Review: 'Pieces of a Woman' is one intense scene and a lot of cheap melodrama, all enlivened by Vanessa Kirby's performance

The drama “Pieces of a Woman” starts with one of the most harrowing scenes in recent memory —  so strong it won Vanessa Kirby a best-actress award at the Venice Film Festival and has her in the Oscar conversation.

But it’s all downhill after that, an average marital melodrama that can’t match that opening.

Kirby plays Martha, a successful executive who seems to have it all: A well-paying job, a luxury Boston apartment, and a good husband in Sean (Shia LaBeouf), a construction foreman on a major bridge project. And Martha and Sean are about to become first-time parents. 

Then comes that great high-wire act of a scene, a single-take 24-minute sequence that begins with Martha having contractions and Sean calling their midwife, who says she’s busy with another birth — so a substitute midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), arrives to assist in the home birth. By the end of that 24 minutes, Martha has given birth to her baby daughter, but then something goes horribly wrong.

Everything that follows in Kata Wéber’s script stems from that moment, and how the people around Martha — Sean, her sister Anita (Iliza Shlesinger), and her stern mother, Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn) — don’t understand why she seems so emotionless in the wake of her tragedy. In the process, other problems that were submerged during Martha’s pregnancy flare up, including marital infidelity and Elizabeth’s long-simmering dislike of Sean.

These moments feel like they were cribbed from a weak TV melodrama, though with really good actors trying to milk something authentic from them. Kirby meets that acting challenge, tightly controlled and precise through all of Martha’s unfathomable grief and barely contained rage. But that early scene, where Kirby simulates childbirth and the rollercoaster of feelings that come from it, is a masterclass of in-the-moment acting.

Director Kornél Mundruczó (who worked with Wéber on the 2014 Hungarian canine thriller “White God”) provides a lush visual backdrop for Kirby and her costars to shine — and deploys Sean’s bridge project as a recurring metaphor for the span of time.

But there’s only so much Mundruczó or Kirby can do with the bargain-basement plot contrivances — including a rousing courtroom scene near the finish — that drag “Pieces of a Woman” down after the spectacular work at the beginning.

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‘Pieces of a Woman’

★★1/2

Available for streaming, starting Thursday, January 7, on Netflix; now playing at Megaplex Gateway (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language, sexual content, graphic nudity and brief drug use. Running time: 126 minutes.