Films about pretty young people dying miserably of some terrible but usually not disfiguring condition can be a bit of a drag. Tuesday writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusić has found a way of injecting a bit of zip – adding a bit of the weird supernatural.
We’re told from all the publicity that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the star, but in fact Lola Petticrew more than capably holds the whole thing together as Tuesday, a teenager with not long to live, who is visited one day by a talking macaw that can change size at will.
She intuits instantly that this is Death itself (we already knew that because an early montage sequence has shown us the macaw on the scene as one person after another falls off the perch).
So Tuesday does what any sparky teenager not quite ready to go would do when confronted by the end. Talks. Babbles, really, trying to distract Death from the matter at hand. And from here a strange kind of almost-relationship develops – they start joking with each other, Tuesday helps the macaw get some glue off one of its talons, they smoke weed together and talk about famous faces of history he’s had the pleasure to have escorted from this world.
By the time mother Zora (Louis-Dreyfus) returns to the homestead, Tuesday has come to terms with her fate. She knows she’s imminently about to die. Now all she has to do is persuade her fiercely protective mother that it is time for her to go.
More weird stuff happens, including mother Zora trying to cheat Death by killing and eating it, which causes her to grow enormously large. A gigantic Julia Louis-Dreyfus probably isn’t the way she thought her career was going to go while she was on Seinfeld or Veep, but in fact her groundedness as an actor is a positive here – this development is doubly bizarre because it’s her.
As a slightly underdeveloped subplot makes clear, Death’s removal from the scene – he essentially camps out inside Zora’s body – leads to all sorts of consequences in the rest of the world, where death (and Death) no longer seems to operate. Zombie cows, a decapitated dog’s head barking, people in desperate agony begging for release. Death, we are being told a bit too emphatically, is a natural and indeed necessary part of life. Remove it from the equation and the rest of it no longer works.
It’s all very likeable, with the total effect like a drugged-up reworking of a medieval mummer’s play, or a lighter, fruitier, aerated variation on that sequence in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal when the Grim Reaper and the crusading knight have their extended chat.
On the other hand – it’s too long and there are pacing issues. This is the writer/director’s first feature-length film after a series of shorts and it has a short’s dynamic. By about 25 minutes in we have the entire thing fully formed and laid out in front of us. The only problem being that there’s still almost 90 minutes to go.
It’s a bit of a mess, but not all of a mess. The performances – Louis-Dreyfus, Petticrew and Leah Harvey as Tuesday’s stern nurse – are exquisite and all the key actors give a lot more than is on the page. It’s drole and playful and full of strong images. And it injects a tired genre with a new spirit, quietly makes a powerful argument for euthanasia while also silently working as a rebuke to all those tech billionaires spending billions on working out how to live for ever.
Kicked into tighter shape it would be something of a classic. As it is it’s freewheeling and fun, which are unusual adjectives to be wheeling out for a film about dying.
Tuesday – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
