Film Review: To the Bone

*In today’s post, I’m talking about To the Bone, which is a film about a woman suffering from an eating disorder. If you are suffering from an eating disorder, please proceed with caution or don’t read if you feel it may be triggering. Furthermore, I’m not a psychologist and do not claim to be an expert of any kind when it comes to eating disorders; I only speak from my own anecdotal experience as someone who used to suffer from an eating disorder. This review includes spoilers.* 

In July, Netflix released To the Bone, a controversial but highly anticipated film starring Lily Collins as a young Californian woman suffering from an eating disorder. Directed by Marti Noxen, who based the story around her own experiences with an eating disorder, To the Bone tackles a difficult subject. Not only is it challenging to portray eating disorders without the risk of glamorizing them, it is hard to communicate in visual format the extent to which an eating disorder inflicts mental suffering on its victim and the daily mental struggle of recovery. Noxen attempts to navigate this treacherous line, tweeting her goal for the film:

“…was not to glamorize EDs, but to serve as a conversation starter about an issue that is too often clouded by secrecy and misconceptions. I hope that by casting a little light into the darkness of this disease we can achieve greater understanding and guide people to help if they need it.” — Marti Noxen

With all its attention and criticism, the film certainly succeeded in its goal of opening up dialogue on eating disorders. That said, after all the hype, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed after watching the film. Ultimately, Noxen does little to scratch behind the superficial exterior that an eating disorder is reduced to–food and body appearance–and does little to challenge or explore underlying beliefs someone with an eating disorder might have (e.g. I will die if I gain weight / eat). At occasion, the film hints at more, getting closer with a poignant mother-daughter scene at the end,  but the film never really pushes past the stereotype of a woman who isn’t eating and squanders the opportunity to present an eating disorder in a more complex light–one that might give the average person a deeper understanding of a victim’s feeling of disembodiment or one that would inspire hope and body positive attitudes in other viewers. Instead, the viewer must slog through what feels like an endless array of depressing scenes to arrive at the end with little understanding of how to encourage recovery and only the faintest glimmer of hope that recovery is possible.

While it’s true there’s no “one-size fits all” to recovery and recovery often involves one-step forward, two-steps back, the film ends before we really see anything that appears to be working for our heroine, and we don’t get a strong sense that the grueling one-step forward, two-steps back of recovery is worth it–we don’t get to see the fullness of Ellen’s life without ED. This seems irresponsible to omit in a film that wants to “cast light” on eating disorders and guide people to help. While I commend the film for starting an important public conversation, ultimately the harmful portrayal of how to interact with someone with an eating disorder, the film’s scattered focus of who the film is actually geared at, and the distracting romantic interlude, prevent me from wholeheartedly recommending this film.

To the Bone opens with Ellen, a 20-something woman who suffers from anorexia, being sent home from a treatment center. She arrives back at her father and stepmother’s home unexpectedly (though it seems rather expected at this point for her to fail a treatment program). Ellen claims that she has things “under control,” and when anyone expresses concern about her, she maintains that cool, detached air of whatever, clearly pretty blasé about help at this point. Moody, obstinate, and showing little emotion, Ellen is not exactly likable. We quickly learn she has been in and out of treatment centers for several years, to no avail, and her family is almost at their wit’s end with what to do with her. Although we don’t learn much about what caused her eating disorder, we do learn that Ellen comes from a chaotic family: her father claims he always has work and bails on commitments, including an important family therapy session; her birth mother left when Ellen was younger to live with her lesbian partner in Arizona; her stepmother cares about her but often comes across as patronizing, and she and Ellen don’t connect at all; and finally, there’s Ellen’s stepsister, Anna, who is the only one Ellen feels close to in her family. It is only through Ellen’s relationship with her stepsister that we catch glimpses behind Ellen’s mask and see that she genuinely cares about and loves her sister, a propensity she doesn’t yet know how to apply to herself. 

