Pieces of a Woman                          3 stars

The title of Kornel Mundruczo’s Pieces of a Woman gives one the picture of a person being broken into pieces. This is truly the objective of the movie as we follow several months of Martha’s (Vanessa Kirby of The Crown) suffering after the loss of a baby daughter immediately after a difficult home birth. Sharing in the grief are her blue collar husband, Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and her elderly mother, Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn). We see how each character deals with the loss differently and how it tears relationships apart. It is Kirby who gives a realistic performance of a woman broken by the experience, but then recovers from it on her own terms. For most of the movie I felt like I was watching people who were wallowing in self pity, who cannot feel empathy for the suffering of others. This is especially true of Sean, the working class husband who Elizabeth thinks is not good enough for her daughter. His reaction is one of rage as he fails to show up for work, has a brief affair and can’t find a way to cooperate in a sex scene with Martha. He is basically an ass, which makes it a perfect role for LaBeouf. Burstyn gives an excellent performance as the mother who is more concerned with making the midwife pay for the baby’s death than helping her daughter through the pain. The movie really belongs to Kirby who has been nominated for Best Actress by the Academy Awards for the role. The movie’s early scene showing the labor and delivery deserves a special mention as it is all done in a continuous take that lasts more than twenty minutes. The movie does have a courtroom scene about the lawsuit against the midwife, but it feels more like a subplot than the focus of the movie. For a better movie about the emotions of parents going through the loss of a child, I recommend Manchester by the Sea.