His Three Daughters

On the rare occasion that I find myself at a lavish stage musical, I always grumble that I prefer shows with just three to six characters yelling at each other on a single set for 90 to 180 minutes—now that's theater! It's only a slightly facetious statement; most theater I resonate with falls much more in the camp of Yasmina Reza than Andrew Lloyd Webber. This preference carries over to movies that capture that same intimacy and intensity while never feeling like a mere photographed play. The latest from Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers, French Exit) is such a film. It's the story of three estranged sisters who reunite for a period of days, coexisting in the Manhattan apartment where they grew up while they watch over their dying father in hospice care. The three characters have distinct backstories that are revealed over time. Still, we can deduce plenty on our own, as they are written as extreme types who are brought to vivid "lived-in" life by a trio of pitch-perfect performances.

Carrie Coon is Katie, the "uptight Bitch," or so she claims is the role everyone in her life assigns to her, giving her no space to be anything else. She lives in Brooklyn but, despite her obvious need to control everything, hasn't spent much time with their dad in many years. Natasha Lyonne is Rachel, the slacker stoner who has been living with their dad all this time, watching sports, drinking beers, and not worrying too much about what happens next. Elizabeth Olsen is Christine, the youngest daughter (though figuring out their birth order is one of the interesting early challenges of the film). Christine's a new-agey helicopter mom who used to be a Grateful Deadhead and now lives in the suburbs with her husband and three-year-old daughter, far away from New York. 

These three individuals seem to have arrived at their distinctive personalities on their own, which is refreshing. We learn early on that they all lost their mother when they were young, but they each had a strong, loving relationship with their father. It feels like a revelation in this era of defining ourselves by our various traumas to have a film centered around difficult family dynamics where major traumatic events aren't getting uncovered one by one over the course of the film. Instead, we're reminded that numerous factors, not just one big bad event, form complex individuals. The three daughters in His Three Daughters probably started out with their distinct personalities at birth. Yet, by the film's third act, we also clearly understand the effects of birth order, the loss of the mother, and the other different life circumstances that have shaped each woman. Each actress is ideally suited to her role. Most of us know families like this one—or come from them ourselves—and we can spot an authentic portrait vs a contrived "acting workshop" within seconds. The dynamics between the three sisters in this film ring true immediately. Katie and Rachel are constantly at each other with abrasive digs that convey decades of resentment, while the younger Christina constantly tries to keep the peace and stay on task.

Jacobs allows his actors to be the film's focus, avoiding all forms of showy directorial flare. Yet, his camera is carefully positioned in every sequence, subtly indicating the status of each character from scene to scene and effortlessly conveying the geography of the space they inhabit. This is great film directing, folks. The hand of the filmmaker does not need to be oppressively visible for a talky movie to be rendered powerfully—in fact, the opposite is usually the case. Watching this picture reminded me why I disliked Fred Schepisi's 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation and so many other films made from stage plays where the director seems to be under the delusion that they must make the photography and editing into active participants with the characters in order to make a dialogue-heavy film cinematic.

Seeing this film the same week as Nathan Silver's Between the Temples was also illuminating. A character-driven film like His Three Daughters, in which a writer/director has clearly taken the time to craft a thoughtful script and work with his actors and production crew to realize the material in the best possible way, is always gonna ring my bell in ways very few actor-driven movies where a writer/director has written a loose outline for his cast to improvise off of while the cinematographer whips the camera around "catching the magic" as it happens for later distillation in the editing room can. It's not that pictures made in that loose, improvisatory way can't be good; some masterpieces have been made in this style, like John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence. However, those looser, more improvisational movies always seem to place the filmmaker and actors ahead of the story and characters. His Three Daughters understands where the emphasis should be placed.