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The Earnest Process of Healing and Grief for His Three Daughters

There’s a trauma in the anticipation of losing a loved one that is different than the loss itself. It is a grieving process that begins before there is a death to grieve defined by complicated feelings and anxiety over the inevitable. The period before a major but expected death is full of the kinds of preparations and grim realities that you would never want to face, but with the morbid fact of the loved one still being present and tangible. Yet most would agree it is better to know the loss is coming, because with all this stress also comes opportunity for reflection, catharsis, and closure. Even healing.
Vincent’s three daughters are especially in need of that, as they converge on New York City to care for their father in the final days of his battle with cancer. Each of them approaches the situation with what maturity they can muster while also aware of the need to repair their estranged relationship with each other in order to get through the imminent loss of their beloved dad. Writer-director Azazel Jacobs brings a compassionate eye to the mundane yet universal human drama of dealing with an impending death. His Three Daughters is the story of sisters struggling to find their bond through loss.
A few years ago, Elizabeth Olsen in an interview expressed frustration and regret that the obligations of her Marvel Studios contract forced her to turn down Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster and other projects that would have been more artistically fulfilling. Well, His Three Daughters is a movie designed to be a great showcase for its trio of actresses, each of whom have been muted in one way or another by their Hollywood roles -for her part, Carrie Coon lately criticized all the reporting on Gena Rowlands’ death citing her as merely “star of The Notebook”. Coon plays Kate, eldest sister and single mother of a teenager, who lives in neighbouring Brooklyn but hasn’t visited her nearby family much in recent years. Olsen is Christina, the younger daughter who lives comfortably in LA with her husband and young daughter –and seems notably the most put-together. And then there’s Natasha Lyonne as Rachel, the underachieving middle step-daughter who nonetheless was raised as one of Vincent’s own and lives in his rent-controlled apartment where she has tended to him long before either of her sisters got involved with his care; and who is not so subtly resented by them –Kate especially.
The dynamics are played with a wonderfully authentic rhythm by each of the three actresses, even and perhaps especially the slightly more artificial beats of undue meanness or presumption like Kate’s resistance to comprehending just how much Rachel cares for their father (and suspects she merely wants to inherit the desirable apartment) or Rachel viewing Christina’s efforts to reach out and bridge the sisters’ gap with cynicism. All are in harmony in enacting a simultaneous history and strain -the subtleties of communication and body language in scenes between Coon and Olsen indicative of a kinder more diplomatic relationship, compared to Lyonne always carrying herself with self-conscious tenseness. She is the most interesting of the three, politely adjusting her routine and trying to be hospitable to her guests, while silently bitter over the intrusion and the judgement they bring on her. She knew their dad the closest in recent years, and it is she who can’t bear to be in the room with him, instead sitting outside anxiously listening to the steady beeps of the ECG machine -tangible faintly in the background for most of the movie. Where her sisters appear ready to face him and confront his death, it’s as though Rachel hopes to deter its reality. And yet Lyonne is careful not to show her emotional vulnerability on the surface -tapping into that instinct to save face around sisters who already expect her not to have it together.
But it is clear that all three have baggage, both with each other and in some way with their father that they need to find closure with. And for much of the movie, Jacobs and his actresses illustrate it in grounded, subtle ways. The clear regret in Kate over her late emotional distance that comes out in anger and prejudice, especially towards Rachel, who got to spend that time with their dad that she didn't. The anxiety in Christina over keeping together a family she too feels she has neglected. Jacobs comes at these feelings with real tenderness and engages with as much interest in the mundaneness of their situation, both soothing and stressful. The hospice worker Angel (Rudy Galvan) constantly has to deliver uncertain status updates, and with that the sisters set about prepping his funeral and obituary, and thinking about what to do with his possessions. You can feel the knot in their stomachs as they do this as Jacobs taps into the dim anxiety as many of us have experienced.
His Three Daughters however, is not a bleak movie -much as it concerns itself with inevitable death. This anxiety and apprehension is rendered with an honest frankness, but the manner in which it is powered through is almost comforting. And of course the way that the sisters are forced to come together emotionally in spite of their differences over their shared grief is a sliver of hopefulness too. When push comes to shove, a loved one's death can be a unifying thing.
In spite of the dressed-down authenticity, the moment of the movie comes with the climax, and an appearance by Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) that dispenses with all realism for a transcendent scene in the vein of Dryer (Ordet specifically) that speaks most powerfully to the bond between father and daughters, the very root of the emotional turmoil that so motivates all three. Perhaps what we see is the fantasy of all children mourning their parents, save for the notion of not having to mourn at all. Sanders is breathtaking, the scene's conclusion silently devastating, and it leads into a tenderly moving resolution for the women when at last given licence to lean on each other alone.
What you are left with is a searing and intimate, earnestly tangible examination of family dysfunction in the vicinity of grief. A small movie, but in the hands of Jacobs, Coon, Olsen, Lyonne, and Sanders feels enormous. Its periphery is limited in the manner of a one-act play, but film is its rightful medium; as still as Jacobs's techniques may be, they feed the understated nuances and calculated pace that could not be effective in another form. And movies have a particular power of impression that His Three Daughters is an apt conduit for. A movie about preparing for a loss through reconciliation, so as to make that loss easier to bear. I can certainly see this movie's audience taking that to heart for when the time comes.

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