Ondi Timoner’s home-movie memoir is a heartbreaking and unexpectedly complex film about her elderly father in his final days. Eli Timoner was a swashbuckling entrepreneur who founded the budget airline Air Florida in the 1980s, became a stroke survivor in middle age, and finally, facing terrible ill-health, opted to end his own life under a Californian law that enforces a 15-day grace period in which the patient has time to reflect before the fatal drugs are administered. In fact they are self-administered: the applicant has to drink the hemlock-equivalent themselves, and there are wrenchingly tense scenes in which Mr Timoner tremblingly practises holding a cup in his hand. If he can’t, the whole thing is off.
The camera movingly witnesses his family paying visits and assembling round his death bed and he also has very touching goodbyes with his old friends and colleagues via Skype and an iPad held up to his face. But the complexity comes with his wife, Ondi’s mother Elissa, who is often a little apart from the group, lying down on a couch nearby, clearly exhausted by the lifelong burden of caring for Eli and perhaps nursing mixed feelings in her heart about all these people showing up at the final hour who perhaps don’t appreciate how difficult he can be – and how she herself deserves some of this outpouring of love.
