Pieces of a Woman: Film Review

Film description: A heartbreaking home birth leaves a woman grappling with the profound emotional fallout, isolated from her partner and family by a chasm of grief.

Critic Review from Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal:

“Does the rest of the film live up to such an agonizing and yet commanding beginning? Unfortunately it does not.”

The review from Joe Morgenstern is an example of what professional critics are writing about this film. There IS a commanding beginning. The story moves quickly giving you glimpses of the lives of the pregnant woman and her male partner at their jobs, baby shower, buying a car with the pregnant woman’s mother and sister and then the home birth with a tragic ending. Fast pace glimpses and the intensity of giving birth.

When the critics said the rest of the film was slow or didn’t live up to the beginning, I feel they are missing something important. They are missing the power of the portrayal of grief at the pace it is experienced. Grief happens in slow motion. The film shows a woman’s story, in the darkest of times, as she tries to return to the everyday routine of life. It is the capturing of the tiniest moments in this slowed down pace that we feel what she is feeling.

I watched the story as a woman who has given birth to four children and who had a baby die…