The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them is a distillation of two separate movies subtitled “Him” and “Her.” Viewers will get a chance to see the original two films in October. After watching “Them” a disturbing paradox presents itself. Admittedly, what seems like a half-baked, occasionally dull synthesis might have been caused by too harsh a pruning. The problem is “Them” hardly leaves you wanting more and hankering to watch the other two films.
Writer/director Ned Benson manages to strike an emotional chord at various stages of the film, largely due to the presence of Jessica Chastain as Eleanor Rigby, a woman struggling with the death of her child. After a quick opening scene where she and her husband Conor (James McAvoy) relate with a loving, charged-with-fun energy, Chastain’s character, Eleanor Rigby, withdraws to her parents home in Westport, Conn. Conor (James McAvoy) tries to figure out why she just jumped off the Manhattan Bridge and then after surviving, went incognito without a word to him. He sulks in his Village bar/restaurant with his bud and chef Stuart (Bill Hader), moves back in with his successful restauranteur dad (Ciaran Hinds), who’s emotionally distant, and eventually decides to basically stalk Eleanor once he gets a lead from Stuart on her whereabouts in New York. Throw in a subplot where Eleanor binds with a cynical but caring professor played by Viola Davis and you’ve got a framework that would be more promising if its fleshing out didn’t seem so much like watching our pained couple from far too great a distance. The two rarely appear onscreen together and when they do what is probably meant as an organically uncertain tenuousness on how to proceed with a reconciliation comes off more like an irresoluteness of the screenplay.
It sure is never a waste of time to watch Chastain in action, however. She displays a marvelous ability to say so much with her eyes and her body language, and the striking difference between her character before her attempted suicide and afterward is testimony to her singular talent. No slouch in the supporting role of her mom is fellow redhead and stellar thespian Isabelle Huppert.
Always an enticing performer, Huppert injects a wine-swilling, witty but ostensibly slight maternal figure with a sneaky depth. On the other side of the coin, Eleanor’s dad (William Hurt) is a shrink who speaks with such a deliberateness that this idiosyncrasy manages to disrupt whatever scene he’s in.
Incidentally, his last name is Rigby and he couldn’t resist naming his daughter after the Beatles song from Revolver. That novelty is merely lost in the shuffle of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them–she may as well have been named Penny Lane or Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds for all it matters. Unfortunately expectations that the two forthcoming films will satisfactorily expound on the themes presented here seem remote. When “Them” itself contains more than a little flab and is in need of further editing, it’s hard to get jazzed about two more hours of this, Chastain’s wondrousness notwithstanding.