Shortly after Ellen arrives back home, Noxen includes two rather perplexing and bothersome scenes. In the first, Ellen eats dinner with her sister Anna, and Anna gets out an app to look up the calorie count for the food. She has Ellen guess how many calories are in each food item, who guesses the calorie amounts perfectly, much to Anna’s amusement. This scene is strange for Noxen to include for a number of reasons. First, anyone who knows anything about helping someone recover from an eating disorder knows that talking about calories is strongly discouraged and harmful. If Ellen’s family has invested so much time and money into putting Ellen in treatment centers and trying to help her recover, wouldn’t a doctor at some point have mentioned “Don’t talk about calories”? Secondly, do we assume Anna doesn’t know better because she’s still in high school and give her a pass for thinking counting calories is a benign game to encourage Ellen to play? This is also difficult to believe because the film makes it clear Anna does care–very deeply–about Ellen’s recovery. It’s unlikely Anna’s character would participate in the calorie counting “game,” so why include it? Perhaps Noxen’s intent was merely to show the obsessive nature of an eating disorder, which almost always involves ritualistically counting and thinking about calories, but I can’t help but feel there could have been a safer way to show the obsessiveness without acting like it’s a harmless game. What Noxen fails to do rather spectacularly is to educate viewers with a simple guideline: if someone has an eating disorder, don’t talk about calories with them. 

With this, I want to take a moment to comment on the film’s lack of a primary audience: is Noxen trying to help people with an eating disorder, is she trying to break myths about eating disorders, or is she trying to educate people who have never suffered from an eating disorder? Here, I couldn’t help but feel that Noxen’s message fell flat because she’s never communicating enough to one specific audience–she makes the film darker so people can understand the misery of an eating disorder, but it’s too dark for people with an eating disorder to watch without being triggered. She includes unhelpful things family say and do that someone with an eating disorder will smirk at, but she doesn’t educate an audience on what is helpful to say or do.

In her purpose for the film, Noxen does mention wanting “greater understanding” for eating disorders, so it’s likely that she wanted to reach people who have never had eating disorders–family members or friends of someone with an eating disorder who might “guide people to help if they need it,” as she states. In that case, Noxen fails to interlace helpful guidance for viewers on how to help someone with an eating disorder–as I stated before, stuff like: don’t talk about calories. This is not to say that Noxen shouldn’t have portrayed a dysfunctional family, but she could have included, say, a character who modeled healthy ways to talk to someone with an eating disorder–ways to be body positive, to take the focus off of weight and food, and someone who modeled or talked about nurturing, loving, and taking care of yourself. You might argue that the doctor, played by Keanu Reeves, models this, but he seems to pop sporadically in and out of the film and wax philosophical, Pinterest-esque, pin-able lines when he’s there. I didn’t really get the sense that he was a deep, supportive character who modeled habits that family and friends of those with eating disorders could learn from.

Another scene that I found strange and disturbing takes place shortly after the calorie-counting scene between Ellen and Anna. Ellen’s stepmother, Susan, has the unpleasant task of weighing Ellen to make sure she is not losing weight. Susan is distraught when Ellen takes off her bulky sweater to reveal her bony frame underneath. She takes a photo of her and turns the camera around and asks Ellen, “Do you think this is beautiful?” Ellen mumbles, “No.” Personally, I found the scene awkward and even mortifying to watch, as it almost felt like Susan is trying to body-shame Ellen into recovery. (Again: Bad! I would not recommend doing this!) Frankly, someone suffering from this disease is not going to see themselves rationally–perhaps even think they’re not thin enough, and focusing on external appearance–even in an attempt to prod recovery–is more likely to be harmful than helpful.

Later on, Noxen includes another scale scene where Ellen is weighed by a nurse at the treatment center, and allowed to see what she weighs. (Not only does this bring the focus back to the exterior, but how incredibly irresponsible for any eating disorder center to let their patients see what they weigh!) With the scale scenes, the film misses an opportunity to explore and challenge the dire fear someone with an eating disorder has about gaining weight. There are some characters who appear like they are becoming more comfortable with eating and getting back to a normal weight, only for them to have a drastic setback, which leaves the viewer hopeless. When the patients are force-fed or gain minuscule amounts of weight, they become depressed, angry, and upset, but the film never prods: “What is so terrible about gaining weight?” (Follow that questioning and see how many irrational answers come up!) There’s some cheering in the weighing scene from Luke, the only male in the treatment center, but beyond that, Noxen avoids a more intimate peek into watching someone overcome those fears. Confronting these fears could have been a chance to introduce a character who successfully models body acceptance and love for their body in all its stages of whatever weight or appearance. In my own journey, it was only when I gave up knowing what I weighed and accepted that I might gain weight that I was able to begin to heal. I had to wrestle with that big fear: what did I believe was so terrible about it? There was a lot packed up in there. However, the film misses this opportunity for a character to transform those beliefs and also misses the chance to challenge viewers who might also have unhealthy attitudes towards themselves about their body and weight.

