Based on a 2015 Esquire article written by Matthew Teague, this ‘Debbie Downer’ of a film that shows you really can feel more doom and gloom on top of COVID.
It’s fall of 2013 when the tide turns, the autumn arrives and life seems fine until we cut to Matt Teague (Casey Affleck) unable to handle the news that his wife Nicole Teague (Dakota Johnson) is dying. She’s got six months to live. She tells her husband that before he opens the hospital door to their children, she has to think on three ways to tell their daughters. Option one: Mommy’s going to sleep. Option two: Mommy’s going on vacation or… Option three: Mommy’s going away for a while.
As a mother of two daughters myself, all the options, well, suck. Going to sleep means she’ll wake up. Going on vacation means she went and they didn’t get to go. What? Option three means they’ll wait for her to return. But nothing is as bad as the way the film plays out, intercutting the back and forth of healthy couple to dying wife. How I longed for the unfolding of a classic movie like Love Story or Terms of Endearment. Instead and what we get is a depressing and confusing mess from start to finish. A feeling that sadly Teague’s private diaries turned article, should have stayed there. Not turned into a film.
There are times in life when we feel on top of the flat tire, the spare has gone flat, too; we double down on embarrassing and mounting atrocities (can this really be happening all at once?) but I’m not sure a movie is intended to take us down that dark rabbit hole and leave us there. (spoiler alert: The dog has cancer and so does mom, and so on and so on.)
Perhaps the filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, intended us to feel that cancer is one big blur of years as cancer makes us feel, but as a movie-going experience even from the comfort of my sofa, I had nothing to sink into except the voyeurism of someone’s atrocities.
For what it’s worth, the acting is excellent. Casey Affleck reminds us (since Manchester by the Sea) that he’s the man to call for an incomparable performance of a real guy in a real town going through real problems. His raspy monotone voice adds to his acting. He himself, haggard from that of a combat journalist traveling from country to country while juggling a dying wife back home, couldn’t be peformed by anyone else.
So with a dying wife and a depressed husband, the film falls on ‘the friend’ like it’s title. And it’s the performance of Jason Segel as Dane Faucheux that steals the movie. From cut to ‘2012 the year of diagnosis’ to various years back/forth to ‘2008 four years before diagnosis’ it’s clear he’s all ‘in’ to upend his life and be the Mrs. Doubtfire to the two little girls.
Segel’s performance is something to be admired. He’s gone from Finding Sarah Marshall goof ball performances…to this.
But sadly, like stage four cancer the big screen couldn’t save us. It’s an intimate film that was best left private. There is no rising to the occasion, no reveal, nothing that alters us except knowing in times of trouble friends are there. But didn’t we already know that? Sorry, I wanted lift-off! Or at least a story told in a better and emotional configuration. We know she’s going to die, but get us there differently.