“To the Bone,” the new movie from Marti Noxon, stars Lily Collins as a young woman with anorexia and Keanu Reeves as the vaguely unconventional—he’s bearded and uses curse words—doctor who treats her. After premièring at Sundance in January, it was bought by Netflix, for eight million dollars. Noxon, who made her name as a writer and executive producer on subversive, female-centered TV shows such as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “UnREAL,” both wrote and directed the movie. It’s her directorial début.
“To the Bone” is clearly meant as a departure, in certain respects, from the dour, melodramatic, made-for-TV weepers that have thus far dominated whatever market exists for cinematic anorexia. Just minutes into the movie, Collins’s character, Ellen, rolls her eyes during arts-and-crafts therapy at rehab and flashes a handcrafted sign that says “SUCK MY SKINNY BALLS.” In other ways, as many critics have noted, the movie hews closely to convention. Its style is straightforward and familiar and essentially didactic; its world is peopled with hysterical women and charismatic male saviors (Reeves, and a pushy, whimsical British love interest played by Alex Sharp). Most obviously, the twenty-year-old Ellen exactly fits the stereotype of an American girl with an eating disorder. She is white, her family is wealthy, and, although the movie makes it clear that she’s physically and mentally ill, she nonetheless scans as a character we’re supposed to find both attractive and captivating: she’s bone-thin, brooding, and beautiful, with big eyes smudged with liner and a sketchbook in her hand.
Noxon based “To the Bone” on her own struggles with life-threatening anorexia in high school. During her senior year, shortly after her weight dropped to sixty-nine pounds, she was hired as a body double for Jennifer Jason Leigh, who played an anorexic teen-ager in the 1981 TV movie “The Best Little Girl in the World.” (A writers’ strike disrupted production, and Noxon, who’s now fifty-two, didn’t actually appear in the movie.) Collins, too, has dealt with the disorder, an experience she writes about in her memoir, “Unfiltered,” which was published in March. Both Noxon and Collins have spoken about wanting to make this movie in large part because they were at a place in their recoveries where they could do so. Nonetheless, and inevitably, it posed a challenge. Collins lost weight for the movie—a pursuit that is generally dangerous for recovering anorexics—and in the middle of filming an old friend told her, “I want to know what you’re doing, you look great!” Noxon has said that some people might want to “steer clear” of the movie; she told the Los Angeles Times that she felt like she was getting “bigger and bigger and bigger” while on set.
Their intimate knowledge of anorexia gives “To the Bone” its ring of authenticity. Collins plays her role in a commendably quiet way, and the best parts of the movie—including a bizarre feeding scene close to the end—come straight from Noxon’s life. As Ellen enters therapy in a group home, small details keep the movie from feeling as rote as it otherwise might: one patient starts panicking about the calorie load of a feeding tube; another girl hides bags of vomit under her bed. But realistic detail in a story about anorexia is tricky. It’s artistically fundamental and at the same time seen as morally troubling, even medically inadvisable for some viewers. (There’s a content warning before “To the Bone” begins.)
This is the difficulty in trying to make art about socially contagious afflictions like anorexia and suicide, which tend to be glamorized and stigmatized at the same time. There have been multiple Change.org petitions asking Netflix to pull “To the Bone,” arguing that the movie is harmful in every direction: it stigmatizes eating disorders, and also glorifies them; it gives too narrow a portrait of people with anorexia, but in doing so also shows too much. Comparisons to “13 Reasons Why,” Netflix’s recent miniseries about suicide, were inevitable. And though the tonal approach of “To the Bone” is very different—it’s a lightly sardonic indie-folk song, where “13 Reasons Why” is like the Trans-Siberian Orchestra covering “I Dreamed a Dream”—a basic quandary connects the two projects: the more exciting the story, the more dangerous it becomes.
That danger is exacerbated for “To the Bone” by the sheer ubiquity of anorexic thinking in popular culture. For Noxon and Collins to fascinate viewers, they must draw from the poisonous worship of bodily discipline and deprivation that already surrounds young women like air. (Given that fact, the relatively bland style of “To the Bone” could be seen as a wise choice; it’s perhaps for the best that we never see Ellen experiencing a rush.) Anorexia is typically treated as a niche topic; Noxon told Vulture that male studio executives thought the subject was “too small.” But its cardinal principles—that thinness is equivalent with morality and that the body needs to be controlled at all costs—are powerfully embedded in everyday life.
This is, essentially, why disordered eating is contagious: the practice is congruent with values of restraint and physical obsession that, up to a certain point, almost always bring social rewards. It is widely accepted that the female body should be surveilled and punished in mundane ways. The B.M.I. of Miss America winners has been dropping since the nineteen-fifties, and contestants are now consistently clinically underweight. This month, Collins appears on the cover of the weight-loss-centric magazine Shape in a bikini, and describes her everyday diet by saying she’s a “clean eater”—the same phrase she uses when describing how she brought herself down to a credibly disordered weight. Self recently ran a piece on “To the Bone,” cautioning sensitive viewers and closing with the phone number of an eating-disorder helpline. I read it, and then visited the main page of Self’s Web site, where there were recipes for low-calorie breakfasts and posts like “This Mom Did a Full Workout While She Was in Labor,” which I did not read.
How do you make a responsible movie about anorexia? And then: how do you make an interesting one? It’s hard to get the answers to those questions to line up. When Todd Haynes made “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” in 1987, he used Barbie dolls instead of actors, whittling away at Karen Carpenter’s plastic throughout. In that deeply strange, forty-three-minute movie, Haynes was able to express anorexia’s bewildering doubleness—how the pursuit of beauty and individuality becomes identical to the pursuit of banality and death; how the disease can seem simultaneously ubiquitous and unforgivable. At one point in Haynes’s film, “Theme From a Summer Place” plays over generic grocery-store footage while a title card describes anorexia as “a fascism over the body in which the sufferer plays both the parts of the dictator and the emaciated victim.” Noxon never goes as deep, nor is she ever quite this clear—there isn’t much in the movie about Ellen’s actual disease or treatment. But, in a subdued, sober way, she gets at the obscure, immovable contradiction at the center of anorexia—particularly in the scenes at the group home, when it’s clear that none of the patients knows whether dictator or victim will win.
