"To the Bone" does not get at root causes. A lot of this dialogue has the unmistakable queasy ring of truth, of dirty dark secrets being told. 3:51 PM PST 1/22/2017 Writer-director: Marti Noxon But the standout sequence is one in the home’s yard at night, where the two confess some intimate secrets to each other, get closer and are then pulled apart, with Collins’ performance and Noxon’s writing providing Ellen with such emotional transparency that it’s crystal clear how her feelings and thinking evolve and then escalate. There's a lack of interest in who she is, what she's about, where she's coming from. This subplot takes up a lot of bandwidth.
Ellen’s art about herself has apparently inspired another woman with anorexia to take her own life. It’s a major sequence, with inspirational music. But the movie is very squeamish about actually showing us these supposedly radical and shocking images, or telling us anything substantial about her troubled admirer. She goes to stay with her father (who never appears in the film), stepmother (Carrie Preston) and stepsister (Liana Liberato). Individual scenes shine, but the overall arc suffers. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Finally caving in when her half-sister asks her in the most sincerely straightforward manner to give it a go, Ellen finds herself in a home with six other young women and one guy, Lucas (“rhymes with mucus”) or Luke (Sharp), who all have eating disorders, too. Her real mom, Judy (Lili Taylor), “a lesbian with bipolar disorder,” as per Susan, has moved to Arizona to be with her no-nonsense girlfriend, Olive (Brooke Smith). She is sent to a community treatment facility under the care of the charismatic and revolutionary Dr William Beckham, played by … Keanu Reeves. All of this is in its favor, to a degree. The third act necessitates a point-of-no-return but a few more hints earlier on that this was coming would have made its arrival more credible. Gaunt and expressionless, Ellen (Collins) is first seen making a humorous but also offensive sign at what turns out to be her fourth in-patient treatment, which leads to her being kicked out again. It’s a dismal TV movie of the week: trite, shallow, cautiously middlebrow and blandly complicit in the cult of female prettiness that it is supposedly criticising. Noxon clearly knows the territory. When Carpenter died, "The Best Little Girl in the World" was often mentioned as a reference point, almost like the culture was trying to put the baffling pieces together: "Karen Carpenter died of that thing we all were just talking about two years ago.

Ellen finds an emotional connection with a quirky British dancer, Luke (Alex Sharp), and encouraged by Dr Beckham (in a particularly implausible moment that pokes up from a nest of unbelievability) she experiments with changing her identity and her name, calling herself Eli. Synopsis. (Spoilers ahead in this paragraph.) FACEBOOK

With the right marketing and outreach, this could be a conversation starter on the art house circuit. There's the pregnant anorexic. Dr. Beckham's unconventional approach involves taking them to an art installation where water falls through the ceiling and then encouraging his patients to dance under the indoor rainfall. by It does not lecture. Luke then starts signaling he’s interested in Ellen through various food/sex metaphors that remarkable newcomer Sharp manages to sell with a lot of goofy charm and not an ounce of ick, essentially setting him up as the potential male romantic lead. To the Bone review – Netflix's anorexia tale is uninsightful, insipid and insulting. Thinness is so equated with beauty norms that it's a culture-wide propaganda bomb. 'To the Bone': Film Review | Sundance 2017. | Cookie Settings. Collins reacts to this appalling tragedy with mild consternation, as if someone has said something lame about her on Instagram. TWITTER The girl at … At the end of the film, precisely nothing useful or insightful is said about anorexia or anything else. As the woman overseeing the house (Marietta Sirleaf) explains, all toilets are locked for 30 minutes after each meal. She's been sick for so long that her entire family, scared and exhausted, has given her up for dead. “To the Bone” does not treat its lead character as a poor and passive victim, sick though she may be. Here is a US drama from Netflix about anorexia, notable only for its sheer extravagant awfulness. There's a discussion about whether or not Emma Stone is fat. Eventually, Eli must come to terms with her relationship with Judy, and the film features a scene in which she is redemptively fed by her with a baby’s bottle, a spectacle that does succeed in being climactically bizarre, at any rate. Sales: WME / AMBI. Girls get the message very young. ), we rarely see him at work with the patients. Other than that (and what, exactly, was that? A few quick scenes establish the situation back home in Los Angeles, where her father is never present; her occasionally borderline inappropriate, endlessly talkative but also somewhat frosty step-mom, Susan (Carrie Preston), tries to overcompensate; and Ellen’s half-sister, Kelly (Liana Liberato), is kinder but has secretly been suffering, too, from having to deal with having a “freak sister” with a disorder. The new Netflix-produced drama, "To the Bone," written and directed by Marti Noxon, tells the tale of a young anorexic using the inside-joke gallows humor of the "rexies" (anorexics) themselves. "To the Bone" gets interested, instead, in the budding relationship between Luke and Ellen.