Dramatizing family life must be tricky for artists, as the material often wants to bend towards cliché. We often filter life with family through clichés even while experiencing it, so that even when we’re talking “reality” we’re really talking generalizations, stereotypes, homilies, false memories, etc. The key to a family-driven movie that cuts deeper than usual, then, might be to acknowledge this insidious sense of reduction, suggesting that our idea of family is a series of simplifications.
Azazel Jacobs’ “His Three Daughters” manages this trick.
Jacobs, who wrote the screenplay, follows three sisters who gather in a small apartment in New York to prepare for the death of their father. Katie (Carrie Coon) is a control freak, Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is a self-enclosed stoner, and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), torn between the opposing energies of her older sisters, is a mellow smoothie who is most vividly defined as being what she’s not, which is neither a control freak nor a bohemian. These identifications are clichés of movies and life. And everyone here—filmmaker and actors and the characters they’ve created—are aware of it.
“His Three Daughters” is set entirely in this apartment, where Rachel also lives and which she stands to inherit upon their father’s death. The only gesture made towards “opening up” this movie are a series of scenes that are set right outside on a park bench, where Rachel goes to smoke weed after Katie scolds her for doing so in her own home. Katie is the outsider and Rachel the host, in theory, but these are the roles they play, and this notion of acting is intensified by the film’s theatricality.
Besides the single set, there’s Jacobs’ dialogue, which wants to be noticed. The film opens with Katie giving a breathless and bravura monologue that sums up the entire scenario as well as her own frenetic desperation. You can practically see the punctuation marks in this speech. It is that mannered because Katie is mannered, as she is understood to be hiding behind the guise of “responsible martyr.” Among other preoccupations, Katie is obsessed with getting father to sign a DNR [do not resuscitate] before he is permanently unable to, which in its mercenary practicality scans as crass and ghoulish.
Christina is similarly mannered in her determination not to seem mannered, think Katie but with the dial turned back a few clicks. She’s that person with the insufferable Facebook profile that suggests that she’s always sliding from one silk-lined memory to the next. As with Katie, Christina is a mother, which both her sisters resent for reasons having to do with her apparent ease with having children, unlike Katie, who is on the phone barking orders to her family when she’s not jumping down Rachel’s throat. Christina seems chill, and, especially as played by Olsen, that chillness is seductive…initially.
If Coon and Olsen give stylized performances that are meant to embody the prisons that their characters have built for themselves, Lyonne is seemingly allowed to be herself. Lyonne is among the most unpretentious actors in modern cinema. And, as that Peacock series “Poker Face” suggested, her affinity with a poet laureate of keeping it real, Peter Falk, is uncanny. It seems as if Jacobs cannot imagine her stuck in a role-play.
Rachel’s brash indifference to platitude, her “realness,” is the role-play, though, and the trick of Lyonne’s superb performance is that it seems to comment on Rachel as well as on every character she has played. Underneath Rachel’s sensitivity and straightforwardness is passive-aggression. But since Rachel is less pretentious than her sisters, Lyonne’s performance is more realistic, rooted less in the bigness of theatrical acting than in the lived-in gestures that are associated with modern cinema.
For much of its running time, “His Three Daughters” is rigged so thoroughly in Rachel’s favor that I began to gravitate toward Katie and Christina. Katie is a potentially thankless role, which doesn’t scare Coon, who leans into the character’s stridency. It’s tough for those of us who adore Coon to see her as the heel, and Jacobs, who is cunning with actors, seems to have factored this challenge into his conception of Katie.
Coon can let sensitivity bleed into her performance without sentimentalizing the character, understanding that sensitivity is the reason that Katie is so insufferable. It’s a “go hard or go home” performance, and it’s going to annoy people. Coon’s performance annoyed me, and that’s partially why I admire it. It has integrity.
Olsen’s role is even trickier. Her co-stars have emotional extremes to play, as well as big and meaty scenes that awards committees love. Olsen is playing someone who is hiding in plain sight, and she has an astonishing moment when Rachel throws Katie’s background of partying and drug abuse in her face on that park bench. Olsen allows you to see hurt in those vast eyes, and then the eyes flutter, batting away pain for the guise of the wonderful mommy and sister who’s so well-adjusted and just trying to navigate the turbulent waters of her siblings. It is the film’s most haunting image.
