‘His Three Daughters’ is a sister act that’s among the year’s best movies
“His Three Daughters” — 4 stars
Siblings are the strangers we grow up with, people with whom we share little except parents, back seats, possibly bedrooms and DNA more random than we think. Sometimes this can make for lifelong bonds. Sometimes it makes for aliens across the dinner table. Do our brothers and sisters ever see things the way we do? Do they ever see us? And can we ever forgive the ones who don’t?
These are some of the concerns of Azazel Jacobs’ “His Three Daughters,” one of the least cinematic movies of the year and also one of the best.
It unfolds in a cramped New York apartment in which three grown women await the death of their father, who is lying unseen in a back bedroom, hooked up to machines and mostly unconscious. The women are Katie, Christina and Rachel, played respectively by Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne.
Katie is the control freak, a Type-A brownstone Brooklynite with an unruly teenage daughter at home and a beady eye for everyone’s faults. Christina is a gentle West Coaster and new mom, the kind of person who became a teenage Deadhead for the community rather than the acid. Rachel, who’s been living with and caring for their father in his declining years, is a very specific breed of New Yorker, a gravel-voiced stoner who bets on multiple sports games, knows everyone in the neighborhood and looks like a mess but isn’t.
“His Three Daughters” is in all its simplicity and complexity the story of how these women get along over the course of their dad’s final week. Spoiler alert: They don’t. If that sounds like a downer, the movie’s kept from terminal morbidity by writer-director Jacobs’ uncanny ear for dialogue and by the empathy of the three central performances. There’s humor here, gallows and otherwise. But there’s also an overflowing heartful of feeling, approached from three different angles by three different people who all happen to love the same parent.
Other people come and go: a hospice worker (Rudy Galvan) whose smooth bromides eventually grate on the sisters’ nerves and ours; a night nurse (Jasmine Bracey) with patience and kindness and a full, unseen life outside the apartment; Rachel’s kind-of boyfriend and fellow New York Jets fan Benji (Jovan Adepo), who at one point comes to her defense in a tense, satisfying showdown with Katie.
The film’s central conflict is between the latter’s anxious, angry need for order — an unsigned “do not resuscitate” form becomes a source of Katie’s obsession early in the movie — and Rachel’s easygoing-to-the-point-of-inertia manner of taking care of business. Which leaves Christina in the role of people-pleasing peacemaker (every family has one, right?) until she has had enough and blows a fuse in another satisfying and deeply funny scene.
Every family also has at least one basket case, the person who sucks up all the oxygen and requires special handling. In “His Three Daughters,” Katie thinks it’s Rachel, but everybody else knows it’s her, and the miracle of Coons’ performance is that Katie’s hypercritical intensity is maddening but relatable and not a little sad. She just wants her father to have a good death at the same time she’s in denial about him dying at all.
An interesting thing about this movie: People end up having differing opinions about the “best” performance and to a certain degree the “best” sister. All three actresses do career-peak work in a talky but never verbose film. One of our wisest and most underrated players, Lyonne slowly reveals the depths of Rachel’s strength and sorrow, transforming in Katie’s eyes and ours from a slovenly pothead to a dying man’s caregiver and best friend. Olsen, for her part, turns what could be a simple-minded role into a layered portrayal of a woman who’s anesthetized herself with mellowness to still a beating, troubled heart. You come out of “His Three Daughters” cherishing all three sisters and with new respect for all three actresses.
As a director, Jacobs turns the liability of the film’s enclosed dramatic space — finally, a New York City movie apartment that’s the size of an actual New York City apartment! — into an asset, with walls and camera angles that separate the sisters before bringing them back together. The relationships here are territorial, especially in the early scenes: Rachel hiding from Katie in her bedroom, Katie dominating the kitchen and Christina floating with worried calm in the spaces between. Somewhat shockingly, “His Three Daughters” rarely feels like a filmed play. It’s more intimate than that.
In its final moments, the movie takes a risk — a huge gamble, really — that for my money pays off on any number of levels, and in doing so finally confirms its writer-director’s talent. Jacobs, the son of avant-garde film legend Ken Jacobs, has been making small, fluky movies for 20 years, with results good (“Momma’s Man,” 2008), indifferent (“The Lovers,” 2017) and weird (“French Exit,” 2020). “His Three Daughters” is a work of delayed but unmistakable artistic maturity.
Among other things, it’s a New York film through and through — when one of the characters looks out the apartment window to Stuyvesant Town below and the skyscrapers beyond and says, “God, I love this city,” you feel the emotion down to your toes. The movie’s also a salve to anyone who has watched a parent die and felt panic about everything left unasked and unsaid. It’s a love letter to the siblings who know us too well and not at all. And finally, it’s a profound act of letting go — of resentments and of fear and of the people who stand us on our feet before sending us out into the world.
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In theaters; available Sept. 20 on Netflix. Rated R for language and drug use. 101 minutes.