Jennifer Lawrence poses during a photocall for the film Die, My Love at the 73rd San Sebastian International Film Festival, in Spain, on Sept. 26.Pankra Nieto/Reuters
Watching the new film Die My Love, I could feel my arteries sizzling. Where had a woman like this been all my life?
Grace (Jennifer Lawrence, never better) has just moved to rural Montana with a man she loves, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), to be near his parents (Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte). Jackson is enthralled by Grace’s enormous life force, even when – or maybe because – she colours so far outside the lines that she obliterates the lines. They have a baby, whom they adore. Yet Grace has the audacity to still be itchy, frustrated, angry.
She gave up her writing career in New York; now she’s stuck between “wanting to do something and not wanting to do anything at all.” When no one seems to hear her, when nothing changes, black clouds crowd inside her until the only recourse she sees is to smash things up and burn them down.
At least that’s the movie I saw. Director Lynne Ramsay, who co-wrote the screenplay with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, based on a novel by Ariana Harwicz, is expert at giving audiences characters, situations and emotions, then leaving the interpretation to us.
“I’ve wanted to work with Lynne my entire adult life,” Lawrence, 35 and a mother of two herself, said in a recent interview. “She’s fearless. She’s not worried about the audience: ‘This is the ride, get on or get out.’” So when Lawrence read Harwicz’s novel – she finished it the day she received it – Ramsay was the only director she wanted.
“I understood how profound it was, but also that it would be challenging to film, because it’s all Grace’s inner life,” Lawrence says. “The interpretation would have to be more poetic than literal, and the most poetic director I can possibly think of is Lynne.” Now Lawrence takes her place alongside other unforgettable Ramsay women, including Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Samantha Morton (Morvern Callar).
The person who sent Lawrence the novel was none other than Martin Scorsese. “He read it in his book club, which is precious,” she says. (Oh, to be a fly on that wall.) “It’s so telling of Marty’s emotional capacity that the story struck him. It is mind-blowing that I was in his mind. Seeing his name pop up on my phone still gets me.”
Mind-blowing describes Lawrence, too. From the moment a scout plucked her, at the age of 14, out of a New York crowd (she was visiting from Kentucky with her parents), her talent has been undeniable, her personality singular – funny, raunchy, outspoken, bold. She racked up a record-setting four Oscar nominations by the age of 26, winning for Silver Linings Playbook. Since 2018, she’s headed a production company, Excellent Cadaver; in addition to Die My Love (which was shot around Calgary), the company has made the drama Causeway, the comedy No Hard Feelings and two urgent documentaries that echo Lawrence’s commitment to women’s rights. Bread and Roses, about Afghani women’s lives in the wake of the 2021 Taliban takeover, was nominated for an Emmy and won a Peabody. Zurawski v Texas, about a reproductive rights case in Texas, was co-produced by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
“I’ve done some movies that are more literal about my beliefs – The Hunger Games, rising up against tyranny,” Lawrence says. “Die My Love is less literal, but it does explore and remind us about this new concept, that mothers are humans.” (She’s being wry, but she means it.) “It reminds us that taking care of children and looking after a house is an exhausting, full-time job. It’s extreme manual labour – it’s just unpaid manual labour.”
Jennifer Lawrence poses for pictures in San Sebastian, Spain, in September.ANDER GILLENEA/AFP/Getty Images
Lawrence is known for not living in character. She’s not sure if that’s a matter of craft “or just an ADHD mind,” but when she gets in the car to leave work, “I forget that I’m even going to have to act the next day,” she says. “I let go completely. I watch reality TV, Veep, Dateline. And then the next morning I’m like, ‘Oh damn, what are we doing today?’”
She admits, however, that Grace demanded a lot of her. One interpretation of this story is that Grace is suffering from extreme postpartum depression. For me, that take’s too limited. But whatever viewers think, “the moments with big emotion that have to do with her child were hard,” Lawrence says. “It was not a nice feeling. They’d call cut, I’d get a little relief, and then I’d have to do it again. I’d know what’s coming, and it got scarier and scarier every time.”
But the moments where she rages at Jackson? “Those were really fun,” she says. For a sequence where Grace trashes a room, Ramsay suggested she wear an earwig – a hidden earpiece – playing hard-core music. It’s the first time Lawrence used music that way, and it felt true to Grace: “There’s so much going on in her mind that’s not matching what’s happening on the outside. It was like physically putting the extra voices in her head.”
In lesser hands, Die My Love might have been a cliché: Husband is a jerk who’s not helping with the baby, so wife gets, then goes, mad. Pattinson insisted on making Jackson even stronger than he was in the script, so he wasn’t blown away by Grace. “That added so much more dimension,” Lawrence says. “The challenges that happen in a relationship after a child – yes, they’re universal, but they’re also deeply complex.”
“More than any movie I’ve made, so much is left between the lines here for the audience to read,” she continues. “All responses are valid. Maybe some of it is a fever dream, but when we were filming, I thought everything we see was real.”
Lawrence makes it feel real. A small piece of direction from Ramsay, in a scene where Grace rouses her sleeping baby just because she’s bored, helped her get there.
“I told Lynne no one would ever do that, because there’s no greater feeling than closing the door on your sleeping child,” Lawrence recalls. In reply, Ramsay read aloud Jackson’s line, “You kept the baby up?” Then she read Grace’s – “Yeah. So?” – off-handedly.
“She just shrugged it off,” Lawrence says. “That wasn’t how I’d been reading it. That unlocked so much of Grace for me – her being matter-of-fact about things that are strange. Her straightforward following of her impulses without questioning them. That is opposite to how I live my day-to-day life.”
Which is? “Carefully,” she replies. “I certainly try to be in control of my emotions, so my emotions don’t control me. I try to be conscientious of the lives around me and think about cause and effect.” But here comes that wicked Jennifer Lawrence grin. “Which was why it was so fun to live out those intrusive thoughts.”