TO THE BONE (2017) - Dr. Beckham
"To the Bone" opens up with a trigger warning about eating disorders and so I suppose if you've somehow found your way to this blog and this post in particular, I guess I should relay that message to you as well, even though I'm going to keep this one on the shorter side and will leave my recap on this less detailed than many of my recent posts.
I'm just going to jump right into this one so I can get on to the next one ASAP and I don't know nearly enough about eating disorders to comment properly on this movie as to what they get right and what they get wrong so I'm not even going to bother to attempt to do so.
"To the Bone" is a story about a young woman, Ellen, and her experience battling anorexia. The movie mainly takes place at an in-treatment program outside of LA which is led by Keanu Reeves, who is once again playing a doctor.
We meet Ellen at the beginning of the movie who is once again failing to get better at her latest in-treatment program and leaving to return home where she lives with her absentee father, stepmother and stepsister and we learn a few things about Ellen in the process: her birth mother is a bipolar lesbian, she's an artist who got into some sort of trouble with drawings she's posted online (we learn more later) and she's been struggling with anorexia for what sound like quite a while.
Her stepmother, while extremely annoying and far too chatty for my liking does seem to genuinely care about Ellen's health (not always in the most helpful ways) and well-being, as does her stepsister. Dad on the other hand is nowhere to be seen. Stepmom gets Ellen into see an eating disorder specialist, Dr. Beckham, played by our hero Keanu Reeves and unlike a lot of other movies I've watched for this project where Keanu plays a supporting role, he is at least introduced to us very early in the film.
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| This seems...unhelpful |
Dr. Keanu admits Ellen to his in-patient treatment center, where she meets all the other women (and one young man named Lucas) and checks in. All the women there have one disorder or another, but the movie focuses mainly on Ellen's relationship with Lucas, who is a ballet dancer with a knee injury and is on his way towards recovery after a six month stint at the center.
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| Hi, I'm Lucas. You're gonna HATE me. |
Ellen learns the ropes of the house, what is an what is not allowed and begins her path towards recovery which includes things like group therapy with the house and a group therapy session with her entire family (sans dad) which does NOT go well. She eventually forms a friendship with Lucas who sort of sees himself as the den mother of the house but his feelings eventually turn romantic and aren't entirely reciprocated by Ellen.
Dr. Keanu shows up here and there for therapy sessions with Ellen and he has a very "telling it like it is" attitude towards Ellen, eventually saying that she needs to hit bottom before she can truly recover. As I said at the top, I don't know much about eating disorders but I'm not entirely sure this is great advice since hitting bottom if you have anorexia can mean death.
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| Dr. Keanu's office, please note his coffee mug |
Anyway...Ellen eventually gets fed up with the center and peaces out despite Lucas' attempt to get her to stay. She heads to a Greyhound station where she passes out before hopping on a bus to go see her birth mother and her wife at the ranch in Arizona where they live. Ellen wanders outside the ranch the first night she's there and passes out yet again, this time having a vision of Lucas and deciding that she does in fact want to recover and live. The movie ends with Ellen returning to the treatment house to check herself back in.
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| Fuck the Greyhound bus! |
I know my recap here is lacking, especially compared to my other posts, but I really don't want to get into all the details of everything else that happens in the movie. Lily Collins, the actress who plays Ellen, is actually quite excellent in the movie and apparently lost a ton of weight for the role and the scenes that we do see of her body (mainly her back and her ribs) are really uncomfortable and upsetting, even more so when I learned that Lily Collins actually had real-life struggles with her weight.
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| Lily Collins will be nominated for my best non-Keanu performances shortly |
In fact, all of the performances in this are really good, except for maybe Lucas who was more annoying to me than anything else. I really don't have much else to say here so I'm just going to move onto my scattered thoughts:
*Hey, Rhetta (Donna, from "Parks and Rec) is in this movie! I always love to see when the supporting characters from that show make it onto the big screen. Or little screen in this case as this movie was purchased and is owned by Netflix.
*At one point in the movie, Dr. Keanu takes the house on a field trip to an art installation, which is basically just indoor rain but the shot looks really excellent and even Lucas gets to show off his dancing skills. This was apparently a real installation in LA that featured sensors on the floor that turned off the water above where people are standing so they don't get wet, which I think sounds pretty fun.
*Later on in the movie in one of her therapy sessions, Dr. Keanu suggests she change her name from Ellen, sort of as a way to see herself as a new person, so she chooses the name Eli. This feels like a bad choice to me as Eli is almost exclusively a man's name and it also reminds me of Eli Roth which in turn makes me think of "Knock Knock" which in turn makes me want to jump off my roof.
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| Enough said |
*Box Office Information: N/A - this movie is owned by Netflix
*Rotten Tomatoes: 72% Audience/64% Audience
*IMDB: 6.8
*My Movie Rating: 6.5/10. Some really good performances in here, particularly by Lily Collins. Even though I'm rating this higher than a lot of other movies in this project so far, I'm not sure I'd recommend it.
*Keanu Rating: It's the second time he's played a doctor and I think he's pretty good! 7/10.
Up Next: Hey, let's get back some lighter fare with...could it be...yes, it's "John Wick Chapter 2!"
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