How many different ways can you tell the same story? That’s a question first-time director Ned Benson hoped to answer with his ambitious collection of films called The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. Starring Jessica Chastain in the title role and James McAvoy as her husband Connor, the films tell the story of a young couple’s response to the tragic death of their young son.
Benson initially planned to only make two films, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him. As one can tell by the titles, they tell the story from the different points of view of the characters. They are almost entirely different movies. Eleanor responds to their son’s death by trying to commit suicide. When that doesn’t work, she decides to restart her life, shutting Connor out and moving back with her intelligentsia parents.
For Connor, he tries to just move on, an idea that seems foreign to Eleanor. His film is more of a mystery, as he searches for Eleanor.
When The Weinstein Company picked up the film after last year’s Toronto Film Festival, they had Benson create a two-hour mash-up movie called The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them. It guts out Benson’s unique idea, turning the film into a run-of-the-mill indie romance movie and it just doesn’t work. Him and Her are such vastly different movies that seeing them smushed together is uncomfortable. I can understand why the Weinsteins may have wanted a shorter, more commercial cut, but it really takes too much away from Benson’s idea.
The acting across the two films is top-notch and I’m sure any first-time director would kill to have a cast like this. Chastain is brilliant in every scene and McAvoy plays the clueless man perfectly. Chastain, who is a co-producer on the film, helped lure in a fantastic supporting cast that includes her The Help co-star Viola Davis and her Juilliard classmade Jess Weixler. There’s also Isabelle Huppert and William Hurt as Eleanor’s parents and Ciaran Hinds as Connor’s father. Bill Hader plays Connor’s best friend.
Thankfully, TWC and Anchor Bay included all three films so you can see how differently the story is told in each way. Benson even used different takes to show how Connor and Eleanor perceive each moment differently. As McAvoy and Chastain explain in a Q&A session included on the Them disc, it really was like making two different movies.
The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby is a unique lesson in storytelling. All three films movie in the same directions, but it’s the journeys that are different. “Tragedy is a foreign country,” Hurt tells Chastain at one point, and Benson shows the different ways to explore it.
The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby is out on Blu-ray on Feb. 3.