There is scene that comes a little over halfway into “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”, where director/writer Eliza Hittman reveals the meaning and value of the film’s title in one of the most searing moments in cinema of 2020. Everything so far in the film has been leading up to it, preparing us for the haemorrhaging of emotion that the scene reveals. What’s more, though, is that nothing that comes after the scene is nearly as effective or intentional. It’s a moment that, in a way, feels like a short-film in itself, and it’s the scene that best propels the virulently emotional landscape that Hittman develops in the film.
In “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”, Hittman presents a semi-naturalistic account of a few days in the life of Autumn Callahan, a seventeen-year old Pennsylvanian girl struggling with an unwanted pregnancy. The inaccessibility to safe abortions leads Autumn, and her helpful cousin Skylar, to New York in search of the medical procedure. Naturally, the film has been given the moniker “abortion film” and the descriptor is not inaccurate. But, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is, perhaps, even better described as a film about trauma. Thinking of Hittman’s film as a film about abortion, though, is to remember that abortion – in media and in life – is often made invisible and peripheral. It is politicised. It is moralised. It is villainised. Here, Hittman is working to empathise. And the film offers itself up as a direct vessel of argumentation, presenting a particular vision of how and why abortions are essential.
So, the film opens – briefly – at a high-school talent show. Autumn performs Ellie Greenwich’s “He’s Got the Power” a song that overwhelms with subtext and foreshadowing, signalling the overwhelming patriarchal structures around her. The men in and out of Autumn’s life are embodiments of the worst of patriarchy. Her careless (step)father is an adult man in a state of arrested development. A male classmate, and suggested ex-lover, is callous in his heckling of her. Her boss at work fondles her limbs repeatedly. A random man on the subway exposes himself to her. And before that central scene that gives us insight in Autumn’s past, hinting a past of abuse, the film is decisively building the plot towards the idea that this is a girl, becoming a woman, whose experiences with men are marked by hostility at best, and abuse at worst.
So, in that central title-scene – as a sympathetic health-worker questions Autumn on her sexual history, the film, in that moment, slowly pulls back the curtain, moving from schematic to specific as it allows Autumn a wealth of depth as a teenaged girl struggling with becoming an adult in a world where women are discarded. Because Hittman is so clearly working with a specific directive, much of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” feels more symbolic than specific. The stark cinematography does a good job of presenting Autumn’s world as one that is dulled by the unceasing sadness around her, but the film is sometimes less developed in the specifics of how this world operates and why. At the centre, Sidney Flanagan is doing a commendable job of navigating Autumn’s emotional closedness in responding to the world around her, and she’s guided by Hittman’s wealth of empathy.
Hitman’s empathy as a director is unceasing. Flanagan gives a tender performance, but the evocativeness of the story depends more on the grace that Hitman affords her. And the empathy is so potent that any sharp critique of the things at work here feels at worst cynical and at best missing the point. In many ways “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is a direct parallel to the strengths and weaknesses of Hitman’s earlier work in the male focussed “Beach Rats”. Both films investigate contemporary toxic masculinity, and both are hewed – almost perilously – to the perspectives of their protagonists. In both cases, the inherent trauma that both protagonists have experienced make that hewn perspective emerge as closed rather than illuminating. It’s hard to represent the banality that comes with relentless trauma without mimicking that same banality in form and tone, so by the third act of the film as the mishaps pile up the film becomes exhausting more than cathartic.
Even before that final act, in an early scene Autumn self-harms herself in an attempt to miscarry. The scene goes on longer than you expect, so long that by the time it ends the initial shock gives way to something that resembles inertia. It’s that line that the film is constantly toeing. Yet, even amidst the film’s own formal myopia, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” feels so essential as a film that offers an essential perspective of a world that is so often overlooked. In a way it makes sense. This is film as political statement and social document, rather than as media or art. And it’s no less valuable for that.
Never Rarely Sometimes Always is available on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and other streaming platforms
