If you had tapped me on the shoulder about two-thirds of the way through Eileen, William Oldroyd’s adaptation of the celebrated 2015 novel by Ottesa Moshfegh, and asked me how I liked it, I would have first chastised you for interrupting me in the middle of viewing with such an intrusive question. Then, I might have said that it was an intriguing and well-acted bit of pulp fiction and that only a near-total collapse in the final third might prevent me from recommending it. Oddly enough, it proceeds to do just that and the result is a disappointment that wastes nearly all of the goodwill it had built up to that point on concluding reels that simply don’t work.
Set in a small Massachusetts town in the early 1960s during the week before Christmas, the film tells the story of Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), a young woman whose life seems to consist entirely of spending her days slaving away in a dead-end job at a local juvenile prison and her free time tending to her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham) and what appears to be serious issues regarding sexual repression—at one point, she fantasizes about having sex with another guard while on duty and at another, she spies on a couple having sex in a car until she finally jams a handful of snow into her crotch. Things start to pick up for her with the arrival of the prison’s new psychologist, a perfectly coiffed Harvard-educated New York sophisticate, Dr. Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), who is like a breath of fresh air in her otherwise drab existence. Unlike all the other people in her life, Eileen feels genuinely seen by this newcomer and the two become fast friends, bonding one night over cocktails and dancing. Therefore, she is thrilled when Rebecca invites her to spend Christmas Eve at her house but when she arrives, things do not go quite as she or we in the audience might have expected.
Between the period setting, the Christmas backdrop and the focus on a developing relationship between a young and unsure woman and the glamorous and more worldly older woman who takes a shine to her, Eileen all but asks for comparisons to Todd Haynes’s Carol and actually outdoes that one for a good chunk of its running time. I enjoyed the cheerfully pulpy story setup and the period setting and I especially like the strong performances from the two leads—Hathaway is particularly spectacular as the object of Eileen’s fascination, who seems to have leaped directly from the kind of trashy paperback that the younger woman probably has stashed away somewhere in her bedroom. The problem is that, as in the book, once Eileen arrives to spend Christmas Eve with Rebecca, the story spins off in an entirely different direction that proves to be both bizarre and resoundingly anticlimactic despite the Herculean efforts of the two actresses (along with Marin Ireland in a role I leave for you to discover) make something of it. I don’t necessarily object to a story taking a big and unexpected turn but this one is deployed too abruptly for it to actually work beyond the initial shock—if there had been a little more set-up regarding the characters, especially Rebecca, in the first half, it might have worked but as presented here, it just feels more like a gimmicky twist than anything else.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about Eileen is that even though I cannot recommend it, it contains enough worthwhile elements to make me wish that I could. There are a number of intriguing scenes (including a hilarious one where the inmates of the prison are forced to endure a supposedly uplifting Christmas pageant that eventually devolves into chaos) and the performances from McKenzie and Hathaway are very strong, as is Whigam’s turn as Eileen’s startlingly awful father. Unfortunately all of this good stuff is undone by the mistakes in the closing reels and as a result, the film becomes an exercise in frustration on a level rivaling that experienced by Eileen herself, the kind that not even a well-placed snowball can fully alleviate.