“Die My Love” is a picture of a slow slide to madness. Grace, a writer, has agreed to pack up her life in New York and move to a very small town in Montana with her partner Jackson. He has inherited his uncle’s house and he’s anxious to get back to his roots. He has a job, family and friends there; Grace does not. But, he posits, there will be no distractions for Grace and she can write that novel she’s been dreaming about. Jackson may be happy but Grace begins slipping into an “All work and no play makes Grace a dull girl” moment as she stares at her empty computer screen. If she is now lacking a creative spark in her writing, her sexual appetite has caught fire. She and Jackson are like voracious rabbits in bed, on the floor, in the yard, in the car. Soon she is pregnant.
Her grip on the real world is tenuous and her only lifeline is Jackson, who may or may not be having affairs while he’s on the road for his job. Her mother-in-law tries to help out, recognizing the kind of post-partum madness that is engulfing Grace. With only the baby, a blank page in front of her and a husband who has gone missing in some sort of action, Grace loses any anchor to reality that she may have had previously.
There is only one reason to see this film. Jennifer Lawrence, Grace, gives an Oscar-worthy performance in a film that definitely is not. She inhabits every scene and it is impossible to ignore her as she burns up the screen with her intensity. Lawrence finds nuance in her madness that makes her demented actions believable as a woman abandoned in the wilderness. Her occasional self-awareness makes her descent all the more heartbreaking. Always protective of her baby, her bursts of anger are primarily directed at herself, her husband and the empty, bucolic environs. Robert Pattinson as Jackson is an inadequate match for her madness. Pattison, given the juicy role of foil to her insanity, is remarkably passive, unable to sufficiently exhibit guilt, empathy, understanding. His face seems to register only perplexity at what is happening. Lawrence does all the work in communicating passion because Pattison seems to lack the chemistry to sell the sex and madness of his partner. He is not capable dramatically of matching or even coming close to her emotions. Sissy Spacek as Pam, Jackson’s mother, is an occasional glimmer of light, showing the empathy Grace needs but always at arm’s length. Nick Nolte, in a very rare appearance, plays Jackson’s father Harry, in the throes of dementia, bursting with the occasional insight into Grace’s illness.
Directed and co-written by Lynne Ramsay, whose previous films, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and “You Were Never Really Here,” also portrayed the lethal mental illnesses of their protagonists, finds the depth in Grace’s trauma. She toys with chronology in an effort to disorient the viewer but the results are mixed. A flash forward sequence of Grace’s early motherhood is set up so that I found myself asking “what happened to the other baby?” only to realize, eventually, that Ramsay was creating an idyllic sequence with mother, father and child that may have been to establish what could have been. Ramsay then takes the viewer back to the proper chronology of Jackson and Grace’s relationship before the birth of their child and the madness that gradually overtakes their relationship. Generally, however, her use of time shifts throughout the movie suck the viewer more deeply into Grace’s madness.
Jennifer Lawrence, always a marvel and a reason to see any film in which she appears, exhibits even more depth and range than she has previously. See the movie for her performance but not for the film.
Opening November 7 at AMC The Grove 14, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema DTLA, Landmark Theatre Sunset and other AMC theaters in the Valley.
