First, a critic’s confession: Since becoming a father, I can no longer quite trust my emotional reactions at the movies. Parenthood stretches the carapace around your feelings thin, makes the lump rise more quickly in your throat, turns the waterworks on even when the material is maudlin, cheap, heavy-handed. It makes you respond too willingly to the movies’ reliable, predictable tricks — the soaring score, the swooping camera, the child in peril, the unlooked-for reunion. Your critical faculties remain — your mind still knows what’s cornball, still recognizes manipulation — but your heart becomes a sucker.
I offer this preamble because it’s a testament to the deep, disappointing, star-studded mediocrity of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby — in which a beautiful young couple, played by Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy, try to figure out whether their marriage can be saved — that I never once felt the lump, the tickle, the telltale sign that I was in danger of succumbing to melodrama’s pull. And not for want of trying: This is a story set in the shadow of unbearable tragedy, and it’s thick with long walks on dark streets, painful flashbacks to happier times, plangent music, quivering lips, and thousand-yard stares. And yet it stirred exactly nothing in me, save irritation at its longueurs and pretensions.
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