HIS THREE DAUGHTERS. Deep into the third act of writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ (French Exit, 2020; Terri, 2011) latest, a dying man’s thoughts on obituary are paraphrased by one of his titular daughters. To further paraphrase, a description of the departed’s life can only fail to convey the totality of that life and its end; only absence, as an idea and weird, constant presence, can. That notion, set against and upheld by Jacobs’ inimitable, almost-stagey dialog as delivered by the principal cast (three of our most fascinating and distinctive actors), propels His Three Daughters while also imbuing it with a feeling of permanence, of death and grief as inevitable and impossible and larger than life, even in the brief instant of its occurrence; the waiting is the hardest part.
Gathered in their father’s Manhattan apartment — a home they each shared with him but perhaps not fully with each other — Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) uneasily attempt to prepare for his terminal cancer to run its inevitable course. Katie, the eldest and a definitive Type-A, fixates on busywork and blame, projection and displacement. Christina, a Deadhead who decamped to the West Coast, keeps up her yoga and sings to her dad at his bedside while trying to keep an uneasy peace in the household. Meanwhile Rachel, who has continued to share the family home into adulthood, caring for Dad, unseen and unacknowledged, stays high, keeps close tabs on her constant sports betting and barely withstands the misplaced attacks and trespasses-of-ignorance visited upon her by Katie. With hospice workers and a nurse entering and exiting daily, the pressure mounts, impending death illuminating the cracks and corners of everyone’s relationships.
There’s nothing new about a meditation on the end of life, or of the loss of a parent; there are no new stories, right? And in the early going I questioned whether Jacobs’ treatment of the subject would bring anything novel, emotionally or stylistically, to bear on the subject. But the work here mightily rewards patience, as we become acclimated to each character’s particular form and pattern of self-expression. Katie presents almost everything as a pre-composed diatribe, an airless treatise on what must be done and what others have done or are doing to impede that accomplishment. Christina presents herself in a gentled but still too-controlled version of her sister’s impossible buttoned downness. And Rachel, the outlier, with her hair blazing like the cherry of her blunt as she smokes outside, in the cold, displaced by Katie’s idea of decorum, speaks plainly, coarsely, with no apparent affect.
The writing here, polished nearly to artificiality, represents a significant achievement on its own. But the words, delivered by less capable, less invested, less willing actors, would likely have fallen out of the air, too precise and weighted to make their way from one character to another. But the cast here, with Coon chameleonic, Olsen at once painfully present and ephemeral, and Lyonne (by whom some of us have been terrified and transfixed since the ’90s) shifting her usual gravelly implacability into a mode of concealed pain, soon enough transform what might be page-bound into living, breathing expressions of fundamental emotions.
Intentionally limited to the interior and exterior of the family’s apartment, the setting doesn’t permit for much, in terms of aesthetic athleticism, but Jacobs and director of photography Sam Levy compose and light each frame with a compassionate subtlety that transcends the physical limitations of the space within which they operate. The piano score moves as gently through the story as the camera does, and what initially might seem artificial becomes artful, a modest but beautifully constructed examination of an impossible moment with which everyone who lives will eventually contend. R. 101M. NETFLIX.
WOLFS. It speaks to our troubled moment in cinema history that Apple would bet big on a movie like this — a one-night action-thriller-comedy starring two once most-luminous movie stars — but would then fail or falter in finding broad-based theatrical distribution for it. Is it a vote of no confidence in Brad Pitt and George Clooney? Or in relatively new but undeniably successful writer-director Jon Watts (Cop Car, 2015; the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies)? Maybe it’s neither, but it seems undeniable that limiting the movie’s release to Apple’s streaming service is essentially a kiss of death in terms of public awareness and approval.
And more’s the pity, because Wolfs, about a couple of fixers unwittingly thrown together to clean up a prominent public figure’s mess, plays like the hits of both of its leads. In their cool leather jackets and impeccable grooming, Clooney and Pitt are as capable and self-aware as we’d like them to be. But that also means they know how ridiculous the notion of the two of them, A-listers in their 60s, as unflappable operators in the New York night, is.
The movie doesn’t advance or provoke any big ideas, but it is fun and beautifully shot, and buoyed throughout by the charisma of two actors who know exactly what their presence in the frame can create. R. 108M. APPLE TV+.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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This article appears in Combating the Barred Owl Invasion.