It’s not just “Carol but in Prison.” Wife’s first reaction as we were getting up to leave in stunned silence, reeling from our first pick of the vacation, wondering what we had wrought upon ourselves was, “We should’ve seen Wonka”.
Happy Twixmas! As predicted, the holidays have allowed for a few more movies as we quickly approach our 350th post. The rationale for seeing Eileen was that it’s got two amazing actors in it, Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway as a blonde. Carol day is on the 22nd, so this seemed like a fitting homage to the great adaptation of Christmases past.
The third act’s twist “feels like more of a trick on the audience than a trick on the character,” Wife muse-fumed as we drove home in otherwise steely silence. “There’s not enough going on in the third act,” which I’m going to tell you about now because you haven’t seen this movie already and you’re not going to. The first two acts of this movie ARE actually a lot like Carol but in prison. Anne Hathaway’s character Rebecca is the first female psychiatrist in a youth prison and she befriends the hypersexual, repressed, and overly imaginative Thomasin McKenzie, the eponymous Eileen. They go for drinks. They kiss. Rebecca disappears for the holidays. Then, out of the blue, a call! An invitation for Christmas dinner! At her home! Drinks! And then the twist, which is an excellent one. This isn’t her home. And there’s a woman tied up downstairs. The same woman whose son Eileen has been obsessing over for months, enough so, to comb through his file and accidentally turn Rebecca onto his case, as Wife points out.
Anyway, there’s a long, tense monologue at gunpoint about child abuse which gets pretty graphic, and then there’s a murder, and then a bittersweet, kind of ambiguous, but not really, ending. Which is too bad, because there are moments of hilarity and brilliance in the first two acts! The dance sequence from the trailer is lovely and fun, not the letdown that the over-hyped dance sequence of Poor Things. Her overactive imagination leads to some neat scenes–although I’m beyond tired of using blood splatter from direct gunshots to the head for the shock factor.
The period nature of this movie, by the way, seems almost completely superfluous. Possibly because the whole queer element of this movie feels a little roped in, as Wife also points out. Why, she asks, was Rebecca acting interested in her at all in the first place, and why does it go away if she doesn’t come back at the end to be with Eileen? There’s just too much that doesn’t seem to fit with the internal logic of the characters, which is going to be a theme for Wife’s arguments against some of the lazier writing of this past week’s movies.
But one of the things that was really magical about Wife grousing about the third act was that as we drove home, she wrote a better ending that I think could’ve actually made this movie amazing. Here’s the edit: Rebecca calls Eileen over for Christmas dinner. Eileen, like in the original movie, writes down the address, 32 Maple Ave, and goes over. La dee dah, Rebecca is awkward on their date and THEN we cut to the dad drunkenly getting up for another drink. He checks the note next to the phone and immediately freaks out, trying to get a car. Cut back to Rebecca with her big twist. They go down to the basement blah blah blah, and cut back to Dad who’s made it to the house, because he recognized it was not actually where Rebecca lives, because he IS a good cop and he REMEMBERS his coworker’s address. He intervenes just after we have maybe an abridged admission of guilt and the gunshot. The former chief is gonna be able to make it all go away just like he’s been doing with his antics in the neighborhood all throughout the movie. The phone rings on the hook and he goes to answer it. Fade to black. Roll credits.
If you leave this movie without seeing the ending, effectively you make it Carol but in prison and that’s probably a better edit of the film than the final cut.
