Did You Miss Me While Looking for Yourself Out There?OTHER PEOPLE

David (Jesse Plemons) is having a rough year. He’s a comedy writer pushing 30 whose pilot wasn’t picked up. His boyfriend just dumped him. And now he’s moving home with his parents, to help take care of his mother (Molly Shannon) while she dies of cancer. These are setbacks that are supposed to befall other people, he confides in an old classmate who tells him, “Now you’re other people for other people.” It’s with this dazed adrift quality that David goes through the next several months, struggling to spend as much time with his mother as he can while figuring out a way to get his life back on track. Writer-director Chris Kelly, veteran of Saturday Night Live and Broad City, brings to Other People, his debut feature, a sharp sense of timing, stringing together incidents by turns lightly comic, gallows humor dark, and gravely serious. It’s funny, heartwarming, and heartbreaking, sometimes turning one to the other in an instant. Throughout David’s aimless frustrations, and the problems of a family facing the end of a love one, help anchor every moment with humane specificity. It’s cozy as a high-quality serious-minded sitcom, and as sharp as a frank, well-observed, deeply personal story.

This isn’t a cancer movie with cancer as its main interest, or a movie about a young gay man that takes his sexuality as its only characterization. It’s not hard to imagine a terrible version of this story playing out like a cloying, manipulative message movie. How wonderful, then, to find instead a movie sincerely felt and earnestly expressed. Questions of illness and identity are elements used to bring specificity to the character’s lives, considered as part of a whole. The movie is simply about people living their lives in all facets and all quotidian ups and downs, doing the best they can with what they’re given. Here’s a full, warm-hearted, clear-eyed, and compassionate movie about a young man preparing to lose his mother. And yet he feels lost in so many ways, futilely pecking away at spec scripts, ignoring his younger sisters (Maude Apatow and Madisen Beaty) and their emotional needs, maintaining tenuous connections with his ex (Zach Woods), and struggling with seeking the approval of his conservative father (Bradley Whitford), who ten years after his son’s coming out is still unwilling to discuss it.

As much a portrait of millennial quarter-life crisis and modern family dysfunction as it is a movie about losing a loved one, Kelly wisely situates David at a nexus of confusion. His dream career seems out of reach. He’s frustrated about moving back to his hometown. He’s suspicious of dating apps, but increasingly tired of the isolation of his location, and perceived failures. Even his one hookup is clumsy. He splits his time between hanging out with his old friend (John Early) and fulfilling his sense of duty to his mother. He holds her hair while she vomits from chemo, watches her sing in the church choir until she can’t anymore, goes for walks in the park, and sits and talks with her while she nods in and out of sleep. He’s looking for some revelation about life, but instead settles into the long, slow, painful rhythms of watching his mother fade away. Kelly has the scenario progress at an unhurried pace, moving from month to month, picking out illuminating scenarios – a last family trip; discussion of a living will and burial plans; bad dates; professional setbacks; a meltdown in a grocery store’s pharmacy section as the full implications finally hit in waves of confusion – knowing that though a mother is dying, the family’s life still must move on.

This all could be the stuff of Sundance-darling indie-film cliché, the journey of self-discovery through small-town shenanigans and/or fatal diagnoses. But what saves Other People and, indeed, makes it great is Kelly’s good sense of authentic detail, honest messiness, and a ring of truth. I liked its vision of suburban California as an endless horizon of subdivisions, strip malls, and chain stores haunted by the local FM station’s repetitive loop of “Drops of Jupiter.” You can see why this place seems so much smaller than David’s showbiz aspirations. And I loved the family interactions, which aren’t so much melodrama or real tragedy as simple disagreements, sublimated emotional expressions, and subtle miscommunications. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy told us. This one is strained, but the love shows, too. (It’s especially fun and poignant when the grandparents (Paul Dooley and June Squibb) show up with sweet elderly candor laced with the sadness of a couple losing their daughter.) Then there are the awkward encounters, like distant acquaintances who don’t know the news and approach with cheer, or the caring friends who don’t quite know the words to express the sadness and shock they feel.

