'Pieces of a Woman' Review: A Grief History of Time

Ignore the cringeworthy title, which brings to mind several lives’ worth of Lifetime movies — Pieces of a Woman, a portrait of personal disintegration and the from-the-ashes process of piecing things back together, gives you three distinct reasons to pay attention to this late-breaking entry in the seasonal Pretty People in Pain sweepstakes. (It hit theaters on December 30th for a qualifying run; it starts streaming on Netflix on January 7th.) The first is The Shot, a set piece that kickstarts the drama in motion. We’ve already briefly met Martha (Vanessa Kirby), an expectant mother days away from her due date. And we’ve been introduced to her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf), a construction worker who’s building a bridge in Boston. She is warm, witty, nurturing; he is rough-hewn, earthy and, per his own description, boorish (“now there’s a Scrabble word,” he adds). Martha’s middle-class family, especially her brittle and controlling mother (Ellen Burstyn), doesn’t much care for this blue-collar dude, but the couple love each other. They’re ready to eagerly embrace parenthood.    So when Martha’s water breaks, Sean distracts her with dumb jokes — already with the dad humor! — and places a call to their midwife. The woman they’ve prepped with, who the two have trusted to guide them through a home birth, is unavailable. A substitute named Eva (Molly Parker) will be assisting them in her stead. She shows up, helps with what turns out to be a somewhat fraught delivery … and then things suddenly, inexplicably take a turn for the worse.   Reviews Vanessa Kirby, Your New Summer-Movie Action Hero Year in Review: The 20 Best Movies of 2020 Reviews 20 Essential Grateful Dead Shows The 50 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time  The fact that the Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó presents this entire sequence of events in what’s designed to resemble a continuous 24-minute shot sounds, on paper, like just another virtuoso move designed to induce a “how’d they do that?” shock and awe more characteristic of magic shows. Yet the director, making his English-language debut, isn’t indulging in hollow, look-ma-no-cuts showing off for its own sake; by letting viewers experience these wrong turns in real time, he’s both establishing your bond with these characters and letting his actors dictate the scene’s free fall from joy to tragedy. Cowritten by his longtime collaborator Kata Wéber, Pieces draws from her play of the same name (along with a very personal experience), and you can see the theatrical origins in this extended set-up. But that aspect works in the movie’s favor here. It’s not the fluid, snaking and craning camera that draws you in but Kirby’s animalistic grunts and cries, LaBeouf’s manic running around and tender encouragement, Parker’s authoritative earth-mother commandeering that slowly turn hesitant as the situation spirals out of everyone’s control. The “single” take is not the showcase itself so much as the stage for it.  Mundruczó’s breakt