Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
One of the great strengths of Marti Noxon as a TV writer/producer — for shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and UnREAL — has been her ability to inhabit heightened environments and still pull real and recognizable emotions from them. Noxon was a major force behind the scenes during Buffy‘s polarizing sixth season as Buffy dealt with what now seems very clearly to be thinly-veiled depression (in the world of the show, she was just brought back from the dead in a most traumatizing way). And as uneven as UnREAL has been over its two seasons, at its best, Noxon has been able to infuse the heightened and salacious world of reality TV with some genuine emotional crises.
Genuine crisis is what sits at the center of To the Bone, Noxon’s feature film debut (she has writing credits on the films I Am Number Four and Fright Night, but she’s the sole writer/director on this one). When To the Bone debuted at Sundance in January, it was among the better reviewed films at the festival, with star Lily Collins singled out for particular praise. The word was strong enough that Netflix snatched the film up for a reported $8 million. Now that the film is set to debut on the streaming platform on July 14th comes the task of convincing audiences to choose to watch a 105-minute film in which Collins plays an anorexic young woman named Ellen, whose struggles to get better are, by design, incredibly frustrating and difficult to watch. It would be a worse film if they weren’t.
Ellen’s appearance is unsettling, a stark reminder that she could die, that she’s headed towards certain death, and yet throughout the film she most often seems actively disinterested in her own recovery. The frustration of that fact is spread across her caregivers (including Keanu Reeves as her aggressive doctor and Retta as the woman in charge of her in-patient facility), her family (a harsh step-mother played by Carrie Preston and semi-estranged birth mother, played by Lili Taylor, along with her partner, played by Brooke Smith, all shockingly selfish in their own ways), and also the audience itself. We feel the frustration because as an audience we’re used to triumph. Or if not triumph, at least hard-charging failure. What is the most maddening to watch unfold before us is the kind of inaction and ennui expressed by Ellen. We want to see her get better. She maybe doesn’t care. Is this a slow and painful suicide? Is it a beast too harsh to overcome? To the Bone succeeds at its best when it sits in these questions uncomfortably. (Conversely, it’s at its worst when it tries to spirit-walk its way to enlightenment.)
Collins — an actress I’ve never warmed to in her roles in Mirror, Mirror or the Golden Globe-nominated Rules Don’t Apply — is quite fantastic here, managing to deliver both the spark in Ellen that we most want to see ignited as well as the absence of that spark. In a family therapy scene after she’s entered inpatient treatment (her fourth such stint), Ellen watches silently as her parental figures (her father is nowhere to be found) snipe at each other, and as the half-sister she’s actually close to describes how her life has been made worse by Ellen’s disease, and there are reams of dialogue that flash unspoken across her face.
Ellen’s time in the group home takes on the familiar beats of the addiction/asylum/group home drama. You’ll get flashes of Girl, Interrupted and 28 Days and TV’s The Fosters — not cribbing from trash by any means, but hitting the familiar beats. Each patient at the facility has their thing. Leslie Bibb’s character is trying to hang on to a pregnancy she didn’t think was possible. Other patients banter about their treatment plans with the casual vocabulary of the girls who have been here a while. The movie most comes alive in a few distinct contexts: Ellen interacting with her sister; Ellen interacting with Dr. Beckham; and Ellen getting to know the group home’s sole male patient, Luke, played with what I’m just going to come right out and call a star-making supporting turn by Tony-winner Alex Sharp. Luke’s eating disorder grew out of a leg injury which derailed his dance career. He’s chatty and irreverent, partly as a defense mechanism and partly because it’s a part of him he can’t keep tamped down. His scenes with Ellen sometimes read courtship and sometimes more casual. The narrative is sometimes tempted to make him a too-perfect guardian-angel (these are the moments you’re certain as a viewer that the movie is going to kill him off, a realization that will make the breath freeze in your throat), but he’s mostly just a bright light in a dark place that Ellen might be able to use to ignite her own light again. There’s a scene a good ways into the movie where the patients go on a field trip to a rain room where Luke gets to show off his dancing talent, and while the film can’t resist pressing its thumb down on the soundtrack volume, it’s still a breathtakingly beautiful moment for both character and actor.
To the Bone is difficult, and it doesn’t always hit the mark, but it’s got an intelligence and humanity to it that pulls it through its rougher patches. It’s tough, but it’s worth the struggle.
