I almost never watch movies like these -- mega-drama releases during Oscar season. But in my first year reviewing on Letterboxd, movies like this appear so consistently in the "Popular with Friends" feed I find myself drawn to them.

And after forcing my self to watch PIeces of a Woman knowing I'd struggle, I think I'm going with my gut next time around.

I don't really have much to add to what's been said before. The birth scene is heart wrenching. The acting is phenomenal. Shia Lebouf's performance was so excellent I kept wanting to slap myself in the face reminding myself that he's a complete asshole.

But the bulk of the movie after the first act is just painful to sit through. Not because of the depressing subject matter. Nothing really gels.

Overall it felt like a jigsaw puzzle that was half completed.

Pieces of a Woman (2020) follows a woman who struggles to deal with the aftermath of a traumatic home birth. This film was a really beautiful film with a lot of heart and emotional. Such a brutally realistic portrayal of grief and I'm very happy i watched it.

I loved the cinematography for this film! The colour palettes were subtle yet very visually pleasing and all the shots were framed really well. The camera panning was good and I liked how it tracked the characters, especially in this birth scene. The extreme close-ups used helped to convey the characters' emotions to the max and were very effective!

The score was super melancholic throughout the whole film and immediately set the tone well. It was somewhat basic at points but I still found that it added a lot to the film and didn't really need to be 'unique' per say.

All the performances were strong, with some well written and intense dialogue. The characters felt so real. Vanessa Kirby was phenomenal as the lead and her acting during the birth scene was unreal! I thought Ellen Burstyn was great in her role too, as she always is! My only criticism is that I'd have liked to have seen more of Benny Safdie's character! Also, I wanted to mention that the casting of the sister was accurate and a great choice!

The film had strong themes of grief, and I found it to be brutally realistic in addressing such themes. I'm sure this is a movie many people, unfortunately, can relate to. Also, I loved the apple metaphor and it was beautifully addressed during the court scene, which was probably my favourite scene of the movie!

Lastly, the pacing was slow and steady, but managed to keep me engaged and interest through the whole duration! I was completely drawn in to these people's lives, and it left me wanting more!

There are some nice moments late into the running time of "Pieces of a Woman," but you may not think the payoff of those scenes is worth what you had to sit through to get to them.

As anyone who knows about this movie already also knows, the opening is a lengthy and grueling one-shot scene of a homebirth gone wrong. Actually, that's not how the movie opens. There are a few brief scenes establishing the principal characters, namely Martha (Vanessa Kirby), her husband Sean (Shia LaBeouf), and Martha's domineering mom Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn). These scenes quickly convey the dysfunctional family dynamic between this trio, and mostly warns the audience that all of these people are going to be pretty miserable to be around. The film then delivers on that promise. After the birthing scene, which wasn't as unbearable as I thought it would be aside from the vomit anxiety induced by watching Vanessa Kirby burp and almost throw up for 20 minutes, this movie becomes nothing but a mashup of marital misery, and reinforces my belief that you can have empathy for damaged people and understand how they became the way they are, but still not want to be around them.

Martha finds some solace and healing very late in the movie, providing Kirby with a chance to convey an emotion beyond hollowed-out bitterness. Burstyn is masterful and has a monologue that has Oscar clip written all over it. LaBeouf is hopeless, as he always is. He's a truly disgusting actor and he only plays disgusting characters and it's a relief when he abandons his wife and leaves the film. I only wish he'd done it sooner.

Kirby is being lauded for her performance, but she's limited by the material. We don't know anything about Martha before her trauma and anything we learn about her after is filtered through that lens. She's a character defined by her tragedy, and the movie makes it hard to care about her beyond the abstract care one would feel for any random person in similar circumstances.

Grade: B