Girls Meet World: ROOMMATESand DON'T SAY GOOD LUCK

Wordsworth said the child is the father of the man. Consider the case of Adam Sandler. His early movies were certainly childish. They were boyish goofs, crude, rude, and ultimately harmless. They could be fun, too! That at their laziest they grew to become excuses to hang out with buddies on the studio’s dime is just symptomatic of those adolescent impulses. But time marches on. He’s a dad of two grown daughters now. They’re both actresses and he’s used his clout to help get them started. I’m glad he did. They give nepo babies a good name, with screen personas that are winningly sensitive and open-hearted. The older, Sadie, has a slightly distant and deeper vein of irony she’ll play around with. The younger, Sunny, has a more closely-held tremulous innocence. They’re similar instruments playing slightly different notes in the same timber. Their movies also happen to be the most emotionally intelligent Sandler’s Happy Madison productions has made. Turns out these children helped remake the man. It’s clear he’s proud of his daughters, and it’s nice that he holds their screenplays to a higher standard than his own. He co-starred with them in the charming tween comedy You’re So Not Invited to My Bar Mitzvah and they co-starred with him in the shaggy belated Happy Gilmore 2. The parent-daughter material of each elevated the projects, taking the former to terrific and the latter to passable. This summer has each daughter starring in her own movie, each without her father in the cast. Sadie Sandler has college comedy Roommates. Sunny Sandler has high school drama Don’t Say Good Luck. Both films are from terrific indie directors and are fitted perfectly to their strengths. Each has a nicely textured balance between emotional honesty and well-earned laughs, though in different proportions. 

Roommates is an unusually thoughtful college comedy, getting something truthful about friendship struggles into the usual moves for such a picture. It has crude humor, raucous parties, bad behavior, and other expected hijinks. But it also has a sharp understanding of the subtle shifts of power and insecurity in the pressure cooker setting of a freshman dorm room. Sadie Sandler plays a shy girl who never really made friends in high school, pinning her hopes on meeting new people at college. Her roommate (Chloe East) is a confident loose cannon, who wears revealing clothes and boldly struts toward whatever, and whomever, she wants. Sandler is drawn toward her charisma, wanting to be friends, but also a little nervous about her unpredictability. The movie is directed with a bright studio comedy aesthetic married to a perceptive attentiveness to character dynamics. Filmmaker Chandler Levack, whose indies I Love Movies and Mile End Kicks are similar sweet-and-sour character comedies about particular cultural spaces (the video rental store and music journalism, respectively), brings her casually insightful eye to a glossier studio product. She gets really terrific performances out of the cast—both the collegiate pals and adult figures (Natasha Lyonne, Nick Kroll, Janeane Garofalo, Carol Kane). Sandler makes an intensely sympathetic figure; we see why she’d want to go along out of her comfort zone, but it makes each little heartbreak all the more impactful. But it’s East—you might recognize her as one of the trapped missionaries in Heretic or Sammy’s Christian girlfriend in The Fabelmans—who makes the most out of what a lesser comedy would make a mere whirling dervish of party girl energy. Instead she brings out a brittle fragility just barely hidden beneath the bravado. It’s something her impressed new roomie easily misses until it’s too late. The movie gets a little broad and silly at times—the finale and frame story are especially goofy—but it never loses that believable core. 

Although it’s ultimately a tearjerker of a drama, Don’t Say Good Luck has some traditional high school comedy moves. It has warmly funny theater kid supporting players, some wise supportive teachers, and a sweet sentimental family life to surround Sunny Sandler’s main character. She’s a teenager excited to get the lead role in her school musical production of Waitress and is prepping for a hectic practice schedule. And then her mom gets a potentially fatal diagnosis. The movie becomes a breezy movie of usual high school problems consistently undercut by jackknifing emotional intrusions. Sudden jabbing grief cuts deep into what should be quotidian teenage concerns, making every usual problem—crushes, homework, friend drama—both heightened by her emotional rawness and diminished in comparison to the literal life and death problems at home. It’s a potent mix, getting some laughs in amid the gut-punch dramatic moments. As the mother, Melanie Lynskey brings such a deep well of maternal energy channeled into a fluttering between fear for herself and care for her family. And it’s all the more moving for her underplaying the lines that a heavier hand would’ve turned mawkish. Similarly, the movie as a whole, benefits from a gentle lived-in look and tone. It’s not a simple movie of Brave Suffering or a mere march through realistic misery. It’s just charmingly real in a polished studio movie way, refreshingly honest about the rough edges and crosscurrent pressures of its believable situations. As the mother’s condition worsens and the show’s opening night grows closer, you can start to see the outlines of moving moments ahead. But when it steers hard into them, it pays off with a succession of lump-in-the-throat scenes that are deeply felt and honestly portrayed. (If you’re already aware the songs in Waitress are moving, just wait for the climactic deployment here.) Director Julia Hart (Stargirl) knows how to make a small-scale, big emotion, broadly appealing movie, and trusts her cast to pull it off with subtle, but no less devastating, impact. She knows it’ll feel good to have such a genuine cry. 

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.”