Whatever Leda (Olivia Coleman) might be feeling the film opens on her feeling freedom from cruising down the highway to a sun-drenched Greek island resort. Lyle (Ed Harris) the resort manager greets her, carrying her luggage full of books to her room. Leda is a divorced, professor from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and this is her idyllic escape except one can never truly escape the challenges of motherhood vs work. Especially when a boisterous Italian family plops down on a nearby beach blanket reminding you of ‘family.’
And that’s what Writer/Director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s gem of an emotional film is all about. Motherhood. Ambivalence.
Leda watches with voyeuristic ambivalence this loud young family who have descended on her oasis. She’s reminded of her own past as she witnesses Nina (Dakota Johnson) young and beautiful as Leda once was, frustrated with family life. We can almost hear the wheels of Leda’s head turning with the thoughts “Youth is wasted on the young.” Her desires become a pie of life – wrestling for a balanced slice of work, writing, husband, children, and housework. Women still want it all. But kids make it complicated. Or as Leda says, ‘Children are a crushing responsibility.”
But there’s another component, too. Back in the day we all took Home Economics classes in High school teaching us to sew a button on a would-be husband’s shirt. But there were no instruction on how to be a mother…how to change a diaper, or deal with an emergency. ‘Stuff’ we really could have used. So the film begs the question ‘what does a new and young mother really know?’ There is no manual.
Through Leda’s flashbacks of her past, we intercut when she was once a young mother of two daughters, daring to write and find her way while falling for Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard.) Young Leda is played brilliantly by Jessie Buckley, intercutting between the past (Buckley) and the present (Coleman) with emotional precision. Most of the movie takes place inside Leda’s head.
But, as Leda and Nina’s lives become more tangled, we witness some concerning behavior as Leda’s taboo-past surfaces immorally as well as ambitiously. It’s clear she was devoured by pregnancy and then motherhood, strangling out any hopes of what she might have become.
We’ve seen this saga before in Gwenyth Paltrow version of Sylvia (Plath)…the young intellectual mother torn between desire and responsibility all without the resources to juggle the manifested guilt, the longing, the confusion, as any mother (myself once a working mother of two daughters) has certainly felt.
Fortunately for Leda, not Sylvia, it doesn’t end with her head in an oven. But it does end in deep reflection. And choice. A powerful word: Choice.
Gyllenhaal directs with a vulnerable albeit confident Oscar-worthy hand from a book by the Italian author, Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend) bringing to life what we, as women, as mothers, often don’t verbalize. And Coleman, well, Coleman is pure Olivia Coleman magic…complex as ever…undoubtedly making a bee line to the stage for an Oscar acceptance speech two years in a row.