Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 1 minute
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Quick Impressions:
Olivia Colman is a great actress, and I’m always happy to see a movie if she’s in it. (Seriously my husband and I went to that Appalachian snake-handling movie mostly because of her. It’s called Them That Follow and wasn’t bad.)
I’ve been wanting to see The Lost Daughter for weeks, and my desire only intensified when I learned it was written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, adapted from a novel by Elena Ferrante. (How could anyone not want to see a movie directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal? It’s her directorial debut. That’s very exciting. Based on Gyllenhaal’s other work, any movie that she would write and direct surely must be pretty interesting. I loved Secretary, and my husband and I raved about Stranger than Fiction at the time. (I’m writing this sentence to prove I know who Gyllenhaal is because my daughter was affronted when I identified her for my father as, “You know, Jake Gyllenhaal’s sister? She blew up in Batman.” My daughter balked, “That’s what you say about Maggie Gyllenhaal!?” To be clear, I’m quite familiar with Maggie Gyllenhaal. I was just trying to identify her quickly for my father, and I know he’s seen The Dark Knight.)
I had no idea what The Lost Daughter was about before watching, and I always prefer it that way. I like discovering films (and novels) as they unfold. Now that I’ve seen it, I totally understand the Oscar buzz for both Colman and Jessie Buckley (whom I identified even more awkwardly.
“She was fantastic!” my husband said. “She deserves a nomination, too! Have we ever seen her in anything before?”
“Jessie Buckley?” I repeated incredulously. “Of course! She was in Judy and that movie we didn’t see!”
That didn’t help him too much. But when I added, “She was also the female lead in I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” then he remembered her. That was one of the better movies we watched at home in our bedroom while movie theaters weren’t happening for a while.)
Buckley is fantastic, playing the younger version of Colman’s character, Leda, and I think both of them deserve Oscar nominations.
The Lost Daughter is a good film, but I should make it clear immediately (in case the R rating doesn’t) that it’s not for children. My love of following the Oscars has recently rubbed off on my daughter (who is now tentatively planning a career as a film historian), but this is not the kind of movie you’d watch with the whole family expecting a good time for all. In fact, my dad found it so stressful that in the middle, he jumped up and left the house! (He actually had plans to meet someone from the start, but he seemed glad when he remembered them and ducked out into the night, teasing, “I’m freaking out watching this movie! I’ve gotta get out of here!”) It is a stress-inducing watch.
The Good:
The Lost Daughter paints such a captivating portrait of what it’s like to be a mother stressed out of her mind, constantly interrupted by her children and unable to connect with them. This was relatable to me.
I spend every second of my life equally worried about two things. 1) I’ll never be able to be the writer I should be 2) I’m not spending enough quality time with my children.
(On any given day, I worry about hundreds of other things, too. But the tension of writing vs parenting is always at the front of my mind.)
(I don’t know that it’s really a “versus” situation. The main sense I have is that I’m failing at both of these things equally.) (My problem is, I want all twenty-fours in the day. Why can’t I have them all? That would be useful. And then we could have an extra eight hours to sleep at the end. And it wouldn’t require effort. You would just automatically go into a state of hibernation when your body needed rest. I guess I don’t want that for everyone, though. Just for me. Everyone else in the house still has to go to sleep for eight hours, so I can write uninterrupted at night.)
When I was still trying to be an academic, I just found it impossible. My husband showed up with his two-year-old, and I thought, “How can I make a family and still do the quality of work that I want?” And then my daughter was born, and I thought, “I have to focus on her,” because I know what I’m like when I’m working on something. (And you know, Mary, Queen of Scots has been dead for a long time. She didn’t need me. My daughter did.)
But I love writing, and I love my kids, and I’m trying to figure out a balance as they get older. (And I’m trying to figure out all kinds of other issues, too. Tackling them instead of avoiding them has proven fruitful so far, but it’s very tempting to want to regress into bad habits.) Lately I feel like I’m pulled in a thousand directions. (My sister was here at Christmas, and at one point, while I was writing a text, she burst out laughing. I didn’t know what was so funny. She explained, “We were having a conversation, and then you told me, “I’ll be with you momentarily.” I was like, “I did?” I guess I was in a fugue state!)
