When Ottessa Moshfegh burst onto the literary scene in 2015 with her debut novel, Eileen, readers and critics alike were enraptured by it: A pulpy coming-of-age riff full of salacious detail, ironic detachment, and bleakness. Writing in the New York Times, Lily King praised the way Moshfegh strung her sentences together (one thing I always envy about my literary brethren is that they can just straight-up pull language, at length, from the texts they’re trying to critique to the point that it feels, occasionally, like they’re using it to trying to hit the word count, much like the Peanuts kids in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown did in trying to describe their summer vacations for their trombone-tongued teacher) and how richly imagined her heroine’s first-person inner narrative was, though King maintained a careful ambivalence about her storytelling; The Guardian offered a heavier critique, highlighting the “sense of pervading doom” and compared it to Plath, and Jean Zimmerman, for NPR, curiously remarked about how weirdly funny the whole thing was. The author, as Zimmerman saw it, “manage[d] to make all this comical, with a touch of tragedy — or is it tragic with a touch of comedy?” It’s a testament to Moshfegh’s skill as a stylist that this ambivalence exists, and one that directly benefits William Olyroyd, who, alongside the author herself, had a bevy of options in terms of what they could emphasize in bringing it to the screen. Do they go pure pulp? Emphasize the existential dread?
Nah. Instead, Olyroyd and Moshfegh have brought that strain of humor that Zimmerman identified to the forefront. They’ve transformed Eileen into the blackest of black comedies, to the benefit of all involved, especially for their two leads, Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway, who seize the moment by offering contrasting styles of camp. It isn’t totally clear at the start: Over a thundering old Hollywood score, complete with a striking classical font, we watch smoke slowly fill a car’s cab, the creeping fog rolling across the dash like the tides on the beach directly out in front of the window. Eileen (McKenzie) is seated in this beater, watching a couple engage in some early-morning or very late-night heavy petting under the grey seaside skies of a Massachusetts coastal town. Notably, there’s no narration. Moshfegh wisely understands that it’s a fool’s errand to try and preserve the tone she’d established in the novel through Eileen’s voice and, through this choice, ensures two things – first, ensuring that her protagonist’s actions remain as inscrutable and bizarre as they appear will give McKenzie more to work with, and that a greater ambivalence can be maintained about her character, free of sympathetic context.
It’s 1964, and Eileen is a thoroughly modern woman emerging from the chrysalis of ’50s propriety. No, she’s not a hippie or a beat or whatever subculture one wishes to cite: She’s a Lena Dunham protagonist without the riches or pluck or self-righteousness or social liberation, a pool of pathologies, tragedies and anxieties barely contained underneath a mousey exterior. To be fair, there are plenty of good reasons for this (this kind of person has always existed, of course, with the easing of censorship and broadening of cultural representation helping to bring them to the screen): her mom’s dead, making her responsible for her housebound father (Shea Whigham, whose sardonic and bleak dialogue is as amusing as his other behavior is terrifying), a retired police captain who has pickled his brain in cheap hooch and regularly threatens his neighbors with his old service weapon, and she’s exposed to the worst that ‘60s Massachusetts has to offer on a daily basis at her job at a local juvenile detention center. Her nature is an awkward one, nurture has failed her, and cultural vanity has led her to worry about all things related to her appearance – we watch her eat boxes and boxes of chocolates, chewing each piece and then carefully spitting it out. Her restraint can only go so far, though, before the weird leaks out in private areas of public spaces — jerking off over guards in adjacent rooms to them inside the prison, digging into case files to look at crime scene photographs – and Mosfegh has actually played up these aspects of her character in comparison to the novel.
Into this odd character’s life comes the facility’s new psychologist, a platinum blonde named Rebecca (Hathaway), wielding Harvard degrees and wearing furs, with a patrician accent escaping between clouds of cigarette smoke. She is a Photoplay cover made flesh, a person seemingly only capable of being seen in tungsten-accented soft-focus, a role tailor-made for Hathaway’s wattage. Perhaps owing to the fact Eileen is the only person even vaguely close to her age employed at the Detention Center, Rebecca quickly takes a liking to her. This woman is giving her attention, something that she never gets from anyone, and seems to care what she says. Even better, it feels like Rebecca is letting Eileen in on some secret club that she’s never quite had access to, be it friendship or wealth or some approximation of ‘60s “feminine standards,” and she falls head over heels for her. She starts smoking – Rebecca’s brand, even – and dresses up in her mother’s long-forgotten clothing when she invites her out to a night at the local tavern. She’s effervescent as always, but unexpectedly fierce, and when a townie gets a little too fresh, she reacts violently. Eileen doesn’t really give a shit (and proceeds to get shit-faced enough to crash her car on her front lawn and puke everywhere), but she, perhaps, should, given just how invested Rebecca seems to be about one case that she’s taken.
It should be emphasized that the black comedy emerges from the pairing of these two characters – a deeply fucked-up yet endlessly pitiable being, nearly otherworldly in her eccentric presence, being matched with the patriarchal idea of “liberated womanhood” that passed muster in ’64. Eileen does her best to seem worldly, to often hilarious ends, to Rebecca’s bemused reactions, and the film could function as just a bizarre meet-cute, which wouldn’t be too out of place in modern cinema on its own. But the film hinges on a third-act reveal, where it looks like their “relationship” may finally be consummated, only for something genuinely twisted to be dropped on the audience. With one giant exception – coming in the form of a monologue delivered full of searing emotion stemming from well-deserved guilt – Oldroyd has crafted the kind of climax that the Coens were once famous for, in which characters are exposed for what they are, and causality ensures a kind of cosmic justice, assisted by a kind of buffoonery. In short, it’s a prime example of the storytelling joys that modern neo-noir can still provide, shot handsomely in a period-appropriate fashion without defaulting to horseshit stylistic homage.
The only times in which Oldroyd misfires are when he provides a quick-shock jump scare as a concession to modern bang-bang expectation, and one could imagine, given its retro-styling, it sporting a similar tagline to Kubrick’s Lolita: “How did they ever make a movie of Eileen?” Well, Oldroyd and Moshfegh somehow did, and it’s fantastic.