Eternal Beauty (2020) Dramady That Gets Mental Health Right (Review)

Craig Roberts, the pinched face and seemingly eternally adolescent Welsh actor best known for his starring role in Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, follows up his directorial debut Just Jim with Eternal Beauty, an offbeat comedy-drama that approaches the tricky subject of mental illness and is hitting cinemas from Friday October 2nd. Any film that tackles mental health is a risky proposition and Eternal Beauty, which deals specifically with paranoid schizophrenia, is no exception. Thankfully Roberts, who also wrote the screenplay, shows a great deal of insight and understanding and juggles the comedy and drama effectively enough to deliver an empathetic, perceptive and respectful drama that actually gets mental health right.

Of course, it helps that Roberts has an incredibly likeable starry cast at his disposal, led by Sally Hawkins as Jane, a woman who is not only struggling with her condition but also with a family who are largely non-supportive and deeply inconsiderate. Now I know anyone who appreciates genuine talent will say ‘You had me at Hawkins’, but Roberts has cast the rest of the family very well indeed. Penelope Wilton and Robert Pugh co-star as Jane’s rather useless parents, the passive-aggressive Vivian and the henpecked Dennis, whilst Billie Piper and Alice Lowe play her sisters, Nicola and Alice. Piper seizes the opportunity to play the selfish and mean-spirited sibling whose clearly Vivian’s favourite and whose only interest in her sister’s condition arises when she plans to imitate some of her behaviour and symptoms to fraudulently claim disability benefit for herself.

Meanwhile, Lowe, who one suspects would have fitted the shoes of Nicola with great ease, subverts audience expectations to play against type as Alice, the only understanding member of the family who provides Jane with some much needed emotional support and kindness. Fast-rising star Morfydd Clark (The Personal History of David Copperfield and Saint Maud) plays Jane as a teenage beauty queen in a series of flashbacks that tragically depict her being jilted at the altar – an emotionally devastating moment that presumably led to her descent into mental illness. The film is set in Roberts’ native Wales and is shot mostly on drab, grey and neglected council estates that befit the somewhat bleak tone that is most certainly found in the film’s early stages. Whilst none of the principal cast, barring native Robert Pugh, are actually playing Welsh (a kink in the road that is never explained), Roberts does afford us the opportunity see the great Welsh actor and writer Boyd Clack in a supporting role as Jane’s doctor, and a phrase that all the characters routinely use “in my oils”, ie to be golden or at one’s best, seems to originate from South Wales. First I’d heard of it I must say, but I’m such a magpie for such idioms, that I’ll probably use it from now on!

Narratively, Eternal Beauty is a very simple movie as Roberts only concerns himself with exploring Jane attempts at functioning with everyday life and the central dilemma that many mental health sufferers face; can you truly claim to be ‘you’ when you’re medicating? It is the latter which is explored with the introduction of Mike, a fellow mental health sufferer and aspiring singer-songwriter whose manic behaviour perhaps dwarfs any actual musical talent. Played by none other than David Thewlis, the larger-than-life Mike comes into Jane’s world at a time when she is searching for meaning. For the first time in a long while, he makes her feel alive and it’s a sensation which she fully embraces by stopping her medication. The depiction of their ensuing love affair is sweetly adolescent-like and joyous, providing the film with some of its most life-affirming, colourful and happy highpoints after the murky darkness of some of a first-half necessarily built around depictions of paranoid episodes that were at best quirky and at worst genuinely discomforting. But pretty soon Jane’s illness and the lack of attention and care she is affording it to keep the episodes at bay resurfaces. Her damaging comedown coincides with further poor health from an unexpected quarter, as Penelope Wilton’s matriarch reveals that she is dying. What follows is a family having to communicate, understand and accept one another for the first time in years and it’s a much needed cathartic release for both characters and audience alike.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure about Eternal Beauty at first and that pained me as I’m such a great admirer of so many in the cast, especially Hawkins. I spent at least half-hour fearing that what Roberts was trying to say just wasn’t going to click with me, and I had reservations about the almost Lynchian approach he seemed to be employing in terms of the film’s visuals and its tone. But then something just clicked and I realised it was the beating heart at the centre of the film. In lesser hands, Eternal Beauty could revel in its skewed camera angles and off-kilter atmosphere, treating mental illness as little more than a showy gimmick – something that allows a director’s imagination to run wild, but as I say, there’s genuine perception and empathy at play here and it is a relief to see.

Granted, there will still be some people who will not take to Eternal Beauty or what it is saying/how it is handling schizophrenia, and I feel that their basis of the complaint will be one of tone. It’s not quite nails down the blackboard, but I can appreciate that it may be too much for some. For all the careful tightrope-walking Roberts may make, it’s all for nothing if his cast are less considerate. It’s perhaps a measure of his background in acting that he gets his ensemble on the same footing to produce great work, but his work is clearly made much easier by virtue of the fact that he had been able to put a call into his Submarine co-star Sally Hawkins to play the lead.

With her unmistakable natural insight and intelligence as a performer, Hawkins interprets Roberts’ screenplay and vision beautifully. Many an actor would seize upon the opportunity of playing a paranoid schizophrenic for the awards potential alone; fully immersing themselves in the mercurial aspects and character tics of extreme highs and lows, resulting in a showy pantomime that is far removed from the grain of truth upon the page or in the writer’s head, doing an important issue a great disservice. Not so Sally Hawkins, who makes the appropriate choices at every turn. She knows exactly when to play up to the humour of the writing – and it is a lot more amusing than it occasionally sounds – and exactly when to underplay it too, as well as mining the drama and tragedy for all its worth, producing a performance of great nuance and depth. Saying a performance will make you laugh and make you cry seems like such a tired cliche, but cliches have a truth to them nonetheless and this is just such a performance. Admirers of the actress will not want to miss the opportunity of catching this film.

Thanks for reading our review of Eternal Beauty

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