‘His Three Daughters’ Turns a Familiar Family Drama Into the Best Movie of the Year
You may love your family, though you might not like them very much, and just because you’re kin doesn’t mean you have anything in common. Take, for example, the three grown siblings who find themselves forced to share the same air in His Three Daughters. There is Katie (Carrie Coon), a Type-A control freak who’s a Karen by any other name, as well as a lover of red wine and passive-aggressiveness. There is Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), the resident peacekeeper and, much to her sisters’ chagrin, a longtime Deadhead. (Even with John Mayer? “Sure,” she replies. “Family’s family.”) And there’s their half-sister Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), a pothead who still lives at home and makes a living by parlaying bets on football games.
There’s a reason that the title of writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ drama refers to this trio not as sisters, however, but daughters. The only real connection these women have to each other is through their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders). And Vincent … well, he’s dying. Receiving hospice care in the Lower East Side apartment where all three of them were raised, the old man is nearing the end of his days, slipping in and out of consciousness. This is why Katie has schlepped over from Brooklyn with a suitcase and Christina has flown half way across the country to join Rachel, who’s been taking care of their ailing pops until it came time for the nurses to step in. They’re settling in for a long goodbye.
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Which also means they’re trapped together, these three wildly different souls with their own fears and anxieties and axes to grind, in a place with too much personal history. This reunion means everyone will begin rehashing old grudges and reopening old wounds. Everyone has their excuses, their coping mechanisms, and their reasons for not making nice. Each of them is starting to mourn the loss of their dad in their own respective way. Each of them is collectively ready to blow a gasket.
In lesser hands, this might be one of those theatrical pieces that offers a nice excuse for actors to rend garments and gnash teeth onscreen — the sort of cinéma du Off-Broadway favored by microbudget indie directors and arthouse die-hards. Thanks to Jacobs’ extraordinary ear for how people use words to wound and mask, and a holy trinity that knows not only how to speak those words but how to complement one another’s disparate performing styles, His Three Daughters ends up being nothing less than the single best movie you’ll likely see this year. You’re encouraged to catch it in theaters starting on Sept. 6, where the back-and-forth of these actors and Sam Levy’s cinematography play out so beautifully on the big screen. Otherwise, it drops on Netflix starting Sept. 20. See it any way you can — just see it ASAP.
No joke, this is one of those films that appears modest on the surface and contains multitudes in ways that keep revealing themselves on more viewings. The idea of starting His Three Daughters with monologues and a series of single, isolating shots for each sister sets the stage early: This may be a character study in triplicate, with all three navigating a claustrophobic shared space, but each of these women are really locked into their own separate grief. (That Jacobs frames these early shots like he’s making an old-school Bergman movie establishes a reference point as much as the Chekhovian title, but this is not a check-out-my-Criterion-collection pastiche project, by any means.)
It also lets the stars establish who these women are in quick succession. Coon introduces Katie as she’s railing about how Dad’s do-not-resuscitate order was never filed, and she’s seen what happens when EMTs try to violently revive someone, and must she do everything herself?! Olsen’s Christina immediately comes off as someone determinedly casual, calming by default and the human embodiment of de-escalation; she displays a certain gosh-all awe at the fact one of the nurses shares the same name as her young daughter. Meanwhile, Lyonne’s Rachel is a deer caught in the headlights, overwhelmed by both the situation and her siblings’ contrasting personalities. She barely says a thing, biding her time until she can spark up and numb herself again.
There are others orbiting this battlezone: the apartment complex’s security guard, Victor (Jose Febus), who keeps kindly asking Rachel to not toke up outside; Dad’s main caregiver, Angel (Rudy Galvan), who has a way of getting under Katie’s skin (“Angel of Death is more like it!”); Rachel’s boyfriend, Benji (Babylon‘s Jovan Adepo), who had his own bond with the old man and sees through the way the sisters treat his perpetually stoned sweetheart.
But this is really the daughters’ story, and a showcase for the three actors at the center of it all. It will surprise no one that the always reliable Coon knows how to navigate the wordy assaults like the theater veteran she is, or show you how broken a brittle character is on the inside. Irritation becomes her. So does the slow thaw that happens as Katie starts to reckon with their father’s ever-nearing end. And Olsen has an incredible way of suggesting how and why her character’s why-can’t-we-just-get-along persona is a necessary defense. Mocked for her card-carrying membership in the Deadhead community, Christina says that it’s really just a bunch of people who nurture one another because no one else was able to or will. The line turns the subtext into text. The actor turns the statement into a complete backstory in a single reading.
The genuine surprise here is Lyonne — not that anyone doubted she’d hold her own in this company, or that she isn’t a major talent. It’s more that in recent years, Lyonne has adopted a certain brash, ballsy personality that colors her roles and her choices — she’s the raspy jokester, lacing everything with irony and a certain vintage-hipster verve. You could practically see the Groucho-waggle of an invisible cigar at the end of every line. In His Three Daughters, Lyonne still puts a whaddaya-kiddin’-me spin on some of Rachel’s exchanges — her banter with the weary security guard is a primo double act unto itself — but she’s tamped down her usual comic thrust and parry. What you see is a person who’s scared of losing someone she’s loved, who’s retreating from the emotional onslaught around her, and who’d rather stay silent than get dragged into Katie’s toxic vortex. It’s such a potent reminder of what a great actor Lyonne is in addition to being a top-shelf entertainer. This is career-best work, hands down.
Jacobs has always been a great director of actors, as well as the unsung auteur of 21st-century Amerindie cinema — everything from his 2008 breakthrough, Momma’s Man, to 2020’s French Exit suggests a sensibility that’s filled with both clear-eyed and cockeyed humanism. He’s given his cast a hell of a stage on which to rage here, and is smart enough to know that they’ll carry this tale of slouching toward forgiveness and letting go of the past. But Jacobs also knows when to make his presence known as well. There’s a sequence near the end that is both graceful and devastating in equal measure, a bit of directorial sleight of hand that aims right for your heart and hits the bull’s-eye. Between his ability to chart the routes of pain and grief and the triumph of the Coon-Olsen-Lyonne triumvirate in bringing these complicated women to life, the film feels like an instant classic of character-driven psychodrama. Tolstoy said every family was dysfunctional in its own way. His Three Daughters reminds you that ties that bind — and occasionally strangle, and often heal you — are also all too familiar and universal.
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