Ellen’s gaunt body made me extremely uncomfortable during the film, and if Noxen’s goal was to shock, it certainly does. Still, choosing to focus the story on a woman who is at the near-death stage of anorexia perpetuates the myth that only people who “look” like they have an eating disorder have one. Someone can be suffering from anorexia and not be bone thin. There are some background characters of different shapes and sizes at the treatment center who suffer from different eating disorders, but they are given almost no attention. I would have liked to see the film focus a little more on the other characters, if only to highlight other eating disorders besides anorexia, which usually receives the most attention anyways, simply because it is the easiest to notice visually. 

One final plot development that bothered me was the little romantic interlude that is hardly original and honestly takes away from Ellen’s own power of finding strength in herself to recover. In the dream sequence at the end, Ellen is not there by herself as a strong, confident, recovered woman: she’s there with the romantic interest, Luke. It’s certainly not terrible to imply that future Ellen eventually falls in love, but this detracts from Ellen’s tenacity and the importance of learning to love and accept oneself. It seems dangerous to equate happiness and recovery with simultaneously finding romantic love and perpetuates the romanticized myth that we need someone else to act as our “savior.” I’m all for guides and support along the way, but I would rather have seen Ellen find something within herself to motivate her to live, rather than the potential of romantic love being used to represent hope and recovery.  While this last scene had powerful potential to show feminine strength, self-love, and acceptance, it was diluted by this romantic trope.

Right at the end of the film, Noxen starts to get into her groove with an interesting and emotional scene of restoration between Ellen and her birth mother on the ranch in Arizona that left me curious and wanting more. This symbolic experience of nurture seems to spark Ellen’s “rock bottom” moment and hallucinatory decision to live. Here, I felt like Noxen had a chance to explore some really powerful themes and get beyond the surface of eating disorders. However, just when I started to feel hopeful and wonder how Ellen would go about her recovery now that she wanted it, the film ended. 

It’s easy to focus on the drama of the eating disorder as a way to convey that darkness to people who haven’t experienced it, but the film focuses on this to the point that the film ends and it feels like only half of the story has been told. Rather than just tell the story of Ellen halfheartedly wandering in and out of treatment centers for the whole film, I wanted to see Ellen waging goddamn war against the eating disorder. There’s some of that–at one point she timidly tells her eating disorder to “F*** off” — a good start, but Ellen always seems to shrink in defeat afterwards. There’s also the “Because we’re alive” scene, which tries to be a beautiful, artistic moment of hope and being alive, but it’s also distractingly overshadowed by romance and felt a little cheesy to me.  I wanted to see scenes where Ellen, not the eating disorder, wins, and where she wins without a romantic interest prodding her along. I wanted to see her eat at least one meal and not feel bad about it. Of course, it would be unrealistic to portray her journey as a constant upward trajectory, but I think Noxen owed it to the viewer to infuse more hope: ED does not have to win.

All in all, it’s obviously difficult to convey eating disorders in film because so much of the disease is a mental battle with no single underlying cause and no single path to recovery. To the Bone takes on a really difficult task of adapting thousands of people’s experiences and building a cohesive storyline that pays homage to ED experiences and recovery.  It’s very possible that my own experience with an eating disorder clouds my judgement of the film — obviously the film presents a different experience than my own, and it’s hard to filter out the expectation and desire to see my own experience represented in the film and not fall prey to the idea that my path must be the “right” path. Yet, even if I don’t identify so strongly with the story presented, I suppose because I feel so strongly about there being hope for a full ED recovery and that I find the moments of victory stronger and more important than what felt like moments of endless failure that I felt disappointed Noxen’s film doesn’t take a stronger stance on showing recovery and victory. Still, Noxen talked about wanting to create a film that portrays eating disorders responsibly, and I can’t help but feel that part of portraying an eating disorder responsibly is not just leading a viewer to discover the start of a path that may or may not lead to recovery, but showing the viewer some concrete steps along that path that lead to self-acceptance, self-love, and a healthy relationship with food and body.