Most movies come to you, but challenging ones make you come to them. Even when they’re assaulting you in your seat, they demand your attention, understanding and interpretation to come off.
“Die My Love” is a broken romance and deep dive into dysfunction and madness by a filmmaker who always challenges us. Lynne Ramsay is the Scottish director of “We Need to talk About Kevin” and “You Were Never Really Here.” If she’s made a movie, we take it seriously. She’s earned that.
But there are many moments in this unpleasant-because-life-often-is melodrama where one gets the sense that our star-crossed lovers, played by Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, are being barked at off camera by a Scottish accent demanding “Show me EXTREME. Go OFF!”
It’s a postpartum breakdown that plays like a filmed improv exercise, a movie that nobody behind the camera thought to advise its stars that sometimes reality this heightened starts to play like camp.
Based on a novel by Argentine Ariana Hawicaz, “Die My Love” gives us scanty clues to piece together a story that includes a lot we’re not being told.
Grace and Jackson are white-hot for each other, beautiful young people passionate about their naked time together. But a baby isn’t just the apple of their eyes and a bundle of joy/blessing in their lives. It’s a shock to the marriage, and in the case of Grace, a shock to the system.
The New York license plates on their SUV and “great American novel” cracks suggest they met in a city and she had ambitions as a writer. Now, they’re living in the small Montana town he grew up in, residing in an old, disordered house just across the village from the one he grew up in.
He’s on a job (Trucking, maybe?) that has him on the road several days a week. She’s stuck at home alone in her thoughts. Her impulses and passions have nowhere to go, her run-away imagination has no literary outlet. And there’s this demanding, helpless little thing that needs her attention and not just the marathon stroller walks she takes to the convenience store/market or over to her in-laws.
Pam (Oscar winner Sissy Spacek) is empathetic. “You know everybody goes a bit loopy” with a newborn in their life. But she’s carrying her own burden. Husband Harry (Nick Nolte) is a handful, settling into dementia in a house where Pam sleepwalks with the old Remington rifle as her only comfort.
That house Grace and Jackson live in? It was his uncle’s, something that sets Harry off every now and again. Because his brother, Uncle Frank, shot himself in it.
Jackson’s ardor has cooled with the weight of all they have going on. But Grace has the same impulses and passions. Finding condoms in his car’s glove compartment are sure to set her off.
The story of the marriage’s unraveling and Grace’s violent lashing-out as she becomes more disconnected with reality — or just too sensitive to it — is told old out of order. We can blame Jackson for straying, and buy Grace’s justification for craving the sexual attentions of the mysterious helmeted neighbor (LaKeith Stanfield) on a motorcycle. But there’s more going on there. There always has been.
She’s smart enough to be rude to the locals, from baby-loving shop clerks to peers who have gone through versions of what she’s experiencing and try to empathize.
“Babies are a lot,” one fellow young mom reminds her. “:I don’t think people talk about that.”
“They don’t talk about anything else.”
Seeing snippets of Grace and Jackson’s past, we get a glimpse of her future. She got drunk and out of control at their wedding. She likes to crawl around on her hands and knees, imitating a cougar on the prowl.
And in a flash, she can intentionally hurt herself or do something so out of control that they have a car wreck.
We sit on tenterhooks fearing for the baby they’re neglecting and the incessantly yapping dog he’s brought home because his impulse control is childish, too.
There’s no getting around the disquiet Ramsay goes for and achieves with this nightmarish primer on postpartum depression at its most extreme. But at some point, the shocks numb you in ways the tedium of the myopic, intimate story hasn’t. The gratuitous nudity becomes an imposition on an actress (pregnant during the shoot) who still mistakes putting it all “out there” for “fearless,” and an indulgence of a filmmaker who might have been better served not filming the most “out there” rehearsals.
Rating: R, bloody violence, sex nudity, alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, LaKeith Stanfield and Nick Nolte.
Credits: Lynne Ramsay, scripted by Edna Walsh, Alice Birch and Lynne Ramsay, based on a novel by Ariana Harwicz . A Mubi release.
Running time: 1:58
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