His Three Daughters is about death. There’s no getting around it. For most of the film, which takes place almost entirely within the living room of a single Manhattan apartment, the man in the next room is dying. Despite that, there isn’t a whole lot of talk about death. The characters don’t waste any breath speculating on the hereafter. Death isn’t a mystery to be pondered so much as it is a process to be borne out. It is scheduled nurse visits, DNR orders, and shifts keeping watch in case the inevitable should suddenly happen.
The protagonists are a trio of estranged—well, no, not estranged, but certainly distant—sisters who have come together in the final days of their dad’s hospice care. Not only do they not talk about death, you get the impression that they don’t talk about anything all that much. When they do, they seem to be talking past one another. Katie (Carrie Coon), the eldest, talks at, mostly.
The particulars of their lives are slowly and meticulously established. Katie lives in nearby Brooklyn and has a teenage daughter who won’t speak to her. Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) places daily sports bets and spends her days high. She’s been providing live-in assistance to their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), for an unspecified amount of time. It would be easy to make Rachel a stock comedy stoner, a slacker, but Lyonne plays her as sensitive and clear-eyed, someone whose drug habit comes from a need to create a buffer between herself and the world so she can bear to function. The youngest sister, Christina (Elizabeth Olsen, who is magnificent), lives in another state, seemingly happily married and with a young daughter. The two moments when she talks to her daughter on the phone are the only expressions of joy we get for most of the movie.
That’s not to say this is a dour affair. It isn’t. It is often funny, and in unexpected moments, as befits the setting. The hardest I think I’ve ever made my mom laugh was during my grandfather’s funeral, on the way from the car to the door of the funeral home. The script is full of dialogue that reflects back on what we see in unexpected ways. One night at dinner, Katie tries to engage Rachel in conversation about the food, but Rachel is watching the final game in her parlay on her phone. “You think watching will change its outcome?” Katie didn’t intend it as a joke, but it is, and it’s a grim one. All three of them have upended their lives to sit around an apartment and watch their dad die. Do they think watching will change what’s going to happen?
After a particularly exhausting interaction with the hospice care provider, the sisters relax into their first and only real conversation, one in which nobody has any walls up and little seems to be at stake. Christina tells the story of a time when she and dad were watching something on TV and he became furious at the way it depicted death. What was on that screen had nothing in common with the real thing, he said. The mistake the movies and TV always make is using the depiction of death itself to represent the feeling of death, of what it is to have someone pass away. “The only way to sum up a person’s life, to communicate how death truly feels, is through absence.” The movie itself has been following his advice. Up until now, Vincent has been nothing but a suggestion, the beeping of a heart monitor. His absence has managed to take up the entirety of these women’s lives.
“I think what dad meant,” Katie follows up, “is that we don’t really know who people are until after they’re gone.” I agree with Victor’s belief that absence is the real impact of death, but I bristled at Katie’s interpretation. You may learn more about a person after they die as you go through their possessions, but surely we can learn more from the living? At least, in an ideal world. That’s particularly true when talking about our parents, full human beings who’ve often closed off entire portions of themselves in the interest of having and raising us.
At that point, having finally moved past their differences, the three of them go into Vincent’s room for the first time as a trio. He responds to their presence and, as best he can, asks them to bring him out to the living room so he can sit in his recliner.
In some stories, there comes a point where the limitations of reality run up against the need to express something, and reality, however briefly, loses. That moment in The Worst Person in the World when Julie, about to break up with her boyfriend, flicks the kitchen light switch and spends an entire imaginary day elsewhere. The ballet at the end of La La Land, when Seb and Mia play out the decade they could have had together if only they’d been different people. These are, unfailingly, my favorite pieces of storytelling. In His Three Daughters, that point comes when Vincent stands up from his recliner, goes into the kitchen, and opens himself a beer.
At that point, Jay O. Sanders delivers a wonderful monologue. You can always tell when a theatre actor knows they’ve been given a good piece of meat to bite into. He winds up by getting the beer, and then he uncorks. He speaks directly to each of his children, speaking to the hearts of their disagreements and insecurities. He tells them how much he loves them, how much he loved their mothers, and tells them the story of the first woman he ever loved. It’s all wonderful, beautifully acted and emotionally gripping.
As the monologue ends, Vincent leans against the apartment window and looks over to his chair, where he sits dying. His daughters are crying against him. He has, of course, said none of what we just heard. He makes and holds direct eye contact with himself. It seems to me that in his final moments he has imagined all of this, saying the things he never got to. Katie and Rachel are on their own to figure out why they get along like oil and water. Christina will never know why she didn’t get the sense of family that she needed. No person alive will ever again know the story of the first woman he loved. “We really don’t know who people are until after they’re gone” is nonsense. You have to tell people who you are and who they are now, while you’re here, before it’s too late.