After sending Michelle Pfeiffer flouncing off to Paris in French Exit, filmmaker Azazel Jacobs makes a satisfying New York homecoming with His Three Daughters, a sharp, tender tale of sisterhood under duress. Blessed with a trio of superlative turns from Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne — all playing both to and against type in bracing ways — it’s the writer-director’s strongest effort since Momma’s Man put him on the indie map in 2008.
Like French Exit and Momma’s Man, Jacobs’ new movie deals with the big stuff: life, mortality, family, real estate. The last of those, in this case, is a rent-controlled co-op in lower Manhattan, where three women have reunited to be with their father during his final days of home hospice care. With poison-tipped stabs of humor and swells of feeling, His Three Daughters shakes off the familiarity of its setup and the inevitable shadow of its thematic forebears (shoutouts to Shakespeare, Chekhov, Bergman, Woody Allen and other usual suspects). Despite any dread a skim of the synopsis might provoke, the film is free of the mopey melodrama or Sundancey quirks that often make the dying-parent/estranged-sibling screen subgenre so dire. It’s wry, vivid and moving in unexpected ways.
Related Stories
His Three Daughters
That freshness is a testament to the singularity of Jacobs’ touch, his gently eccentric blend of comic absurdism and emotional generosity. Most crucial to the movie’s effectiveness is the director’s success in coaxing rich, nuanced, utterly unselfish performances from three starry headliners with distinct styles of acting. Conjuring a sororal fractiousness tinged with gallows humor and subject to unpredictable ebbs and flows, they achieve a subtle, surprising alchemy.
His Three Daughters opens with oldest sister Katie (Coon), arms crossed, brow furrowed, lecturing her siblings on how things should and shouldn’t be done. The austere framing — Coon in medium shot, against an unadorned white wall — reflects both Katie’s curt, control-freakish character and the bleak subject of her tirade: She, Christina (Olsen) and Rachel (Lyonne) are there to oversee their dad’s death.
Christina, the youngest, is a former Deadhead turned suburban yoga mom, whose gratitude-and-mindfulness façade is showing cracks; her earnest over-enunciating seems like a coping mechanism to fend off an impending meltdown. Rachel, a proud wake-and-baker, looks at her neurotically nattering sisters as if they’re visitors from another planet.
They might as well be. While Rachel has been staying there — in the apartment they grew up in — tending to their father between blunts and betting sites, the others have been carrying on with their lives. Katie, based in Brooklyn with a couple of kids and a husband, makes only a monthly pilgrimage into Manhattan to see her dad; Christina is across the country with her own spouse, child and set of ostensibly trivial problems.
The women’s temperaments are as different as their circumstances: Rachel’s laid-back (or is it checked-out?) candor and Lyonne’s naturalistic register make for an oil-and-water juxtaposition with the high-strung edginess of her sisters and the more stylized delivery of the actresses playing them. Speaking a mile a minute, defenses up but nerves exposed, Katie and Christina kick the film off on a note of such brittle anxiety that you may, at first, feel like joining the heavily sedated patriarch in the next room.
But scene by scene, Jacobs and his leads etch a tangle of compelling, persuasive dynamics and backstories. Of the three women, only Katie and Christina are biologically related. Their mother died when they were young, after which their father’s girlfriend (and eventual second wife) moved in, little daughter — Rachel — in tow. Katie views Rachel as a freeloader, while Rachel finds Katie bossy and insufferable. Despite their shared blood and occasional (ridiculous) exchanges in gibberish, Katie and Christina’s closeness seems more presumptive than genuine, born of convenience instead of true affection. Overtly hostile toward Rachel, Katie is passive-aggressively needy when it comes to Christina, who’s stuck playing peacekeeper between warring siblings.
Working with DP Sam Levy, Jacobs often shoots the sisters separately as they interact, isolated in their arias of delusion and denial, their stinging retorts and moments of chastened retreat. He also catches them watching or eavesdropping on one another from around a corner, behind a wall or window — brief instances of unspoken compassion or comprehension that close the distance between them inch by inch. Rachel and especially Katie and Christina indeed start out as types before gradually deepening, becoming — both to the viewer and to each other — more fully, endearingly human.
Along the way, there are logistics to handle: a Do Not Resuscitate form, comings and goings of caretakers, the obituary — the business of a life nearing its end. Above all, there are resentments to exorcise. Jacobs avoids the usual shrieky confrontations and tearful rapprochements, finding organic ways to tease out complex emotional histories. He dials up the intensity, and the volume, sparingly; when the explosions hit, they do damage. In one scene, Rachel’s boyfriend, Benji (a fantastic Jovan Adepo), calls out Katie and Christina with such blistering, bull’s-eye incisiveness that the already tenuous bonds among the three sisters appear ready to splinter for good. The ensuing fallout has a spiky authenticity, from the ferociousness of a near-violent dispute to a détente complete with awkward apologies and flashes of affection.
Delivering performances that feel thought-through but also lived-in — down to the soft New York accents — the actresses are exceptional. Lyonne’s whiskey-and-smoke-scraped voice, so often used as a signifier of brashness, is at certain points almost entirely extinguished here. Rachel addresses her sisters with the weary cautiousness of a hostage negotiator at the end of a tough day; Lyonne has never seemed so vulnerable.
Christina is the character who changes most noticeably, the kindness of Olsen’s open, smoothly beautiful face belying reserves of strength and an instinct for self-preservation. (An amusing scene finds the other sisters unnerved by the sight of her taking a quiet moment for herself.) Katie is, in many ways, the opposite, concealing her fragility behind a no-bullshit front that’s harsher than she actually wants it to be; Coon is masterful at conveying the space between those inner and outer selves.
What gives the performances a cohesive, haunted harmony is their sadness — the bone-deep fatigue of watching someone fade away, the loneliness of sifting through private memories, the difficulty of connecting with others doing the same. There’s also magic in the details: the way Lyonne plays Rachel’s response to a security guard’s kindness; how Olsen leaps up, almost balletically, to prevent an argument from turning physical; Coon’s slightly baffled expression as Katie watches Christina doing yoga. Meanwhile, Jay O. Sanders, as their dad, remains offscreen until a surreal twist near the end — a flight of theatrical whimsy that injects this modestly scaled film with a dash of grandeur.
Like the father, New York looms large through its invisibility: Jacobs only fleetingly springs us from the confines of the apartment, a choice that, paradoxically, reinforces the city’s presence, how central it is to the soul of this story and these people. Smoke breaks on the bench outside, glimpses of the skyline from a window, the rattle of the subway, even the slam of the front door as one sister or another returns from a head-clearing stroll — these become sources of relief and restoration, signs of a world still turning.
While the characters may feel like they’re suffocating, it’s not Jacobs’ style to make us suffer alongside them. With low-key visual precision, he gives the interior setting a casual, life-worn grace. A few fluid tracking shots through the apartment have an almost caressing quality, as if to remind us that this has been a space full of love — of songs, laughs and wisdom shared — as well as discord. In His Three Daughters, Jacobs’ camera captures a family’s wounds; it also heals them.
