His Three Daughters-Movie Review
We don’t often get the kind of small and cozy art that we used to. Everything has shifted to big budget, trusted IPs and the “sure thing.” Sometimes it can feel like the art has left the building. But don’t worry, it hasn’t…yet. There’s still tons of people who just want to make something nice and smart and interesting that isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster (I do like those, for the record). One such film is this one- His Three Daughters.
His Three Daughters is a film made by Azazel Jacobs, a director from Tribeca who makes a lot of artsy and smart little films like this. He tends to get a lot from what can seem like a little and his films often tell their stories subtly. This is one of those movies. His Three Daughters isn’t some grand opera. It’s the simple story of three daughters waiting for their father’s death in hospice.
The whole movie takes place in a New York apartment and the bench in front of it. The entire 90 minute movie. And yet, the way it’s shot, you feel like you’re seeing new angles of this apartment all the time. But it still is just one apartment, even if it is big, and there is a sense of claustrophobia and tension as our characters navigate grief in confined space.
Our three leads are Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne. That’s a stacked line-up and you could predict that it would be good, but it’s good in ways I wasn’t expecting. The writing and acting resembles a play more than a movie in some ways and there are a lot of monologues about mundane things that you would only see on the stage. Exposition just flows through the dialogue and at first you’ll be a little annoyed by it, but by the end it’s charming, particularly when Carrie Coon does it. She seems to have a knack for this type of delivery, where she’s just talking right at the camera.
All three of our leads are great in this movie. Carrie Coon’s character, Katie, is uptight, methodical and seemingly always busy. Elizabeth Olsen’s character, Christina, is a faux flower child who is settling into domestic life after having her baby. There’s a sense that she always identified with a counter culture she could never really take part in and a feeling of “out of placedness” that follows this character, as if she’s about to snap. Natasha Lyonne’s character, Rachel, is probably the heart of the film in some ways. She is the step-daughter of the man who is dying, less of a daughter than the other two, despite having been his caretaker for the past few months.
There’s a lot of soft tension here, the kind you get with families, particularly women in families. The women each have their own little beefs and picadillos. Katie thinks Rachel is unserious and irresponsible. Rachel thinks Katie is stuffy and a bitch. Christina kind of rides the middle of the fence, to the point where she’s on no side and it seems like neither one is truly on her side. But this tension underpins the core of this film, which is the hardship families go through near the end of a parent’s life, when people who have defined them for so long are no longer.
It’s both a quick 90 minutes but also a dense 90 minutes, full of tiny subplots and dynamic shifts that, for a time, can change the way the movie feels in some small way. But even when it slowly shifts off it’s central axis, the foundational vibes of grief and family and…awkward families remain. This film is a poignant and touching introspective on a tough time that many of us have or may experience. Hospice is no joke and the emotional state you’re in is hard to explain. There’s a sort of peace. The fight is usually over and resolution is guaranteed. But at the same time, there’s an anguish and sadness, loss in slow motion.
But the best scene of the movie occurs at the very end, when the father, who has not been onscreen for the whole film, is wheeled out into the living room. He’s played by actor Jay O Sanders, who, himself is a theater guy, and you can tell. The monologue he gives is beautiful and sad and crushing, particularly the way it ends. He talks about love and life and love lost to life. It’s a speech that embodies the fullness of time and a life. Seeing back into places you can no longer go, people you can no longer talk to and dreams you can no longer have. It’s a dark thing, but it’s also part of it.
It’s a very talky movie, which I think you should obviously be aware of. The monologue is the action sequence of films like these and this one has a lot of cool monologues. They’re a little kooky and quirky and some of them are delightfully dull. But they’re all well written and serve a deeper purpose within the film. Every single one tells us something the character performing it and you usually come out of it surprised or enlightened in some way. It’s a movie for movie people and not the kind that have seen every MCU entry.
His Three Daughters is a very good movie and it’s the kind of movie that we need more of. A quiet, smart, introspective story about real people with real problems, who see the same things over and over again and have boring, shitty tedium they have to deal with. Just like real life. This movie doesn’t have big explosions or crazy hero arcs. There’s no fantasy here. But real life? Yeah, it nails that. Don’t watch this movie if you want a lit Friday night popcorn banger. Watch because you like art and you see that bridge between the mundane and the powerful. Because it’s there and you just have to see it.
