For five years now, there hasn’t been a film that’s loomed over my head quite like Pieces of a Woman. Please don’t read that statement as endorsement or condemnation. What it means to me is something more sinister, more a reflection of failure on my behalf to achieve the most basic of utilities. Again, don’t look too deep into the film, because that’s not where the answer is. You won’t find the puzzle piece that makes everything to follow make sense. All you have to know for now is that Pieces of a Woman is single-handedly responsible for ending my career as a film critic.
Let me back up for a minute. This isn’t a story of being blacklisted by anybody. Everything that happened was by my own hand in the privacy of my own house. However, it’s still painful to think of early 2021 and see Pieces of a Woman continually face me down during awards season, one that I felt shouldn’t have existed at all, and let me know that everyone else could assemble a couple hundred words stating whether they liked it or not. There were institutions willing to nominate them for awards who could summarize it in even shorter space. This shouldn’t be so hard! And yet, it’s the film that ended my career as a film critic.
To those who have been reading The Memory Tourist since its launch in 2020, the narrative may be a bit more obvious. Following over a year of the Covid-19 pandemic and at least nine months of lockdown, my head wasn’t in a good place. Despite writing over 2,000 words a day between March and November of that year, I quickly spiralled by December, finding myself preparing for a more pronounced depression, the worst that I ever had, where I was stuck in constant dissociation and couldn’t escape negative thinking. Sometimes I acted out simply to feel something greater, which only backfired when I became paranoid that I might’ve been talking to nobody on social media except for pixels. If you want to know why I’m sensitive to websites like Twitter becoming overrun by bots and AI, it’s because I know that fear of isolation, of which I have been fighting to escape for almost four years now, with some success.
And yet, I don’t know that one can fully understand the damage of depression until assessing it in hindsight. Few moments felt indicative of how difficult the period was than the day after I saw Pieces of a Woman on Netflix. By all accounts, I would give it a positive review. There’s nothing all that difficult about trying to understand its appeal. Even if I wanted to write a banal, “Vanessa Kirby was good in it,” that would be better than what happened. Mind you, this was roughly a month after I had reached burnout on The Memory Tourist to the point that I couldn’t express myself in any meaningful way.
As a result, my other websites suffered. For a significant portion of my adult life, I was known as a movie critic. Even in high school, people nicknamed me “Ebert” because I could spill a few words on new releases. I was published on a few websites, had gone to Sundance, and even had a significant reputation for my Oscar prognostication website The Oscar Buzz, then going on eight years and preparing to cross off every candidate for Best Picture as I paid attention to awards shows and reviews. It was business as usual and, if nothing else, this would be a cakewalk given that everything (at the time) was available via streaming. Theaters hadn’t opened up fully and all I had to do was track things down from my couch. Pieces of a Woman being on Netflix seemed like an easy one-two punch where the review would be up in a matter of days.
It wasn’t the first review that I had written for the season. If you go back, you’ll see that a handful from the time existed. However, I think certain subtext could be read into some of my pieces, notably Mank, where I seemed hellbent on acknowledging how it failed to depict depression in a significant way. I’m not sure if I ever wrote a review for Another Round, but that’s another one that annoyed me because the wounds felt a bit too self-inflicted. Was I engaging with art critically or projecting? Part of me is embarrassed to check my Letterboxd from the time, but I’m sure there’s some reactionary nonsense on there.
So why did Pieces of a Woman end everything? I think it was simply luck of the draw by that point. It was the middle of January. I had a routine on how reviews came out which, at the time, were on the shorter side at five to eight paragraphs. There was no pressure to stray from that formula. The film was rated four out of five stars in my head. There should’ve been enough to get my point across.
And yet, one of the scariest moments of my life came in trying to write that review. As I sat with the text keys flashing before me, I attempted to find the groove by writing the first few sentences. Usually, something clicks after three sentences and a direction begins to take shape. I may change it significantly afterward, but there is at least something to reflect confidence in my skills.
