By Benjamin Angrisano
@bangrisano
In a revealing interview with CBS Sunday Morning, comedian and actress, Julia Louis Dreyfuss (Seinfeld, Enough Said) spoke about why she began her new podcast “Wiser than Me” in which she speaks with older women who she deems to be wiser than her, as well as why she chose her newest role as a mother struggling to accept the terminal diagnosis of her daughter in the debut feature film of Daina O. Pusic, Tuesday.
“Maybe it’s because of my age. Maybe it’s because I had this horrible cancer scare and it sort of brought certain things into sharp focus for me in a way. It’s been a great gift to have the opportunity to talk to these women and to explore these subjects.” Tuesday begins with Death, voiced gravelly and deep by Nigerian-born British stage actor and playwright, Arinze Kene (I’m Your Woman, Get Up, Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical) in the form of a size-shifting anthropomorphic macaw parrot, flying around the world with the voices of the dying and suffering echoing in his mind. He visits two different people, both women, to nod them away to the unknown afterlife.
The first attempts desperately to bargain with the parrot before it silences her pleas, the next is an older woman who rebukes the parrot and spits in his face. This is a movie about women. The only developed recurring masculine presenting character is Death himself. Granted there are only four developed recurring characters in the entire film, and this may seem a bold minimalistic approach to such a maximalist topic.
Still, in all four cases I never once grew weary of the characters or performances. Soon the parrot arrives in the backyard of a dying girl named Tuesday, portrayed vulnerably with a sunny yet weak disposition by Irish actor Lola Petticrew (A Bump Along the Way, Dating Amber), who has been stricken with an unnamed degenerative illness and lives out her life in a wheelchair being cared for by her in-home nurse and friend, Billie, played by British actress Leah Harvey (Foundation, A Gentleman in Moscow).
Her mother, Zora (Dreyfuss), spends out her days anywhere else but home despite being secretly unemployed. The loss of a child goes against the natural order of things so innately that it is difficult for any sentient creature to process, and so Zora chooses not to. Dreyfuss does a profound job here, as she also does in last year’s underwhelming but well-performed You Hurt My Feelings, of conveying the callousness and denial inherent in avoidance. When Tuesday asks the parrot if she can call her mom one last time and Death atypically acquiesces, Dreyfuss’ acknowledgment of and wordless silencing of her phone while she sits in a coffee shop pretending to do work channels the same narcissistic tendencies of her relentlessly damaged maternal characteristics in Veep.
This is a strong debut for Croatian-born filmmaker Daina Oniunas-Pusic, who before this was best known for her award-winning short film, “Rhonna and Donna,” in which a conjoined twin is cast as Juliet in her school play, but the other twin wants nothing to do with it. This was ironic for me to discover because another film I saw days before seeing Tuesday, the superb Ghostlight, also shares the primary theme of coping with the death of a child.
Although Ghostlight’s approach to this subject is vastly different and much more grounded than Tuesday’s, it also happens to centrally incorporate an amateur stage production of Romeo and Juliet. Pusic provides the audience with a role model to balance out Zora’s cowardice in the title character of Tuesday.
Tuesday makes the voices in Death’s head stop ringing. Why is that? What makes her different? She tells the parrot a joke and makes him laugh. She notices he is dirty and offers him a bath in the sink revealing his beauty. She enriches him culturally with kindness and wonder and he reciprocates in kind. They share a joint. At one point she makes another morbid joke, and he inquires as to whether she was being sarcastic because Death is a huge fan of sarcasm. Later as they are perusing through a book of historical figures, he remarks that Elizabeth II almost outwitted him, Joseph Stalin is an absolute prick, and Jesus is very sarcastic.
When Tuesday asks what he means, Death parrots the actual audio of Jesus’ voice remarking with a hint of snark, “Let the one among you who is without sin, cast the first stone.” They share another laugh over this. That night, when they try to explain the situation to Zora and she is confronted with Death, who urges her to say goodbye to her daughter, she tries her best to kill the parrot. Her character shifts dramatically and she begins to fight like hell. Accepting reality is hard but when the reality becomes something tangible in front of you that you can keep at bay your perception shifts. What is denial? What are we internalizing in our brains and our subconscious? Something we know to be false, that we know is not aligned with reality.
If we could somehow find a switch that could change the nature of reality, how long would we last before realizing it is almost certainly illusory? Would we be able to accept reality then? Julia is receiving universal praise for her ability to convey the steps of this process effectively and I for one am excited to see what else she has in store to surprise us with.
I would be eager to see her shift gears and try something new again until we find something she is incapable of pulling off. I have heard it said that if you can write well for comedy, you can write anything. As one of only six women to be awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and the actor with the most Emmy Award nominations of all time, I have yet to see proof that she cannot do anything. When the movie ends, the Ice Cube song “Today (Was A Good Day)” plays over the end credits.
A callback to a scene earlier in the film where Tuesday introduces Death to the song as they are sharing perspectives. I shared the theater with two people, one of whom left right away. The other, a much older man, was sitting and watching the credits and I asked him what he thought of the movie. He said he enjoyed it although we both agreed we did not yet understand why Death was a parrot. He said he was staying for the credits because he wanted to see what rap song was playing in the movie.
I told him the song’s name and artist and he thanked me. As we were walking out talking after the credits, I mentioned how the movie argues that we think of death as this whole scary thing, but it would be so much scarier to never be able to die. This seemed to put a smile on his face and he chuckled nodding in agreement with me.
I began to check my phone and was still looking down at it forty-five seconds later when I heard him say “Take care have a good one!” I looked up at him walking down the steps and waved back as he stretched out his arm in acknowledgment with that same smile still on his face. When the great macaw in the sky visits you, how will you respond? With furious vitriol kicking and screaming? Or will you ask them how they’re doing and offer them some cocoa?
