Alone in the Dark
Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway, in William Oldroyd’s Eileen (2023)
I’m going to work harder the rest of my life to resist those snobby “Ah the movie, but the book though” stereotypes, especially if I haven’t gotten round to actually reading the books yet. Last night I took note of an idea that I ought find room for in my Great European Novel — and grumbled again at how much easier it is to deliver story through screenplay than literary fiction. You can skip so much granular detail, operate in faith that a very good director and a strong cast will help take care of all the particle physics. This exact observation, despite my aforementioned resolution, is the reason book snobs still get to say, Ah, but the book though.
I have never read Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh. I did read and quite enjoyed My Year of Rest & Relaxation, in which a deliberately superficial human being decides (pre-pandemic!) she will sedate herself into a year of pristine self-isolation. The novel is dark, funny, pissy about modern life when it needs to be; a tangible and clear sensibility runs through it, saving its rinse-and-repeat mechanism from a verdict (at least by me) of artistic failure. This is what film adaptations, even ones as decent as Eileen, struggle with: they operate like inter-school relay because the presumption is they can only recreate and visually expand so much. That’s fine, and understood — but I wish more film snobs were book snobs, especially the ones that adapt novels; then they’d understand the crucial ingredient is the author’s meaning, inference, in all the meditation between key events.
This was my fear when I first saw the trailer: I could not sense nearly enough of Ms. Moshfegh’s creative instincts in what appeared to be the final product. The easeful, almost cocksure manner in which she prepares a brutal, peculiar sentence, and the way she’s able to divorce herself from the actions of her characters. This is where you say, “Maybe shut up and enjoy the turkey in front of you, bro,” which would be the screen adaptation not directed by Ms. Moshfegh herself. Sure thing, and I did for a long while. Eileen, the movie and I’m sure the book, is about the very brief period of time in which a seductive counsellor tornadoes through the life of a young lady who works at a correctional facility. Eileen, the movie, artfully portrays an older, worldlier woman exploiting the sexual inexperience of a younger one for a hit of academic dopamine — and then a dangerous revision of justice.
At times, Eileen is gorgeous. Anne Hathaway as said counsellor shimmers in her own golden light, that of working class bars, working class living rooms, street-lamps grateful to watch her smoke, and in the fluorescence of compromised basements. It’s a little too much cinematic stuffing, even if the point is to show us how and why exactly Eileen falls under this woman’s spell — or perhaps what I mean is, it’s a little too much by Moshfegh’s parameters. We get the point quicker than the film gives us credit for, and when it all unravels it does so with the single tug of a string. I would’ve preferred a gradual loosening, a decaying as opposed to an instantaneous snapshot of existential rot, especially because I kept comparing Eileen to Todd Haynes’ Carol.
Maybe that’s on Moshfegh and the source material. But that’s my point about adaptations: it’s not the literal details you need to include in the recipe.
Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny, in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023)
Speaking of falling under spells, I am disappointed to report that Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla collapses under its own wistful gazing at the domestic life of Elvis Presley. I say this as someone who recently suggested to co-workers that we don’t mention Coppola enough amongst the great, modern American directors. Movies like Somewhere, The Bling Ring, and On the Rocks aren’t quite technical masterpieces — but I remember floating above the earth or at least my seat when I watched them all, mesmerised by Coppola’s ability to conflate the dubiousness of memory with the sweetness of dreams, psychedelic comedown or no. This is executed via her penchant for thematic montage — frequent stabs at making a discipline of it — and has rendered visual scrapbooks of her most memorable projects. The approach stumbles in Priscilla, where lavishly decorated sets and costumes ultimately fail (pardon) to read the room.
Even as we wonder whether the King is in fact poaching a teenager out of high school, even when he proves himself to be quite the cad, the camera continues to revel in Priscilla’s luxurious set pieces. The movie’s called ‘Priscilla’ because we’re supposed to be learning the cost of fame to those who fly closest to the sun, and how buying tickets, applauding the art, makes all of us complicit in falsifying pop history. Or so I thought? But you never really sense an emotional transformation, a break in tide, to indicate we have switched acts or emotional gears.
Even the classic storytelling journey, from which we or our heroine are supposed to return at least somewhat altered, surrenders to keeping the existing narrative intact. Priscilla Presley waits all throughout the movie for Elvis to let her speak, let her act, and we never get to see the seeds germinate: the ones that actualise her freedom, less than ten minutes from the credits. Elvis meanwhile gets to live on in our memory as an American god — who possibly groomed a person and maybe even abused her physically but hey. The romance holds, in part, because Priscilla is never less than lavishly decorated. It never decays.