So expertly judged, Kelly use each moment as evocative glimpses into a variety of evolving reactions to the mournful central issue as well as the daily grind of everything else, even as the end draws near. Simply framed crisp clear digital photography captures scenes with no fuss, effectively and efficiently. This allows us to focus on the great, natural, emotionally dexterous acting and deeply felt dynamics at play. The entire ensemble (enjoyable and moving every one) brings tremendous and true lived-in performances, but I must single out the leads for special mention. Plemons plays David as a man unsure of his movements, hesitant about when to open up and when to merely be strong and silent. He wants his mother’s final months to be happy, and doesn’t want to trouble her with his career and relationship worries. He wants to care for her. Shannon plays her with a fading light, bubbly and funny and full of personality that slowly drains, until she speaks in a whisper as she says her goodbyes, mothering to the end. Their final scene together is the culmination of their characters’ searches for the right words that’ll make them feel some form of solace, as well as the sort of goodbye people have when they can’t bring themselves to say it’s the last one.

Because the movie is so compassionate to every person, and completely aware of how funny life can be even, and maybe especially, during trying and difficult times, there’s a sense of well-rounded believability that serves to make the movie more effective than one of non-stop single-minded sadness. Without falling back on cheap sentimentality or easy tear-jerking, the movie’s final moments earn a wallop of an ending, a satisfying conclusion that’s not tidy, but tender, convincing, right, and overwhelmingly moving. The first line of “Drops of Jupiter” – played earlier for laughs of recognition, now having become unexpectedly melancholy – started me crying. Then a shot of eyes, imbued with such casually forceful symbolic import, immediately before the final cut to black insured I’d be sniffling through the entire end credits, with the feeling I’d just seen something powerfully relatable and genuine.

Holiday Schmaltz: LOVE THE COOPERS

The opening scene of Love the Coopers finds the Cooper family matriarch signing the last of her Christmas cards. “Love, The Coopers,” she writes with a flourish. The title of the movie, however, lacks the comma, making it less a warm present to us all, and more a demand to love the family we’ll be spending the next two hours with. This directive would go over easier if we were given sharply drawn characters who come into focus quickly. But we don’t. It’s a sprawling holiday dramedy dripping with sap and spreading its large ensemble amongst several connected plotlines, some far more interesting than others. It’s a sloppy Christmassy mess, but because a cast of likable charmers plays the characters, the movie has its moments anyway.

Opening on the morning of Christmas Eve, the screenplay by Steven Rogers (Stepmom) finds a large extended family all over Pittsburgh in a rush to get last minute holiday shopping and planning out of the way before the night’s big family dinner. It’s a belabored, scattered setup, hoping to gain some interest out of mystery, keeping the family connections murky until they crystallize as the people congregate around the cookbook-photo-spread Christmas supper. Overly expository narration (by Steve Martin, oddly drained of humor, and oozing storybook affect) tells us a lot, but illuminates little as we find a variety of small human dramas played broad. There’s a layer of schmaltz slathered all over an awkward mix of bad sitcom pacing and drooling manipulation.

There’s a divorced dad (Ed Helms) trying to hide his job loss from his ex-wife (Alex Borstein). Their painfully uncomfortable teen son (Timothée Chalamet) wants his first kiss, their youngest son (Maxwell Simkins) wants a bike, and their toddler daughter (Blake Baumgartner) has learned a curse word. There’s a kind old man (Alan Arkin) with a platonic crush on a sweet waitress (Amanda Seyfried). There’s a couple in their sixties (Diane Keaton and John Goodman) happy to host a family holiday for one last time, since they plan to use it to announce their impending divorce. There’s a lonely middle-aged woman (Marisa Tomei) who’s caught shoplifting (by cop Anthony Mackie) and so might be late for dinner. Finally, there’s a cynical liberal playwright (Olivia Wilde) who Meets Cute with a conservative soldier (Jake Lacy) in an airport bar. Between these stories are stock-footage-ready shots of snowy streets, Santas, and more carolers around every corner than I’ve ever seen in real life.

That’s quite a lot of plot to juggle, especially when it’s not all that deftly edited, and written with thin tin-eared stereotypes. (I didn’t even mention the elderly aunt (June Squibb) whose dementia is used exclusively for laughs.) It develops convolutedly, layered with flashing flashbacks to many characters’ pasts. You might think that’d bring extra heft to the emotional stakes, but it often confuses the issue, mistaking whats for whys when it comes to fleshing out the characters. Director Jessie Nelson (with her first directing credit since 2001’s I Am Sam) cross-cuts unevenly, allowing one character’s cross-town car trip to take as long as another’s grocery shopping, caroling, sledding, and cooking combined. This all could’ve benefited from a smoother approach to ensemble storytelling, more Altman-esque, or at least on the level of a Love Actually or The Best Man Holiday.

