This is the End: HIS THREE DAUGHTERS

The only way art can accurately portray death is through absence. So says one of the daughters in His Three Daughters, a movie about estranged sisters gathered in the small New York City apartment in which their father is dying. True to its word, he stays in the next room, with only the sound of a heart monitor softly beeping in the background to alert us to his continued presence. Meanwhile the action of the film takes place almost entirely with him off screen. It creates a sense of impending absence looming over the picture. We spend our time in the rest of the apartment with three grown women who aren’t particularly close in their sibling relationships. We get the sense that maybe they were never all that close. Here are sisters who’ve found themselves at very different places in life, living distant lives connected only by the man who raised them, gave them a shared history, and now in his expiring has them back for another time together—the last with him, and maybe the last for the three of them together, too. The trio of performances are a fine-tuned chamber piece of natural discomforts and duty. There’s the frosty older sister (Carrie Coon) who talks about her own distant daughters. There’s the pothead middle sister (Natasha Lyonne) who lives with the old man, took care of him on her own for years, and is now suddenly sidelined by the others. There’s the younger sister (Elizabeth Olsen), with a 3-year-old daughter back home. They sit awkwardly together, tiptoe across a lifetime of conversational land mines, take breaks for solitary phone calls and smokes, reconnect even as they feel bound to sit and wait for a conclusion.

They take turns sitting at their father’s bedside. Hospice nurses come in and out, each time reporting that this looks like the end. When called out for their repetitive negative prognostications, one admits: it’s always been the end. The movie gets the atmosphere of suspended suspense of a deathbed vigil—the tense import weighing down on even the most quotidian of exchanges as all involved wait in the long caesura of activity of an old body slowly shutting down. They wait for…what, exactly? A moment of clarity? A last goodbye? A release? A relief? It brings the sisters together, and finds ways to put stress on all the fragile points of past fractures and current contention in their family bonds. And it brings a fluttering sense of togetherness—unity in disunity, hopeful fresh starts even as their last fixed point of familial obligation is slipping away. Writer-director-editor Azazel Jacobs is always good at tracking the subtle shifts of mood and perspective in intimate character studies. In modest, perceptive dramas with warm, natural comedy and deep reservoirs of melancholy, he draws portraits of sensitive high schoolers (Terri) and middle-aged divorced couples (The Lovers) and rich-blooded eccentrics (French Exit). His latest, shot with warm interior lights against a grainy, autumnal glow, is another in that strong tradition. It's a sad, small, dialogue-driven movie that sometimes risks the obvious, only to speak so directly to a strong, true set of emotions that it finds quiet, heart-rending moments of transcendence. It feels like we really come to know these women—and their father—in this last moment they have together.

Talking Head: GET ON YOUR KNEES

Early in Get On Your Knees, writer-performer Jacqueline Novak casually mentions that she used to write poetry in college. Based on the dense, surprising tangle of allusions and images in the 90-minute monologue that follows, she’s still writing it. In this case, it’s in the form of a one-woman show that’s an exhilaratingly literate example of the form. Neither stand-up comedy nor straight up lecture, Novak stalks the stage with an easy stride talking through a coming-of-age. Her footsteps’ pacing matches her rapid linguistic stylings. Thoughts tumble with studied casualness, barely keeping up with her delivery as if she’s just thinking of these writerly phrases. She looks casual—jeans and t-shirt—but in her grinning, bookish preparation, it’s clear she’s thought carefully about how to phrase these ideas and how best to present them. (A knowing detail comes when she describes not only reading Nabokov as a girl, but wanting to be seen reading Nabokov as a girl.) It’s no wonder this is a captivating monologue on stage, and the movie does well to capture its spirit. (That director Natasha Lyonne cultivates a similar aw-shucks candor in her own on-screen career makes for a simpatico pairing.) The camera tracks and pans as the spotlight roams, barely keeping up as Novak’s mind, and ours, are racing. She packs in literate references and spins elaborate metaphors—stacking quotations and adjectives until her points are vividly clear. It’s a look at an active mind spinning along and inviting us to join the ride. 

And now I see I’ve done a good job avoiding the animating idea of the show, something about which Novak certainly couldn’t be accused. She gets to the point in disarmingly direct, honest inquiry. She’s here to talk about genitals and her youthful explorations thereof, specifically as she learns to relate to the male anatomy. It’s a concept full of symbolic and experiential import, and she’s eager to draw out theory and anecdote. And yet she deploys this subject matter so intelligently and cleverly with good humor and bracing candor. She’s neither careful nor apologetic. Her presentation is so breezily, candidly, smilingly, matter-of-factly open about potentially vulgar material in witty paragraphs written and performed with a total command of her language and its effects. She expresses such simultaneous depth of feeling, lightness of touch, and frankness of spirit that it feels simply free, never grossly edgy for the sake of it. The show is ultimately an argument in celebration of human anatomy and the awkward, difficult, pleasurable things we expect it to achieve—the ways in which it is central and futile, fumbling toward profundity and intimacy and constantly falling short, except for the fleeting, beautiful moments of real connection. In expressing her particular intellectual and physical insights, she gives us a vulnerable, verbose, articulate work that’s carnal and emotional and expressive all at once. It’s sweet and sensitive—with a bit of a bite. It takes familiar ideas and erects new, personal insights, building blunt poetry out of it. There’s no wonder the movie’s triumphant climactic cut to credits is scored with a booming pop flourish that echoes that idea—“Like a Prayer.”