PROTAGONISTS: Jessica Chastain with James McAvoy at a photocall in Cannes.
By Steven Zeitchik
Does a filmmaker seek to avoid specific vantage points entirely, keeping us at arm’s length?
It’s something first-time director Ned Benson thought about a lot about when he was developing his new relationship tale, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. And it’s something audiences might find themselves thinking about if they see the film — or, more accurately, the films.
In telling the New York-set story of the young married couple Eleanor and Conor (Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy) who split up after a tragic event, Benson actually made two movies. Subtitling one Him and the other Her, he describes the same events in each but distinguishes them by their perspectives.
In one, we largely follow the path of the title character in realms the other is not likely to know or see — say, Conor as he navigates a difficult relationship with his father (Ciaran Hinds) in Him, or Eleanor and how she interacts with her sister (Jess Weixler) after the breakup in Her.
In scenes common between the two movies, we see the same moments, but shaded differently. Each of the films also has a tone, and even a look, befitting its namesake.
This would be no small ambition in any event. But after the two films premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and were acquired by the Weinstein Co., Benson and Harvey Weinstein agreed to make a new cut that synthesised the two films into a single feature that would be a little more release-friendly. Earlier this year, Benson and his editor, Kristina Boden, set about doing just that.
That creation, called Them, arrived theatres this past weekend, where, though reviews have been mixed, it averaged a solid $17,000 on four screens in Los Angeles and New York; it will widen to about 150 screens this weekend. Him and Her will open as a double bill (sold as one ticket) on October 10.
“I wanted all three films to have their own identity but be under the umbrella of a trilogy,” Benson said.
Rigby (the title is only loosely related to the Beatles song) is more than just a nifty formal trick. By playing with perspectives, Benson is able to break free of the shackles that bind many linear two-hour movies and even to furnish an equivalent of sorts to television, in which multiple episodes and seasons allow for a far greater range of viewpoints.
More broadly, Benson’s movies raise questions relevant in this era of selfies and Vines. For all our interest in visually documenting our lives, the films implicitly ask, can we ever fully capture them?
Or, as Chastain observed: “What’s that old line? There are three sides to every story — his side, her side, and the truth?”
Benson, a longtime Hollywood screenwriter, decided to make Rigby because of his own feeling that relationships were more slippery than many stories about them acknowledged. He would hear a friend talk about a significant other and realise what a fractured view he was getting of their relationship.
It was also a personal project for him in other ways. Benson and Chastain were in a long-term relationship — they arrived in Hollywood together from New York more than a decade ago — and though the movies are not autobiographical, Benson allows that the relationship and its dissolution found its way into the work.
“You draw on your experience all over again while you’re making something like this, because you’re trying to articulate part of yourself in it,” he said. “I don’t think love goes away, it just manifests itself in different ways.”
He and Chastain (the two are now good friends) encountered skepticism as they went out to producers and financiers; cost-minded types kept telling them they liked the idea, but couldn’t it just be one movie? Which, they insisted, was exactly the opposite of the idea. (They eventually found some private backers for the modestly budgeted films, shot over a total of 40 days.)
The Weinstein Co. understands that it has an unusual challenge on its hands in getting consumers to buy a ticket for a romantic drama, then buying another for two more movies with the same characters a month later.
“We really want to event-ize it,” said the company’s head of marketing, Stephen Bruno. “The uniqueness of the release brings attention to it.” Weinstein also is working with companies like Fandango to target people who bought tickets to Them for the release next month of Him and Her.
Chastain noted that, like some fans of the experiment, she was initially skeptical of a compression, imagining it would squeeze out the delicacy of the thing. “I thought, ‘This going to be a disaster. Why do we need one version?’” she said. “And I was wrong.”
Still, she said, “I really hope people see Her and Him too.”
Benson noted that since Her and Him began screening last year, he has found that people’s views on the fictional couple were influenced by a host of factors — their own baggage, gender and relationship status, and even the order in which they saw the two films. The second movie usually won viewers’ over to that character’s side, regardless of whether the film was Him or Her.
“My point with this project is that there really is no right or wrong,” he said. “I had no interest in making assumptions about how characters cope with something. How different personalities approach the world is what brings them together in a relationship. And in a weird, ironic way, it’s what could make them end that relationship.” — Los Angeles Times/MCT