As shown in the film, young Leda needs some help. She never acknowledges her children (which drove my husband crazy. That drives him crazy in real life, too. He’s said a million times, “Will you please acknowledge your sister,” or some variation of that.). Because Leda never acknowledges her children, they are constantly trying to get her attention. They’re very clingy and always all over her, demanding her focus. It’s a self-perpetuating problem, a vicious cycle. (My six-year-old wasn’t even watching the movie (of course!). He was alternately playing on his tablet and reading his new books, but even he found the constant, incessant vocalizations of the children so annoying.)
Jessie Buckley plays Leda in these flashback scenes, and I fretted, “I worry that I act like this all the time.”
Fed up with my nonsense, my daughter said, “What?” which was very reassuring. That’s the mom I’m afraid of being, the one who never responds to her children. (Leda can’t seem to connect to her kids emotionally. I worry about the opposite problem, burdening them with my emotions. The being preoccupied thing Leda and I have in common, though apparently I’m not coming across at all that way to my kids.) (That’s another flaw of mine. I’m a bit melodramatic when I imagine myself.)
(As soon as I said, “I worry that I act like this all the time,” my six-year-old kept pointing out over and over again how annoying the little girl was, and how nobody even likes dolls, and just bashing this “annoying little girl.” (There are three different girls, but he was reading a book. He just wanted me to know the mom wasn’t the one with the problem, which was sweet of him.) (And also I think he was genuinely annoyed by the children’s voices because he was trying to read.)
My point is that this peek into Leda’s younger life is extremely well done. I really get what she’s going through. (My husband was so exasperated with her husband!)
Unlike my son, I think Leda’s children are usually very sweet, and it makes me sad to watch her wanting nothing to do with them most of the time. At the same time, though, she’s trying translate Auden into Italian. That requires focus. Where is their dad? (I do think in these flashbacks we’re getting life as Leda experienced it, rather than an unbiased, third person look at the situation.)
That part of the story is very clear, and that’s one thing I find fairly novel about this movie. Usually, when we get an eerie story full of flashbacks, the mystery lies in the past. But the Leda of the present is far more enigmatic. We can figure out what’s going on in the past fairly quickly. (Maybe she needs time to figure it out, though.) The portion of the film that takes place in the present at the beach resort is a lot harder to make sense of. (I don’t mean the events. I mean Leda’s motivations. She’s a very interesting woman.)
I like the sense the film gives us that we’re moving toward some grandiose tragedy. Either something very, very bad happened in the past, or something very, very bad is going to happen in the present (perhaps both). But the film thwarts our expectations and offers us a more complex story instead, one more grounded in realism than sensationalism. Present day Leda is captivating and fun to think about but ultimately pretty hard to pin down. (I feel like I know exactly what is going on with Jessie Buckley’s Leda. But Olivia Colman’s Leda…you could spend a whole movie trying to learn more about that character, and the process is maddening and emotionally exhausting. But she’s so captivating that you don’t want to give up. (What is going on with that doll? That plot thread was driving all of us crazy.)
I kept wondering, “Were her children really that disruptive, or does she just have a focus problem?” because now her children aren’t bothering her, but she seems to have trouble collecting herself, anyway. (Also there’s the fact that she hates being interrupted, yet constantly seeks out interruptions.)
Dakota Johnson is quite good in the film, too. Late in the movie, there’s a scene in which she reminds me so much of someone I know. There’s a certain look in her eyes. Surprisingly (given that her part is not that large) this may be my favorite performance of Johnson’s. (I think it’s because she keeps reminding me of someone I know.)
Don’t expect a mystery. (At the outset, the film reminded me a bit of movies based on women’s mystery novels like The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window. This isn’t that kind of movie. Leda is the mystery.) But the film is engaging (and far more agonizingly suspenseful than it has any right to be).
I absolutely love the movie’s main musical theme. My husband said he loved Dickon Hinchliffe’s entire score. I didn’t notice all of it, but that main theme really makes an impression. (And it’s nice to see a composer of a movie getting Oscar buzz who isn’t Jonny Greenwood or Hans Zimmer. I keep loving scores by Jonny Greenwood and Hans Zimmer! Jonny Greenwood must have written the scores of three-hundred films this year!)
I also am so captivated by the way Leda’s life turns into a horror movie, first at night, and then any time she is alone. As I said to my family, “I like how in the daytime, rowdy kids crowd the beach to eat ice cream, and at night, she’s living in an atmospheric arthouse horror movie—isolation, fog horns, and rotten fruit! What a resort!”
