In Azazel Jacobs’ intelligent, affecting His Three Daughters, a trio of wayward adult siblings gather for the most painful of reasons—to navigate their stricken father’s waning days. It’s a premise worthy of Ingmar Bergman, and the movie, a confined chamber piece featuring open-wound turns from Carrie Coon, Elisabeth Olsen and especially Natasha Lyonne, is a sometimes sad, sometimes amusing examination of the tenuous bonds between adult children, especially once their parents have left the building. Is there, Jacobs asks, anything remaining to hold them together?
Not much, at least at first glance, and Jacobs has written three very different, very smart women with one thing in common—the father with whom each still has a deep well of memories. Eldest daughter Katie (Coon) is the uptight, caustic Brooklyn mother to a troubled teen, residing across town from her ailing father’s Manhattan apartment but rarely visits, mostly due to ongoing inflammation with younger, flame-haired individualist sis Rachel (Lyonne), who lives with their declining dad and is set to inherit the rent-controlled apartment upon his passing. Rachel spends her time betting on pro sports teams and keeping her distance from alienated Katie. Third sister and former Grateful Dead groupie is seemingly happy California wife and mother Christina (Olsen), who returns home to New York to find her hands full with dad and her new job mediating her eternally warring sisters.
Jacobs’ premise hinges on these three adult strangers locked in a ticking-clock countdown with a pair of hospice workers (Rudy Galvan, Jasmin Bracey) who advise that their father’s death is imminent. That father is unseen by looms largely from a bedroom at the end of the hall, bedridden and in and out of consciousness. This leaves the daughters to while away the hours wrestling with the messy mechanics of life’s end, including writing an effective obituary and desperately trying to finalize dad’s “do not necessitate” order before he expires, a declaration that wasn’t signed prior to his incapacitation while dredging up all sorts of deep-seated family resentments. While controlling Katie needles Rachel at every turn, criticizing her incessant smoking while venomously suggesting how inappropriate she finds her sister’s every move, optimistic Christina tries to keep an even keel. At one explosive juncture, their conflict turns physical. And during another, the terrific Jovan Adepo, playing Rachel’s no-nonsense supportive pal, cuts through Katie’s BS, scathingly confronting her imperiousness.
Taking place almost completely in and around the cramped apartment means Jacobs (French Exit, The Lovers) exploits its tense, close quarters, providing an effective theatricality (indeed it could work well onstage) that makes His Three Daughters foremost an actors’ treat. The filmmaker has shrewdly cast three very different performers in as much diametrical opposition in performing styles as in his three sisters, so stepped in dysfunction they must may not come to terms. come to terms. Jacobs’ screenplay is richly insightful in charting passive-aggressive resentments, ranking with the best of 80s’ Woody Allen—think Hannah and Her Sisters—in its intricate confrontations.
Those confrontations sizzle with the best kind of acting, each actress tearing into Jacobs’ screenplay, which is frequently, blackly funny, their performances suggesting different women—bound by blood but not by like or temperament—who love their father but not necessarily each other, stuck together for an agonizing sojourn.
Each actress has punch-through moments of intensity. Coon (Gone Girl, The Nest), whom I was lucky enough to see at Chicago’s Steppenwolf in (husband) Tracy Letts’ incendiary 2020 Bug revival, is a tightly coiled ball of anxiety; the fun of her performance, which is highly theatrical and vocally mannered, is in watching her ever so slowly reveal the disappointed, sad woman beneath the demonstrative demands. For her part, Olsen has the more straightforward role but her emotions but performs with direct focus; her Christina has the least baggage but suffers in silence, Olsen providing a handful of quietly personal moments, including a poignant one late in the film, beautifully shot by cinematographer Sam Levy to suggest infinite separation (a wall becomes a center-frame bisection).
But it’s the always eccentric, uniquely offbeat Natasha Lyonne—one of the movies’ great, cynical, deadpan realists—who steals the movie as the raspy voiced, chain-smoking outcast Rachel, tough as nails until a stunning moment at the film’s hour point where the armor breaks to reveal a wounded heart. There probably isn’t an actress more comfortable in her own skin than Lyonne, and her performance style—free of technique, spontaneously in every moment—that separates her from Coon’s immaculate technique and Olsen’s warmth.The trick of her performance is to suggest a young woman out of control and on the fringe before revealing a fiercely devoted caretaker and loving companion.
The movie slips slightly on an unexpected final sequence, affecting but not needed, Jacobs throwing the carefully calibrated sisterhood dilemma a curve with a questionable narrative device slightly daring but more distracting. Some will find it transcendent and others bewildering. Regardless, it’s a bold move from a director in total control, injecting unpredictability into the tiny apartment’s psychodrama.
His Three Daughters will land on audiences to varying degrees, whether as a smart actors’ exercise or a personal connection to family trauma and the singular experience of losing a parent. Jacobs has crafted an incisive, regenerative story about whether ties really do bind and how sometimes just saying what’s in one’s heart, at the right time, has tremendous healing power, especially true in damaged families where siblings have turned into complicated adults who can’t relate. The film’s notion of what it takes to move on—to another dimension, from the past and in our own lives—is profound.
Throughout, Jacobs effectively uses the sound of a beeping heart rate monitor that is frequently audible, even outside. His movie has a big one.
His Three Daughters opens theatrically on September 6 and streams on Netflix September 20.
3 stars
