Directed by: Lynne Ramsay
Distributed by: Mubi
Written by Anna Harrison
40/100
I am, for better or worse, one of those people who enjoys reading source material before watching an adaptation. Often, I find that it enhances my viewing experience, and this habit has made me a better filmgoer and critic as it has forced me to think about what sets the written word apart from the visual world of film, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Other times, I end up with a superiority complex and say annoying things like, “The book is better.”
Well, folks, the book is better.
Ariana Harwicz’s “Die My Love” is a nonstop assault on the reader, its flow-of-consciousness first person jumping between multiple perspectives and only ever letting up for a break when a new chapter begins. Its main character, an unnamed woman experiencing postpartum psychosis, fantasizes about wild animals having orgies. She compares her son to those same animals. She wants to be those wild animals. She inflicts violence on animals. She regularly thinks of killing her entire family. To read “Die My Love” is to subject yourself to the same torment as the unnamed mother. Its very ferocity is what lets the book succeed as a work of art and what makes Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation so sedate in comparison.
It is perhaps odd to describe the film as “sedate” when one of its first scenes involves Jennifer Lawrence slinking through the grass like a cat and clutching a shining kitchen knife as she stares at her infant son, but that’s as bold as the movie gets. Lawrence plays Grace, a writer from New York City who moves to rural Montana with her partner, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), whose parents (Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek) live nearby and pester them constantly. Grace soon falls pregnant, and then any semblance of happiness she had with Jackson quickly disappears upon the birth of her son. Like many married women—in happy and unhappy marriages alike—Grace finds herself corralled in, domesticated and burdened with childcare while Jackson does whatever he does for work and may or may not screw around with waitresses he meets along the way.
Quickly, it becomes apparent that Ramsay finds herself torn between the novel’s distance (we are thrust violently into the narrator’s head, but she so quickly cycles between thoughts that we never get ahold of her character; she has, crucially, lost her personhood, and neither she nor the reader can find it) and a desire to make Grace and Jackson recognizable characters. The film is not bold enough to disorient us in the jarring way that Harwicz’s novel does, but neither can it commit to making Grace and Jackson anything more than bland. Gone are the fantasies about animal orgies, gone are the moments where the reader fears for the baby’s safety—in fact, Grace makes a point to say that “it’s everything else that’s fucked,” not her baby. Never her baby. She is nothing but protective over her child, even if she has a propensity to wander off into the wilderness with him without telling anyone.
And therein lies the key issue. In making Grace no longer a danger to her child, we lose what makes Harwicz’s “Die My Love” so special. Grace and Jackson’s mother discuss, obliquely, the harrowing effects of giving birth, and it’s clear that everyone is, to a certain extent, sympathetic to her tendencies to smash her head into mirrors and run out glass doors. (Women, am I right?) But it is never in question that her baby is safe, and that does a disservice to both the book and the terrifying violence of postpartum psychosis that is inflicted upon both mother and, often, child. The movie claims to be bold, claims to be treading new ground, and yet never goes so far as to make us sympathize with a woman who would hurt her child, because that would just be too horrible. Too outlandish. Too harsh. Women must never be horrible or outlandish or harsh or think bad thoughts about their children. Thus Grace is ground down and made more palatable for general audiences in a remarkable betrayal of the source material, which would have been okay—not all books must be adapted faithfully—if the movie did not position itself so clearly as a Movie About the Dehumanization of Motherhood and then fail, on all fronts, to say something, anything new (something even more egregious in the year of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”).
Nor is it particularly effective at anything else. Lawrence is good, but Pattinson is miscast—or perhaps misdirected, or both—as he goes too big in an effort to keep up with Lawrence’s swings. Grace and Jackson are too inert as characters to draw us into the drama or romance of it all, and while the movie looks good, it is not such a feast for the eyes that we can ignore its drawbacks. So we are left with very little to do except to stew over how much the movie avoids saying, how goddamn frustrating it is to sit and watch this overlong and shallow treatise on nothing, and, most of all, how much it hides from the shameful parts of motherhood and postpartum that it claims to bring to the fore.
Just go read the book.
“Die My Love” Trailer
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