one heart in this body, have mercy on me”) and an aimless subplot featuring Viola Davis as a sarcastic Cooper Union professor who warms up to Eleanor and offers guidance (scolding her for being part of the “generation of too many choices”). In its duel-perspective original, maybe these elements were presented less as fact and more as the product of a shaky memory. We all look back on relationships through a hazy lens, remembering and misremembering most of what happened. Maybe Conor remembers his relationship with Eleanor as being filled with joyful runs through the park and cheesy lines of faux-poetic reverie, and maybe Eleanor remembers that those lines of dialogue were cheesy and left her annoyed.
“Eleanor Rigby” is now something different. It’s a very sad movie (a few people were openly weeping during the screening I attended), and you can imagine that the studio wanted to cut down on some of the more depressing aspects, or at least rein in those already in place. But in the process, it seems that they’ve stripped the film of its most exciting attribute. We’re left with the story of one, which is something we’ve all seen and experienced. We don’t need to see it again.