I’d like to read the book now. And I’ll probably have to see the film a second time to figure out the intricacies of Leda.
Ed Harris also shows up from time to time. One of his scenes is the only one my son did watch because it involves cooking octopus, something he’s been wondering about aloud since he ate squid the other night. (I kind of love it that his character protests, “Oh I’m so much too old for you. My kids are older than you.” And she’s already told Paul Mescal’s Will, “You’re my kids’ age,” and yet she persists in hanging out with both of them. It’s not that there’s any reason she shouldn’t. It’s that it seems to make her happy that she can think of reasons these relationships probably won’t work out. She’s very interesting that way, always seeking out obstacles to throw in her own path.)
Peter Sarsgaard has a brief but crucial role in the movie, too. (Of course, he plays the person who is too charming and seductive to resist.) (I told you I know who Maggie Gyllenhaal is!)
Best Scene Visually:
The very last scene in the movie is amazing. I loved it. Olivia Colman delivers a line that, to me, succinctly expresses the point of the entire film. And this is the one scene that stands out to me visually. (I probably should call it “Best Scene” since I think it is the most perfect scene of the film. But the movie leans toward the visually drab apart from this, which is why I mention it here.)
Best Scene:
Both Dakota Johnson and Olivia Colman are magnificent in their final scene together. It may be Colman’s best scene in the film. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Johnson’s best scene ever.
Best Action Sequence:
The scene in the movie theater made me realize, “Wow, Leda really hates being interrupted.”
The Negatives:
The Lost Daughter isn’t going to be for everyone. His joking tone aside, I think my dad was pretty glad to leave. My husband, my daughter, and I are all quite invested in the Oscars, and we liked it, but we also found it a stressful watch.
“Why does she keep staying at this resort?” I asked again and again and again.
(Clearly, she likes it there, which I find fascinating.)
The character is so complex that the film practically demands a second viewing. What I find really thought provoking is that what’s going on with the younger Leda seems so obvious and easy to interpret. But did she not find it so as she lived it? Is she just beginning to understand it now? (We have difficulty understanding the present Leda, just as she has difficulty understanding the younger (and much more easily discernable) Leda.)
I love W.H. Auden. “The crack in the tea-cup opens the lane to the land of the dead.” I almost chose him for my junior poet (kind of like a junior thesis at my college), then ended up deciding on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. (I also toyed with Wilfred Owen, but he wasn’t on the list.) I probably need to reread some of Auden’s work. I’m wondering if the poems Leda is translating give insight to her character. Since her name is Leda, I should reread a bunch of Yeats, too. (More practically, I could just read the novel, looking for insights there.) If you don’t like pursuing ideas further, this movie may annoy you.
I liked this film, but I can so easily imagine people saying, “This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life,” and turning it off. It is geared toward women (or, as some people call movies like that, boring). And as a mother who has been an academic and still does time-intensive, focus-drawing work (writing), I can easily understand young Leda’s frustration as she tries to find balance. (It seems like she’s not really trying to find balance, of course. She’s just rejecting half of her life out of hand, but I still get where she’s coming from.) People with a different background might not be as receptive to this storyline as I am.
And this is not a movie where things happen. You can tell it’s a literary adaptation. One of the big events is someone getting stabbed with a gifted hatpin. You know that’s the kind of event that would turn up on your English test. There’s all this potential for mayhem and violence, so people who are looking for that kind of thing are going to be extremely disappointed by the film. Also, it feels a lot longer than two hours, even if you like it.
The one actual criticism that I have is that The Lost Daughter makes Greece look awfully drab, which is so weird because of the vibrant beauty of Greece. (But that’s probably deliberate. The last scene is immensely vibrant, once Leda’s muddled through her complete journey and come out on the other side.)
The Lost Daughter isn’t going to be for everyone. Let’s say that. (I think I did say it already. I’ll say it again for good measure.)
Overall:
Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley give performances in The Lost Daughter that should get some Oscar attention. I think Dakota Johnson’s pretty good, too. The story itself is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. I feel I need to watch it again because Colman’s character is so…perplexing and intriguing. But I’m not sure that I want to watch it again because it’s really quite a stressful watch, and ultimately nothing much happens. Will you like it? If you have Netflix, why not give it fifteen minutes and see? If Colman’s performance draws you in, watch the movie. If you aren’t going to like the movie, you’ll know within fifteen minutes.