The movie spends its time lurching from storyline to storyline, haphazardly developed, largely unconvincing, tonally confused, both too calculated and weirdly adrift. And yet, as frazzled as this setup is, some of it works, and the predictable payoffs are rather sweet in their own ways. The talented cast is too good, especially when Nelson allows them real sensitive moments of connection, to let a sloppy script drag them down. When Keaton and Goodman argue, and when they wistfully reminisce about the good times and the bad they’ve shared over forty years of marriage, there’s real emotional weight. And in the airport scenes between Wilde and Lacy there develops a low-key romantic comedy that’s rather lovely in its chemistry and prickly warmth.

There’s almost enough gooey goodness in the moments that work to override the bad, like the final moments, which reveal the narrator is not omniscient, as has seemed to be the case, but instead a character we meet who has no possible way of knowing everything he’s been telling us. So it’s not a particularly good movie overall. It’s clumsy, obvious, full of clunky failed comedy and overtly telegraphed messages. (Could you guess it’ll be about valuing family togetherness and appreciating what you have right in front of you?) But it also has enough earnest sentiment to make it moderately effective on any big softies in the audience. I have to admit, from time to time, I was one of them. There’s no compelling reason to recommend Love the Coopers except the fleeting moments of button-pushing emotion, which might be enough if you’re willing to let yourself give in and be an easy target for that sort of thing. 

On the Road: NEBRASKA

In Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, an old man (Bruce Dern) in the early stages of aged confusion gets a piece of junk mail that says he has the chance to win $1 million. He thinks he’s won and needs to get from his Montana home to Lincoln, Nebraska (the mail’s return address) to claim his money. He’s all ready to walk there, seeing as he’s not well enough to drive and still hasn’t fixed up the busted pickup that’s been sitting in his garage for a decade. His younger of two grown sons (Will Forte) agrees to drive him, his older son (Bob Odenkirk) and wife (June Squibb) slowly shaking their heads at all this silliness. Forte calmly hears his mother’s objections as she asks why he won’t take her to see her sister instead of indulging his father’s figment of the imagination.

The dignity of the old man’s nonsense quest comes in simply allowing him a sense of purpose and good fortune, the removal of which would be awfully difficult anyway. Payne’s typical sweet-and-sour comic drama chops, on display in the likes of About Schmidt and The Descendents, serve Bob Nelson’s dryly observant road trip screenplay well as the man and his son stop off to see relatives along the way in domestic scenes so true I found myself thinking, I’ve been in those rooms! Conversation is terse, halting, transactional, loosely organized, understated, half-loving and half-prickly. My favorite exchange comes when Forte’s elderly aunt (Mary Louise Wilson) says his uncle’s foot’s been bothering him again. There’s a long pause before the man (Rance Howard) simply says, “Naw. Just hurts.”

It’s all so sharply moving and funny that by the time it concludes with a fuzzy and generous sense of tough Midwestern sentimentality, it’s very nearly earned. The resolution comes not so much from plot or a change in circumstance, but from a simple act of dignity allowed an old man who appreciates it with as much stoic befuddlement as he can be. Dern’s performance is real and creaky a picture of low-level confusion and unshakable delusion. Forte’s a fine low-key foil, exasperated by his father’s unshakable misunderstanding, but so full of loving affection that he’d rather protect his father from those circling to get a piece of the nonexistent prize and shelter him from those who’d make fun of the truth. That just might be a losing battle.

The ensemble – from Odenkirk and Squibb to the myriad small town relatives and acquaintances, including Stacy Keach with perfectly pitched arrogance – is so fully real and convincing there’s hardly a false note among them. Their dialogue is funny in the way your relatives (mileage with this comparison may vary) are funny, with unexpected detours, sudden surprise revelations presented matter-of-factly, conversational roundabouts, and wondrous colloquialisms. The false notes ring softly in the script as it falls into predictable road trip patterns and there’s scarcely a surprise on a story level. That kept it a tad on the narratively uninvolving side for me. The milieu is presented with such clarity and truth, the plot mechanics feel at times like nothing less than an unwelcome intrusion. But the characters feel so real that when the movie was at its best, I hardly cared. Nebraska is as prickly and unhurried as its characters, filmed in bracing black and white that casts it all in a fading glory. The past, endlessly picked and poked by being in old places with old relatives, may be gone, but there’s still dignity in allowing the old man to believe he’s rich. With a son like that, who is to say he isn’t?