B+Directed by Chris Kelly Starring Jesse Plemons and Molly Shannon Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Other People shows the viewer the ending at its beginning. This semi-autobiographical debut for writer/director Chris Kelly of a family and their cancer-afflicted mother isn't going to be about triumphing over adversity; it's going to feature the mother's slow decline and ultimate death, surrounded by her husband and three adult children. Thwarting this depressing intro is the kind of detail so absurd that it must be true. While the surviving family sobs over their minutes-dead matriarch, an old friend of the mom leaves a message on the nearby answering machine, obliviously checking in while she places a drive-thru food order. Other People repeatedly finds the humor in the darkest of scenarios, while still managing to be genuine and raw about what the characters are experiencing. What must have been a purgative experience for Kelly, whose own mother died from cancer in 2009, is also a complete experience for the viewer, as the film achieves an honest balance between comedy and drama.
Jesse Plemons plays Kelly's doppelganger David. A comedy writer, much like the real Kelly, David has returned home to Sacremento from NYC to help take care of his ailing mother Joanne (Molly Shannon). There's a clear sense early on that David has not made this trip often, and likely wouldn't have this time if not for Joanne's illness. He's frosty with his entire family, nuclear and extended, though Joanne is the exception to that rule. A gay man who had a difficult coming-out, the only one David's fully mended fences with is his mom. He earnestly wants to help her through her cancer, and the timing of having a TV show in limbo and the dissolution of a long-term relationship allows him to dedicate himself to her care. When David gets the occasional break, he debriefs with his childhood best friend, another gay man named Gabe (John Early) whose mother died of cancer years ago. As the months roll on and Joanne, resigned to her fate, stops treatment, David struggles to picture his life going forward without his greatest ally.
Combining a cancer narrative with that of an anxious gay man whose family never reconciled with him could easily make for too much emotional baggage for one film to handle. Kelly portrays both with enough specificity that he could've likely gotten two films out of Other People. It demystifies sickness in a no-frills way, taking a page from films like 50/50 and James White. Kelly also ably constructs the family member who keeps everyone at arm's length, engaging in niceties but never letting the guard all the way down. David is someone who has created nonoverlapping magisteria in his life, with his family in one constrained circle and friends, work, and romance in others. Joanne is the only one allowed to mix worlds. There's a wealth of perception and hard-earned wisdom in Other People, ensuring that the viewer is always engaged mentally on a constant flow of lived-in moments.
Other People has no problem engaging emotionally. David losing his strongest familial connection combined with Joanne's harrowing deterioration keeps lumps firmly in throats. Joanne's parents, played by June Squibb and Paul Dooley, are a break in the conversation away from breaking down no matter how frank and jovial they were being moments before. Acquaintances can be having lovely conversations with Joanne and David, and she nonchalantly mentions that she's not doing chemo anymore, causing a wave of unspoken emotions in the acquaintance as their mind figures out what that means and the reaction subtly materializes in the corners of their eyes. Any scene, no matter how bouncy or cheerful it seems to be going, can believably transition to tears at a moment's notice.
Like another great downer of 2016, Manchester By the Sea, Other People never forgets to find the humor in sad situations. A lot of this is due to Shannon's superlative performance, a complementary role to her performance in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, where she was the mother of a cancer patient. Here, she's completely unashamed of her illness, punctuating sentences by theatrically ripping off her wig. She speaks plainly about what her husband (Bradley Whitford) should do after she dies, and what she wants done with her corpse. She does nail the rock-bottom scenes of despair and misery that the film uses sparingly, but she's first and foremost a sassy and big-hearted broad who just happens to have a large and growing mass on her back. David and Gabe also have a witty rapport based on decades of shared history. The one part of Other People that pushes too far into pure comedy is Gabe's pre-teen brother (JJ Totah), who gives a Gaga-esque drag performance at a family gathering. This might be another too-specific-to-be-concocted scenario like the aforementioned answering machine scene, but it's an odd inclusion in a film that was successfully finding humor in dialogue.
What's amazing is that Kelly had an experience superficially identical to many other people, but he manages to tell a story about those experiences that is totally free of cliche and unearned emotion. He doesn't take any shortcuts that surely presented themselves in the course of making the film, instead sticking with the least-writerly and probably truest interpretation of events. Other People is my ideal mixture of pathos and levity, see-sawing back and forth freely between those two opposites. B+
Combining a cancer narrative with that of an anxious gay man whose family never reconciled with him could easily make for too much emotional baggage for one film to handle. Kelly portrays both with enough specificity that he could've likely gotten two films out of Other People. It demystifies sickness in a no-frills way, taking a page from films like 50/50 and James White. Kelly also ably constructs the family member who keeps everyone at arm's length, engaging in niceties but never letting the guard all the way down. David is someone who has created nonoverlapping magisteria in his life, with his family in one constrained circle and friends, work, and romance in others. Joanne is the only one allowed to mix worlds. There's a wealth of perception and hard-earned wisdom in Other People, ensuring that the viewer is always engaged mentally on a constant flow of lived-in moments.
Other People has no problem engaging emotionally. David losing his strongest familial connection combined with Joanne's harrowing deterioration keeps lumps firmly in throats. Joanne's parents, played by June Squibb and Paul Dooley, are a break in the conversation away from breaking down no matter how frank and jovial they were being moments before. Acquaintances can be having lovely conversations with Joanne and David, and she nonchalantly mentions that she's not doing chemo anymore, causing a wave of unspoken emotions in the acquaintance as their mind figures out what that means and the reaction subtly materializes in the corners of their eyes. Any scene, no matter how bouncy or cheerful it seems to be going, can believably transition to tears at a moment's notice.
Like another great downer of 2016, Manchester By the Sea, Other People never forgets to find the humor in sad situations. A lot of this is due to Shannon's superlative performance, a complementary role to her performance in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, where she was the mother of a cancer patient. Here, she's completely unashamed of her illness, punctuating sentences by theatrically ripping off her wig. She speaks plainly about what her husband (Bradley Whitford) should do after she dies, and what she wants done with her corpse. She does nail the rock-bottom scenes of despair and misery that the film uses sparingly, but she's first and foremost a sassy and big-hearted broad who just happens to have a large and growing mass on her back. David and Gabe also have a witty rapport based on decades of shared history. The one part of Other People that pushes too far into pure comedy is Gabe's pre-teen brother (JJ Totah), who gives a Gaga-esque drag performance at a family gathering. This might be another too-specific-to-be-concocted scenario like the aforementioned answering machine scene, but it's an odd inclusion in a film that was successfully finding humor in dialogue.
What's amazing is that Kelly had an experience superficially identical to many other people, but he manages to tell a story about those experiences that is totally free of cliche and unearned emotion. He doesn't take any shortcuts that surely presented themselves in the course of making the film, instead sticking with the least-writerly and probably truest interpretation of events. Other People is my ideal mixture of pathos and levity, see-sawing back and forth freely between those two opposites. B+
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