Review: The Boy and the Heron and Eileen all need help

Last week, on the same day, I saw two movies from seemingly diametric universes. 

The first was animated, the second made with live actors. In the former, a twelve-year-old boy named Mahito loses his mother to the bombardment of World War II; he is evacuated to the countryside, and encounters a rather sinister bird (voiced by Robert Pattinson) who leads him into a magical underworld so that he might save his distressed aunt (Gemma Chan) and meet a younger embodiment of his mother (Karen Fukuhara). In the latter, a young woman named Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) works at a teenage boys’ correctional facility in dreary mid-century Massachusetts while living with her alcoholic, widower father (Shea Whigham); her life turns upside down when a glamorous yet sinister new coworker (Anne Hathaway) eggs the titular wallflower into a chaotic series of choices that exploit her underlying, violent desires.

All in all, these are both movies about stunted young heroes with mommy issues. Both protagonists “resolve” their issues through actions that stem from hostile fantasies – whether about a race of murderous parakeets, or putting a gun to the head of an abusive patriarch. 

One is called The Boy and the Heron, the other is called Eileen. Neither is very good, though both arise out of compelling scenarios and interesting psychology. 

For instance, in Eileen, director William Oldroyd and screenwriters Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh evoke a gray, apathetic atmosphere that perfectly illustrates its antiheroine’s dismal life – a humorless wash against which they impose lurid music and Ms. Hathaway’s pale blond wig. There is distinct misery lurking at the corners of Eileen’s existence, like so much cigarette smoke, and McKenzie settles into this drab reality with trembling yet stern earnestness. 

You grasp her desperation, you tense to wonder at what it might lead her to do.

Similarly, in Boy, writer-director Hayao Miyazaki builds a tender yet diligent sense of grief. His mastery of painted scenes means that the slightest rustling of blades of grass, or the most minute shift in Mahito’s face contains depths of emotional insight. The natural world is always keenly recognizable in Mr. Miyazaki’s movies – and here he gets a lot of power out of allowing his traumatized hero to linger by a window, or to stand alongside a peaceful river. 

You sense his isolation, you wonder at how his imagination might lead him to engage with his surroundings. 

But once these movies get going, they run themselves into thematic dead ends. Upon whisking Mahito into the underworld, The Boy and the Heron introduces metaphor after metaphor – this opponent, that ally, these rules, those exceptions – until you’re nearly laughing at the lack of cohesion. And as soon as she’s entrusted with a weapon, Eileen isn’t able to stop its- or herself from veering towards jarring, brutal visions of vengeance. 

These are two movies that posit worthy ideas only to overstep their own conceptual authority. It’s almost as if the lurking urge to compensate for an absent mother has haunted Mr. Miyazaki and Mr. Oldroyd, spurred them toward rhapsodic gestures which bespeak grand yet unregulated emotions. 

Not to be paternal or anything, but The Boy and the Heron and Eileen both need someone to hold their hands, rub their heads, and send them to bed. There’s nothing here that a glass of milk and a good night’s sleep won’t fix.