Irresistible Starvation
It’s the pretty one, stupid
Does Netflix original To the Bone glamorize anorexia?
The debate’s raging, and mostly because female writer/director Marti Noxon is a recovered “rexie” — as the in-group at rehab refers to their cabal — the film is getting a bye on glamorization. We get a passing glimpse of a furry forearm, see a few protruding vertebrae bruised by too many sit ups, wince at a whiff of a minor character’s hidden barf bag, but hey, folks, film is first and foremost a visual medium and these obligatory “ewwww” moments are oddly divorced from characters or storyline and feel meant to placate the eating disorder police.
Of the whole batch of troubled but lovable weight-obsessed teens at Doc Keanu’s halfway house — our heroine Ellen (Lily Collins) is the pretty one, always impeccably made up (are those false eyelashes or just a boatload of mascara?), the only one with a complex backstory (not one but three fabulously self-absorbed mother figures) and the one who effortlessly wins the affections of the only guy in sight. Plus she’s a talented artist, to boot, an icon among the self-starving set for posting her drawings online. We don’t actually see this work, but the script would have us believe the drawings are so compelling they motivated one fan to starve herself to death. It suggests merely by saying so that Ellen is sorry this happened. And, oh yeah, she’s skinnier than anybody else.
Keanu Reeves’ GP & part-time therapist wins the “unconventional” label because he tells his upper middle class and above inpatients that 1) It’s cool to be alive , and 2) Everyone is responsible for his or her own choices. Except for one brief splash in a super fountain, he’s pretty much wasted in this film.
As to glamorization, here’s the thing. The camera and the director behind it both love — you might even say, adulate Ellen/Lily Collins. For the 90 or so minutes of film time, so do we. The only other truly present character is Alex Sharp’s saintly charmer, Luke, a male rexie ballet dancer who promptly falls in love with Ellen instead of showing us his demons or more than a shadow of his own backstory. (The subplot of a miraculously pregnant bulimic miscarrying after eight weeks while purging her last meal feels more like lesson than event.) If the actress cast as Ellen were less lovely or the rest of the cast more so, if Ellen’s story was one of a compendium of human journeys and not the only show in town, we as viewers would be invited to make emotional and aesthetic judgments. We’d have to stretch, to think, to react as independent agents.
As it is, the adults are too cartoonishly awful, the peers too quickly drawn and the camera too besotted to resist our self-absorbed and spindly heroine. In spite of one quite lovely hallucinogenic sequence near the end, To the Bone feels less like the portrait of a potentially lethal mental illness than a visit to the cool kids’ camp.
