Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Azazel Jacobs
Starring: Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, Carrie Coon, Rudy Galvan, Jay O. Sanders, Jovan Adepo
When people say there are no good roles for women in the movies what
they're essentially saying is that they don't watch movies outside of
the American mainstream. World cinema and American indies are filled
with great female-fronted movies, but a movie like
writer/director Azazel Jacobs' His Three Daughters, which stars three established American actresses and doesn't ask them
to wear a spandex suit or punch a villain through a wall, doesn't come
along too often in today's American mainstream filmmaking, which seems
overwhelmingly focussed on sating an audience of teenage boys.
Those three established actresses are Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen. With their father (Jay O. Sanders) receiving palliative hospice care as his journey with cancer comes to
an end, sisters Katie (Coon), Christina (Olsen) and Rachel (Lyonne)
assemble in their family's New York apartment, repeatedly told by a
hospice worker (Rudy Galvan) that their father could pass any
time now.
Rachel is the middle sister and the one who has been caring for her
father, with whom she lives, in his last months. That doesn't stop Katie
and Christina, who have a different mother, from treating Rachel as
though she were their kid sister, constantly patronising her slacker
lifestyle and occasionally speaking in their own shared secret language.
The prissy Katie continuously prods at Rachel, forcing her to smoke
outside and highlighting her perceived immaturity at every opportunity.
Rachel presents herself as a classic tough New Yorker yet allows herself
to be bullied by Katie. Desperate to avoid confrontation, the ditzy
Christina spends much of her time in her father's bedroom.
As their patriarch clings to life and the days drag on, the three
sisters bicker and confront one another over long held resentments. It's
not exactly a novel premise, but Jacobs injects his drama with nuanced
details that feel like they're based on real life experience of familial
estrangement. His film might be accused of being "stagey" as it almost
never leaves its apartment setting and is heavy on dialogue, but it
avoids monologing and shouty Oscar bait speeches. The various
resentments the sisters hold towards one another are slowly squeezed out
like the last drop of toothpaste in a Presbyterian's bathroom. The
aggression is of the passive variety, until it inevitably isn't. How the
characters move, sit and listen tells us as much as the words they
speak, which can't always be taken for granted.
The three actresses all bring something different to the table, playing
to their individual strengths while expanding their range. Coon's
physical stiffness conveys Katie's role as the big sister who is
resentful at having to be the responsible one, but who at this point of
her life doesn't know how to be anything else. Lyonne understandably
gets the most comic role of the three but she plays the brash Rachel
with a tender centre that suggests she hasn't "made it" like her sisters
because she lacks their ruthlessness. Having spent the last decade
largely chained in the Marvel yard, Olsen is let off the leash and gets
to play a real person. She hasn't been this good since she blew us away
with her breakout role in 2011's Martha Marcy May Marlene. The prettiest and youngest of the three sisters, we suspect Christina
has had the easiest life, and Olsen plays her innocent inability to
understand her siblings' troubles in charming, wide-eyed fashion.
It's in the final act that His Three Daughters begins to stumble as it grasps for a way to wrap up all this
drama. A late transcendental moment is misjudged and plays like it
belongs in a far less nuanced film, and Jacobs ties things up a little
too neatly. That said, as the sisters say their goodbyes we're left to
wonder if their shared experience has brought them closer or simply
solidified their estrangement, which is a tribute to how compelling and
real these women feel for the duration of the drama.
His Three Daughters is on
Netflix from September 20th.
