‘His Three Daughters’ Review: Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne Excel in Azazel Jacobs’ Vividly Affecting Chamber Dramedy – Hollywood Reporter

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 pointy, tender story of sisterhood beneath duress. Blessed with a trio of superlative turns from Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne — all enjoying each to and in opposition to sort in bracing methods — 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 film offers with the large stuff: life, mortality, household, actual property. The final of these, on this case, is a rent-controlled co-op in decrease Manhattan, the place three ladies have reunited to be with their father throughout his closing days of house 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 different ordinary suspects). Regardless of any dread a skim of the synopsis may provoke, the movie is freed from the mopey melodrama or Sundancey quirks that always make the dying-parent/estranged-sibling display screen subgenre so dire. It’s wry, vivid and shifting in surprising methods.

That freshness is a testomony to the singularity of Jacobs’ contact, his gently eccentric mix of comedian absurdism and emotional generosity. Most important to the film’s effectiveness is the director’s success in coaxing wealthy, nuanced, totally unselfish performances from three starry headliners with distinct types of performing. Conjuring a sororal fractiousness tinged with gallows humor and topic to unpredictable ebbs and flows, they obtain a delicate, stunning alchemy.

His Three Daughters opens with oldest sister Katie (Coon), arms crossed, forehead furrowed, lecturing her siblings on how issues ought to and shouldn’t be achieved. The austere framing — Coon in medium shot, in opposition to an unadorned white wall — displays each Katie’s curt, control-freakish character and the awful topic of her tirade: She, Christina (Olsen) and Rachel (Lyonne) are there to supervise their dad’s dying.  

Christina, the youngest, is a former Deadhead turned suburban yoga mother, whose gratitude-and-mindfulness façade is exhibiting cracks; her earnest over-enunciating looks as if a coping mechanism to fend off an impending meltdown. Rachel, a proud wake-and-baker, appears to be like at her neurotically nattering sisters as in the event that they’re guests from one other planet.

They could as properly be. Whereas Rachel has been staying there — within the condo they grew up in — tending to their father between blunts and betting websites, the others have been carrying on with their lives. Katie, based mostly in Brooklyn with a few youngsters and a husband, makes solely a month-to-month pilgrimage into Manhattan to see her dad; Christina is throughout the nation along with her personal partner, youngster and set of ostensibly trivial issues.

The ladies’s temperaments are as completely 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 extra stylized supply of the actresses enjoying them. Talking a mile a minute, defenses up however nerves uncovered, Katie and Christina kick the movie off on a observe of such brittle nervousness that you could be, at first, really feel like becoming a member of the closely sedated patriarch within the subsequent room.

However scene by scene, Jacobs and his leads etch a tangle of compelling, persuasive dynamics and backstories. Of the three ladies, solely Katie and Christina are biologically associated. Their mom died after they have been younger, after which their father’s girlfriend (and eventual second spouse) moved in, little daughter — Rachel — in tow. Katie views Rachel as a freeloader, whereas Rachel finds Katie bossy and unbearable. Regardless of their shared blood and occasional (ridiculous) exchanges in gibberish, Katie and Christina’s closeness appears extra presumptive than real, born of comfort as a substitute of true affection. Overtly hostile towards Rachel, Katie is passive-aggressively needy in terms of Christina, who’s caught enjoying peacekeeper between warring siblings.   

Working with DP Sam Levy, Jacobs typically shoots the sisters individually as they work together, remoted of their arias of delusion and denial, their stinging retorts and moments of chastened retreat. He additionally catches them watching or eavesdropping on each other from round a nook, behind a wall or window — temporary situations of unstated compassion or comprehension that shut the gap between them inch by inch. Rachel and particularly Katie and Christina certainly begin out as varieties earlier than steadily deepening, changing into — each to the viewer and to one another — extra absolutely, endearingly human.

Alongside the best way, there are logistics to deal with: a Do Not Resuscitate type, comings and goings of caretakers, the obituary — the enterprise of a life nearing its finish. Above all, there are resentments to exorcise. Jacobs avoids the same old shrieky confrontations and tearful rapprochements, discovering natural methods to tease out complicated emotional histories. He dials up the depth, and the amount, sparingly; when the explosions hit, they do harm. In a single scene, Rachel’s boyfriend, Benji (a incredible Jovan Adepo), calls out Katie and Christina with such blistering, bull’s-eye incisiveness that the already tenuous bonds among the many three sisters seem able to splinter for good. The following fallout has a spiky authenticity, from the ferociousness of a near-violent dispute to a détente full with awkward apologies and flashes of affection.

Delivering performances that really feel thought-through but in addition lived-in — all the way down to the smooth New York accents — the actresses are distinctive. Lyonne’s whiskey-and-smoke-scraped voice, so typically used as a signifier of brashness, is at sure factors nearly fully extinguished right here. Rachel addresses her sisters with the weary cautiousness of a hostage negotiator on the finish of a troublesome day; Lyonne has by no means appeared so susceptible.

Christina is the character who modifications most noticeably, the kindness of Olsen’s open, easily lovely face belying reserves of power and an intuition for self-preservation. (An amusing scene finds the opposite sisters unnerved by the sight of her taking a quiet second for herself.) Katie is, in some ways, the other, concealing her fragility behind a no-bullshit entrance that’s harsher than she truly needs it to be; Coon is masterful at conveying the area between these internal and outer selves.

What provides the performances a cohesive, haunted concord is their unhappiness — the bone-deep fatigue of watching somebody fade away, the loneliness of sifting via non-public reminiscences, the problem of connecting with others doing the identical. There’s additionally magic within the particulars: the best way Lyonne performs Rachel’s response to a safety guard’s kindness; how Olsen leaps up, nearly balletically, to forestall an argument from turning bodily; Coon’s barely baffled expression as Katie watches Christina doing yoga. In the meantime, Jay O. Sanders, as their dad, stays offscreen till a surreal twist close to the top — a flight of theatrical whimsy that injects this modestly scaled movie with a splash of grandeur.

Like the daddy, New York looms massive via its invisibility: Jacobs solely fleetingly springs us from the confines of the condo, a alternative that, paradoxically, reinforces town’s presence, how central it’s to the soul of this story and these folks. Smoke breaks on the bench outdoors, glimpses of the skyline from a window, the rattle of the subway, even the slam of the entrance door as one sister or one other returns from a head-clearing stroll — these develop into sources of aid and restoration, indicators of a world nonetheless turning.

Whereas the characters could really feel like they’re suffocating, it’s not Jacobs’ model to make us undergo alongside them. With low-key visible precision, he provides the inside setting an informal, life-worn grace. A couple of fluid monitoring pictures via the condo have an nearly caressing high quality, as if to remind us that this has been an area full of affection — of songs, laughs and knowledge shared — in addition to discord. In His Three Daughters, Jacobs’ digital camera captures a household’s wounds; it additionally heals them.

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