Eileen

I'm not the biggest fan of art intentionally subverting expectations. Don't get me wrong, there's a time and a place to swerve left when the audience is expecting you to go right, but there's also a time and place where the director should pay off what's promised. Being subversive for the sake of it, or worse for the sake of antagonizing the audience, is at best risky and at worst distracting. In A Violent Nature's entire premise was a subversion of slasher movie format and, in the process of employing its genre-breaking concept, bled itself dry of actual horror. Rian Johnson has made a career of disrupting genre conventions and, for my money, has shown that sometimes being the smartest guy in the room makes you the idiot that can't read the room. I think -- and this is just my opinion here -- the line between when subversion works and when it doesn't all comes down to intentions (are you using it to explore new, unconsidered avenues of storytelling or are you just being contrarian) and the volume at which the subversion is happening (does it feel organic, or is it obvious the director is proud of their cleverness and yelling it from the mountaintops). Eileen is something of an enigma in this regard. Before I can explain how, the basic story: Eileen (played by Thomasin McKenzie) is a young woman working as a secretary in a boy's correctional facility. She lives with her alcoholic dad whom she has to take care of, has no love interest, and had to drop out of college. She hates her life, and can't see a way out. The facility gets a new psychologist, Rebecca (played by Anne Hathaway), who is older, more worldly, and not like other women of the time (the 50's). A friendship blossoms into something else, and that's where I'll leave it out of not wanting to spoil things. The ways in which the movie defies some expectations is refreshing. If Thomasin McKenzie is a petite person, and has a soft, fragile appearance; here she is given dark brown hair, which emphasizes the expectation that she will be a mousy introvert. But she has daydreams of having rough sex in public with one of the prison guards, and in the opening scene, gets so turned on watching another couple making out in a car, she has to shove a handful of snow down her pants to combat her lust. She is combative with her dad, who constantly tells her she's nothing and will never amount to anything. Her withdrawn attitude is not one of social anxiety but resignation that hers will be a life unfulfilled and lacking in love. There is some hidden darkness in her that peeks around the edges that the viewer gets a glimpse of here and there, especially after she meets Rebecca. Speaking of her, Rebecca first comes off as a Hitchcock blonde-style femme fatale. The movie introduces her getting out of a car with a shot of her legs, and when she steps out, she has platinum blonde hair done up like Marilyn Monroe in Niagara. She immediately gives off vibes of a predator like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, and yet, she's quite the opposite. She is smart and sophisticated, bold, confident, the opposite of Eileen, but not a garish caricature. For a long time, the movie doesn't give you a hint on if these women are equals, or if there is a spider/fly dynamic and which one is which. Eileen, with her thirst to get out of where she is and have a life that's always felt out of reach, could just as easily be the predator as Rebecca, the more mature and self-assured of the two, could. Hathaway and McKenzie have a great chemistry and play this roles perfectly, walking a fine line that never lets the viewer get settled into assuming what the roles will be. Then the third act happens and all hell breaks loose. This movie goes from a slow burn of a psychological drama to something much, much wilder, and the escalation is immediate. This prompts true depth of character to be revealed, and as much as you think you'll have it figured out, you won't. It's a credit again to the acting, as well as the writing, that the characters and story play out as they do and never once feel like an "I'm smarter than you" trick. It's the difference between being smart and clever. But herein lies the paradoxical portion I mentioned earlier. I felt like the movie was teasing me with opportunities it never intended to pay off. I don't mean in an unresolved plot thread way. I mean that, as subversive as this movie could be, it always felt like it was holding back and teasing ideas it never intends to explore. This isn't a case of wishing the movie were something it isn't; instead, it's wishing the movie didn't keep introducing possibilities it never intends to bring to a head. The themes of love -- what someone will do for it, where loves come from, the consequences of love -- are there, but other aspects, like obsession, desperation, and longing, are all only hinted at with little moments and passing comments, and the movie seems to be content with those teases being just that. That's exacerbated by the third act, which pulls the rug out from under the movie and goes in a whole new direction. An interesting direction that plays on what has been built, but it is a tonal shift of the most drastic order. It leaves the movie feeling wobbly and unbalanced, as if the third act is really the second, and there's a missing reel out there that brings this story to a proper conclusion instead of the "well, we're out of time, folks!" ending it has. Despite the flaws, I still think Eileen is a worthy watch. It never crosses that smart/clever line, it has oodles of atmosphere (the soundtrack and score are lush and intoxicating), the way the characters are written is intelligent, and the acting from Hathaway and McKenzie and their chemistry is electric. It does manage to overcome its flaws and be good, but you may very well end up like me also wondering what could've been had it not been so interested in teasing.