Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” is a movie I was desperate to end much sooner than it actually did. Not because I wasn’t enjoying it, not because I had anywhere else to be, but simply because if the movie ended, maybe, perhaps, I could imagine a world where these characters could go on to have any shred of solace in their lives instead of drowning in the incessant chaos cycles of their own creation. As it stands, the film, based on the Spanish novel “Matate amor” by Ariana Harwicz, is a carefully calculated descent into manic monotony, of a woman tasked with staring down the barrel of a meaningless existence, dulled by obligation and the crutch of loving a man who cannot understand the depth of her endless torment. This is a love story, let’s not get it twisted, but one as destructive as it is revelatory, where dance and art are what set us free, and the cold scream of cicadas in a lonely house are the bars that constrict a vibrant life to chains.
Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) have recently taken over the home where Jackson’s Uncle recently killed himself. For the bohemian pair, Grace, a writer, and Jackson, a musician, the two-story farmhouse tucked far from the screeching sirens of the big city seems a solace, a place to start a family and build something that will last. It’s helpful that Jackson’s mother (Sissy Spacek) is nearby, she herself caring for an ailing husband (Nick Nolte), but otherwise these two are largely left alone to waltz the empty halls of the house naked and make passionate love on the hardwood floors in the moonlight. Soon, a baby boy is born, and Jackson begins to leave for days on end for work, tasking Grace with raising their son amidst the ghosts of desire put on pause. Grace gives the impression of a woman caught in a medieval form of psychological torture, somehow transported to a world without choice and endless obligation, where every day is more arduous and lonely than the last. She suspects that Jackson is cheating on her, evidenced by the ever-present box of condoms in his truck’s glove compartment, yet cannot seem to summon the flame of passion that once fueled the pair of them, instead frozen in stasis between a screaming baby, a barking dog, and a broiling libido unrequited. Unkempt and uninspired, Grace has seemingly lost the will to write and begins to grow increasingly unmoored from reality, wandering the endless fields around their home with a butcher’s knife while often seeing a mysterious motorcycle helmet-wearing man driving past the house at all hours. As days stretch on around her, it’s clear that there is no easy reprieve from the nosedive of Grace’s sanity and increasing penchant for self-destruction. Something has to die, if not perhaps someone.
Jennifer Lawrence is in a fascinating place as an actress, unshackled by the burdens of movie stardom yet still possessing that indelible honesty in performance that always made her a standout. Post motherhood, Lawrence seems compelled to stretch herself creatively, not seeking prestige roles that give Academy Awards, but instead those that require giving oneself over to be molded by a great filmmaker. Perhaps this is the benefit of having won an Academy Award already, as Lawrence is now eager to seek new frontiers and follow her muse. As Grace, she shows no vanity; as quick to undress herself as she is to crawl in the dirt like an animal. Perhaps her finest moment in the film is a quiet scene shared with Nolte, heartbreaking as Jackson’s dementia-ridden father, as she finds him wandering the forest in the middle of the night. Far from the prying eyes of the mentally sound, they see each other fully in a beautiful sequence of kindness and understanding. That she is able to hold the center of this film in nearly every frame while spanning an emotional spectrum that ranges from calm contemplation to violent self-immolation is a feast for the soul and a performance worth reckoning with. One can only hope that the coming years of her career follow a similar track to her peer Kristen Stewart, one of choosing exciting projects with challenging filmmakers. Filmgoers will be all the better for it.
Lynne Ramsay is one of those “feel bad filmmakers” whose work taps into the doldrums of human experience in a way that is as entrancing as it is repulsive. Her previous film, “You Were Never Really Here”, set the bloody revenge thriller genre against the brutal reality of a man for whom violence is a way of life, and one’s only peace is to sink to the bottom of a bottomless pit. That film, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who tracks down missing girls for a living in a role that should have won him an Oscar, thus negating whatever “Joker” was, leans much further into the tropes of an action film, yet steeps itself in the malaise of death in a disquieting, yet sticky manner. There’s a gloss that even the best popcorn movies spackle across our imaginations that, when peeled away like so much wallpaper, reveals the thorny recesses of experience that are difficult to articulate in any other manner. See, for example, the scene where Joaquin kills an assailant and watches in real time, as do we, while he slowly dies. John Wick, this ain’t. So while “Die My Love” is itself part postpartum depression film, part love tragedy, part manic fever dream, it exists in this liminal space between entertainment and voyeurism, offering us something we should not see but cannot compel ourselves to pull away from. Tone is something that many modern films fail to commit themselves to, leaning instead towards the safe shores of story with its calculable patterns. What Ramsay is seeking here, and her performers are fully committed to, is the tone of a grand ship sinking into quicksand; slowly, groaningly, as timber by timber becomes entombed, never to be salvaged again. That ship is Grace, and while every person in her life might be abandoning her for higher ground, we, the audience, are lashed to the wheel like the Captains of long ago doomed vessels, forced to go down with the ship with whom our fates are entwined. “Die My Love” is cinema as slow suffocation, and that is meant to be complimentary.
While I wouldn’t call it the perfect date movie, “Die My Love” has depths to it that reach beyond a simple reflection of postpartum depression or the implosion of a relationship. “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin comes to mind easily while watching, and that is no accident, as in the final scene of “Die My Love”, Grace chooses what she wants from what life she has left. A tragic end, but a liberating one, and that, of course, is the point.
Go down with the ship.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Die My Love” is playing at The Broad Theater.