I don’t know if you’ve found yourself facing an existential crisis, but it’s unpleasant. As someone who had written since I was a child, finding it difficult to start a paragraph brings your whole life into question. For over an hour, I sat writing out that opening paragraph, never being satisfied with where things were going. There never was a second paragraph. All that I could do was erase and start over. I’m by no means a perfectionist, more someone who craves experimentation and just trying things out. Still, there was something about Pieces of a Woman that remains impenetrable for basic criticism. I would experience it again shortly after with Promising Young Woman, but at least there I had a competent Letterboxd piece to fall back on.
To not do the most basic craft of a film critic ate at me and only got worse as the depression became more centered. I recognize that a major issue with running The Oscar Buzz in early 2021 was that I was dispassionate at that point. My mindset was that the pandemic negated any need to celebrate cinema and that, for this particular time and place, should be cancelled. Again, when you feel like the thing you’ve dedicated a significant portion of your life to doesn’t matter, it makes you wonder why you’d continue doing such useless work.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t watch The Oscars or thought that Nomadland was phenomenal. However, the damage was done, and any conflict was with myself. I couldn’t continue faking the enthusiasm nor write reviews that were even close to half-hearted. As a result, I took some time away from the job to focus on myself. After a month or however long, one thing became clear… The Oscar Buzz, the most successful writing project I had ever done, was going to have to end for the betterment of me and my audience. I couldn’t let grievances translate to quality decline. And, symbolically, it was all Pieces of a Woman’s fault.
Anyone who has read The Memory Tourist will recognize that film criticism has reentered my portfolio in the years since. I’d argue that a lot of it is on par, if not better, with what I was writing all along. However, I think the proverbial “dream” was over. I would still be a writer – it’s the one thing impossible to remove from me – but days of dreaming about Oscar prognostication were over. I have had periods where I miss writing for The Oscar Buzz, but I am too traumatized to restart because I know how much it’ll just feel like a desperate shilling. Also, I just don’t care to see everything in a timely manner anymore.
So why write this? Why rope Pieces of a Woman into this essay about a writer’s block that has clearly recovered? To summarize, it feels like unfinished business. While not as scary as the days of starting at a blank screen, the idea that nothing transpired from that experience haunts me just a little, and I knew there would have to be a significant period to remedy this misfortune. Even if it meant zilch in the grand scheme of things, there is that need to get a review for Pieces of a Woman out of my head just to appease some irrational demons. I wouldn’t say it’s significant enough to warrant this emotion in me, and yet it’s something that just needs to escape to the real world, reminding me that I am capable of doing this.
For whatever reason, I have long romanticized the idea that it would take five years for society to stabilize after the COVID-19 outbreak. I believed it would take a lot longer to find a vaccination and also create enough immunity to have everybody live a normal-ish life. I know that long-haulers are still suffering, and I’ve contracted the virus three times, but there was hope that, by 2025, everything would have worked itself out.
Do I believe that? In the sense that fatalities have shrunk significantly. I wouldn’t say everything has completely stabilized, but things are better. At least, I feel better. Along with being a quaint halfway mark to the decade, five years felt like a significant time to review the film because the dust has settled. I’ll be judging it less under the pressure of meeting a deadline and more completing something personal. I’m not trying to please a system that I now feel detached from due to aforementioned social media outbursts. All that I have is myself and this movie that I still believe I will watch and enjoy, possibly with more enthusiasm than I had back then.
All I can say at this time is that a Pieces of a Woman essay is coming. First, I need to watch it and regain that perspective to craft a few words. However, I’m thrilled to get to that next stage and potentially run out the gate with hundreds of words. I’m aware of the irony of being unable to write a review for a movie about grief during a depression. Still, I wonder if I’ll get caught up with every uncomfortable feeling I had at the time, not able to fully disconnect this tragic little movie from that part of my life.
For now, I say that challenge is accepted. I’m not worried about it going viral or reaching half as many readers as The Oscar Buzz still does over four years into its demise. I wish I had those numbers now, but that’s how things go sometimes. I’m happier now, writing material that makes me happy and, most of all, makes me curious to revisit long after the fact. I’m not saying everything is a hit, but it’s at least eclectic. I hope that will be enough motivation to get something out there so that I can move on, satisfied that I finally have an idea of what I always wanted to say. Stay tuned. I’m not sure when things will drop, but I’m predicting soon.
Comments
Post a Comment