William Oldroyd attempts the change of tone in this film - its big twist - with all the finesse of a DJ with one turntable mixing two tunes together. And Oldroyd isn't a very good DJ to start with. When that fails, all he can think to do is turn the volume up on the score. All the problems with this film lead back to Oldroyd.
As readers of the novel will know, Otessa Moshfegh (who oddly gets half the screenwriting adaptation credit here, as if she had little familiarity with her own novel and how it works, and doesn't work) filled her pages with absolute grime, leaving the reader to imagine hair-filled carpets, drains, basins, counters, etc. Her anti-heroine never shaves her legs, much less her pubic area. Just about every setting in the novel is a public health crisis while Oldroyd's film has exactly one pubic hair. In a bar of soap. This is a problem.
"X-ville," as the New England town that is the setting of the novel Eileen is called, is the kind of place even the reader doesn't want to spend time in, a place where understandably no one begrudges the titular character for getting out of - so much so, no one even ever comes looking for her after her departure (even though her abandoned vehicle would've led the authorities right to her, a lapse in logic we're perhaps meant to believe is symptomatic of the inertia engulfing the place). Moshfegh is hardly working for the X-ville tourism board. This is all spelled out in the opening chapter of the novel, since Eileen is narrated in retrospect by the title character later in her life. This is another problem with Oldroyd's film since the adaptation only deals with the immediacy of these events and thus the duality of the novel - and all of its context and point of view - is lost. Eileen is not a perfect work or even a masterpiece of modern literature, not by a long stretch; its strength lies in its narrator's voice which nobody here, including the author herself, seems to understand.
Casting, pretty much all the way around, is a major problem. Though Oldroyd's cast is expert in their approach to what they've been given, they are all largely miscast. The casting of Thomasin McKenzie in the title role is particularly blunderous. She's a wonderful actress and acquits herself nicely here but she's so miscast the most she could ever hope to be is a paper-doll construction of the actual character, a character who should be greasy and unkempt, who is probably pasty and smells a bit off - you will need reminding that Eileen Dunlap is a WORLD-CLASS MISANTHROPIC SELF-LOATHER, along the lines of Ignatius J. Reilly, who doesn't shave her legs, her underarms, who is scatalogically obsessed to the point of timing out and controlling her massive bowel movements which are one of her life's few pleasures and often has an itchy bottom. I'm thinking Janeane Garofalo, in her '90s prime, might've turned heads taking on an assignment like this. But not here. McKenzie's casting would make more sense if she were revealed to be an imposter who tied up the real Eileen Dunlop and locked her in a closet. She tries. But with her perfect complexion, perfectly brushed hair, and soft willowy high pitched voice, it's amazing she suggests any internalisation of the character at all - and given there's no voiceover, the entirety of the character, who is given full uninterrupted flow in the novel, is required to be fully internalised here. It's like watching a poorly cast high school production of Eileen. McKenzie isn't helped at all by the filmmakers' decision to rob her of Eileen Dunlop's primary objective - escape, to get out of X-ville at any cost - until the film's final minute. It doesn't even qualify as an after thought since it appears they never gave it any thought at all. Instead this is substituted with minor fantasies of Eileen's, a few moments here and there, the likes of which used to be popular on certain prestige television shows about 20 years ago. Even these are poorly staged and perplexingly lacking in tone - are they supposed to be funny? Empathetic? Who knows. More likely, they're just meant to jolt the audience out of their stupor.
The much vaunted performance from Anne Hathaway as Rebecca St. John proves to be little more than a fashion story. She is similarly miscast though likely her casting is the only reason the film exists at all. She's too old for this role - which is accentuated because McKenzie reads too young for hers. Eileen and Rebecca should nearly be contemporaries. (It's telling that Rebecca is never described as a "Dr." in the novel, a title she is granted here to account for Hathaway's obvious gravitas.) Instead, what little chemistry the two have reads more like a mother/daughter dynamic, with Rebecca filling the void of Eileen's dead mother. Superficial comparisons to Todd Haynes' Carol are insulting to that work. This isn't Carol. If anything, it leans in the direction of Heavenly Creatures, that is, if it were anything at all.