Actors understandably seem to love Jacobs: “The Lovers,” with Tracy Letts and Debra Winger, is his. So is “Terri,” with John C. Reilly, and “French Exit,” with Michelle Pfeiffer. For my money, I’m not sure he’s yet topped “Momma’s Man,” which was shot in the home of his parents, artists Ken and Flo Jacobs, and featured them as supporting players. Jacobs has a unique kinship with performers, whether famous or unknown, seemingly transmitting their essences to the screen with sensitivity and mystery.
Azazel Jacobs is one of the great modern American actors’ directors, then, and you probably haven’t heard of him. Good news: “His Three Daughters” drops on Netflix this week, and the Criterion Channel is now running a series devoted to his earlier work. If you are looking for intimate acting and films that cannily walk the line between theater and indie cinema, you should not be disappointed.
At the center of Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” is Elizabeth (Demi Moore), an acclaimed actress turned fitness guru who’s on the wrong side of 40 for the industry. In the highly artificial world of this film, workout videos that used to feature people like Jane Fonda and Suzanne Somers are apparently still a thing. This allows Fargeat to parody female objectification without shooting numbing close-ups of people browsing their phones and laptops for porn. The workout numbers here are a visceral symbol of how we consume images of women, and Fargeat really gets her groove on.
As she showed in the equally nuts “Revenge,” Fargeat doesn’t hold herself above the media’s hunger for sexy bodies. She parodies objectification, and empathizes with how it warps men and women alike, and gets off on it herself. Fargeat is willing to understand that there’s a reason why artificial images of sex and bodies sell—they are addictive, and to hold yourself puritanically above the addiction only makes you seem like a scold. Fargeat’s mode of having her cake and eating it is hypocritical and resonant.
So, when Elizabeth is on the outs with the fitness industry, which is presided over by a man named, ahem, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), a pig to end all pigs, and is replaced by the young Sue (Margaret Qualley), Fargeat stages a workout set piece that suggests a merging of aerobics with a military drill and a lap dance. Sue’s shorts couldn’t be tighter, and Fargeat openly drinks in her body. Fargeat wants you to laugh at how easily and openly you can be turned on, with the most regressive and obvious sexual fantasies.
Qualley is lit to suggest that Sue always seems naturally airbrushed—her skin suggests the coating of a candy apple. When she goes out to party, she trades the tight gym shorts for a dress that resembles S&M gear. As Sue pulls a Diet Coke out of the fridge, the glistening moisture on the can rhymes with the glow of the gloss on her lips. Post-#MeToo, this sort of thing might even make a horndog like Michael Bay blush.
Sex and fame are shown to have an explicit price, especially in an unforgettable visual metaphor that opens and closes the movie. The connection between Elizabeth and Sue consigns the workplace rivalries of “All About Eve” or “Showgirls” to a single body that’s intent on destroying itself for the delectation of others. Elizabeth and Sue are united by their eagerness to stay in the public eye, and by a sexy-forever procedure called The Substance, the ingenious details of which evince the sort of pointed contempt for corporate inhumanity that Philip K. Dick might’ve respected.
Fargeat wants you to be sexually intrigued and, especially if you’re socio-politically self-conscious, uncomfortable. The movie’s themes are bluntly stated, and Fargeat shoots most scenes in wide angles and garish colors that suggest the films of Stanley Kubrick. The scene in which Jack Nicholson enters a hotel bathroom in “The Shining,” expecting sex with a beautiful woman only to encounter a laughing hag, is an enormous influence on “The Substance” in its mixing of enticement and revulsion.
Kubrick’s revulsion at the very least flirted with misogyny, and the troubling brilliance of that movie is his willingness to tap into an ugly and primordial side of men. Fargeat turns that revulsion in on itself. Her aesthetics are warmed up by Moore’s vulnerable yet steely performance, and by Qualley’s priceless and chilling parody of a living centerfold.
Eventually “The Substance” gets too nuts, and borrows from more sources than it can handle as it takes a deep dive into body horror. Homages to “Carrie” and “Society” and “Death Becomes Her” and “Requiem for a Dream” probably don’t all belong in the same movie. That’s a rich meal, and at 140 minutes this thing runs a half hour longer than many will prefer. But excess is the point. “The Substance” is meant to make you feel like an oinker, especially as these women, whom we come to feel for, enter into a self-hating death spiral. Fargeat asks “are you not entertained” while slapping you on the ass.
