Pieces of a Woman (2020)

 Okay, so this film was not what I expected.

First of all, the birth scene is only twenty-one minutes long, not as long as I was led to believe and it is actually a work of art (despite the constant complaints of and how awful this is), showing how deeply connected and in love Martha (Vanessa Kirby) and Sean (Shia LaBeouf) actually are. And the baby isn't a stillbirth. The heart rate drops quickly, and midwife Eva (Molly Parker) urges Sean to call 911, but the baby is born breathing and crying but tragically turns blue in the arms of her parents, dying off-screen.

And then, they are left to deal with the unspeakable aftermath. While Martha returns to work and sniffing apples as though she can't bare to have her arms empty, Sean's six years of sobriety is tossed aside without so much as a scolding or acknowledgement from any of the other characters. Meanwhile, Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn), Martha's mother, wants justice done and enlists her niece, Suzanne (Sarah Snook) to handle the criminal proceedings against Eva. 

Now I understand that everyone deals with grief in different ways but forcing your partner to feel your penis is never a good idea and is borderline assault. But while Martha and Sean learn how to re-live in this world, Elizabeth is ultimately still calling the shots, cutting Sean a huge check to leave Martha and never come back. It's because he's blue-collared not college educated. He leaves without settling anything with Martha. While I ultimately did not root for that relationship, neither of them got the closure they both desperately needed. 

However, Kirby's best scene is when she has to testify on the stand bleeding into finally developing a picture of her baby girl and admitting that she doesn't blame the midwife for what happened. And from all my experience (from watching every single minute of Call the Midwife), I don't feel that Eva made an error. That being said, had the medical emergency happened in a hospital, the little one would likely have survived. 

My biggest problem came at the very end, with Martha appearing to make a swift recovery after acknowledging that she doesn't blame the midwife, and then the epilogue which shows a small girl climbing an apple tree and then Martha calling her home. Clearly, this is Martha's child but the father is unknown and that bothers me. That being said, at least this is a happy ending and after constant tragedy, it was desperately needed. 

Though I found the story a simple one, I still had no problem with that. My problem was rather with the vast amount of underdeveloped characters, including Martha's sister (Iliza Schlesinger) and even her lawyer cousin, Suzanne. Martha's father is never mentioned and we don't learn what exactly her job is either and we should have been able to gather that information through context clues. And I hated what Sean's character became. Still, the acting was brilliant, namely from Kirby as she fully embodied her role entirely, breathing life into a comatose film. Grade: B-

Side Notes:

-While I adore Ellen Burstyn, she was too old for her character and the character (born during the Holocaust) was too old to have daughters that young. 

-Sean and Suzanne are both scum for starting a sexual relationship while Martha is still grieving.

-We never fully learn why Martha wanted a home birth and if it was just to piss off her mother, then that was not a good reason. 

-Martha describes Sean as her partner but she has a ring on her ring finger so I also felt like that relationship needed to be further fleshed out. 

-The camera work in this film is also incredible, with tons of long shots.

-No one ever needs to see LaBeouf's penis, for the record. 

-Martha ends up donating the little body to science but somehow also has ashes to scatter? This was just something else that I needed an explanation to.