In the novel, it's not quite clear whether Rebecca sees herself as a movie star (she's a redhead there, not platinum blonde as in the film) or, more likely, perceived as such by Eileen within the context of X-ville. Rebecca's actions certainly suggest she is a woman of serious concerns, albeit one who sees herself as towering over the plebs of X-ville; she entitles herself to be judge, jury and the law. One thing's for sure: casting a movie star as Rebecca robs her of any complexity or mystique she might of otherwise had, if she were an actual character instead of the bungle of poses and attitudes Hathaway strikes here. In the context of the film's mixed reception and spotty release, Hathaway is obviously both a blessing and a curse but she's slumming it here, imagining herself in some other movie. Oldroyd hones right in on her too, never realising that if the character is to exist at all on celluloid, she needs distance, as she is after all, a fleeting distant memory of the protagonist, who has probably been greatly embellished in Eileen's twisted, razor sharp mind, especially to account for her collusion with her. While the rest of Oldroyd's film is immediate, Hathaway's performance plays like a well-polished memory that likely never existed at all. Here she is one note and when the needle gets to the end of the record she is over without even a fade. Hathaway's performance is all chorus with no verses. She must've been enticed by the wig.
Similarly, when the characters of Eileen's father and Mrs. Polk illicit our sympathy, you know the casting is way off base. Shea Wigham as the former is a terrific actor and he suggests a full character here - I like the movie he's in - but he's no Mr. Dunlop, who should be absolutely repulsive. Here he doesn't have a hair out of place - it's like Tom Ford styled him - and at worst suggests a broken down Andrew Scott, which would still be better than most. He's not quite lovable but seems a reasonable man, nothing like the lecherous, vile, abusive drunk of the novel. (He's supposed to be a hardened, psychotic former police chief suffering from ultra paranoid delusions, like "who are all these other people in the house"-type delusions.) A doctor states that he'll die if he doesn't stop drinking and suffer the same fate if he does but Wigham doesn't seem that pickled at all and appears to put on a clean shirt every day; nothing like the yellowed, sweat stained, stretched out wife beaters of the novel with the smell of hard liquor rising from his every pore, and probably urine and faeces as well. (In the novel, he's beyond caring if his daughter sees him doing his business on the toilet.) Wigham seems like his life would be greatly improved if someone would just invent a television remote 20 years earlier.
Marin Ireland is, of course, a terrific actress and she does her job here - with a much truncated speech that has been so shredded in this adaptation viewers who haven't read the novel will likely need a special decoder ring to figure out what she's talking about. Which begs the question: who did the filmmakers make this film for? Are they embarrassed by the content of the novel? Do they think diluting it in this way - and arguably robbing it of its power - somehow makes it more...commercial? Mrs. Polk needs to be more a of beast, and for all that she gives, the slim and pretty Ireland only confounds matters further. At a point when the entire film is spinning out of Oldroyd's control, and Eileen is at its blackest, he fills the screen with the faces of his pretty female leads and the entire premise couldn't seem more contrived or poorly staged. You half expect someone on screen to just say "Scene" and roll credits.
What remains on screen is so deflated and half-hearted the mere minutes that follow hardly matter, which seems to be the consensus of the filmmakers who appear to have spent more time commissioning custom "period" style graphics for their producing partners than figuring out how to adapt this troublesome, unyielding, almost stubborn novel to the screen.
Ultimately, Oldroyd's limiting sense of taste and, dare I say it, surprisingly middle class sensibility, does not extend itself to the vomitous, bilious "haven't brushed my teeth in three days" taste where Moshfegh's novel idles and without that, as a starting point, it just doesn't work. We're meant to be lulled into a sense that the gruesome, pointless mundanity of young Eileen Dunlop's life can't possibly get any worse - and then it does. The third act isn't meant to be a jarring, half-hearted, confused tonal shift. It's meant to credibly emerge from what is already there, from what has been there all along: the grotesque. Oldroyd's folly seems to be in thinking he could make a tasteful version of Eileen, which is a bit like a bloodless version of Jaws. Only worse.
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