It’s hard to think of anything less amusing than watching someone you love gasp their last breath of life. Yet, in the opening of Other People, film-maker Chris Kelly manages to turn that searing scene into the stuff of scream-out-loud comedy. Like a lot of humor of the darkest hue, success pivots on the juxtaposition between the monumental and the mundane – in this case involving mortality and a mixed-up Taco Bell order.
The plot of Kelly’s debut film, which was released in 2016, centers on a struggling and downcast comedy writer (played by Jesse Plemons), who reluctantly returns to the place where he grew up, Sacramento, California, to help his sisters and father care for their cancer-ravaged matriarch (the iridescent Molly Shannon). The opening scene makes her tragic fate clear. The rest of the film chronicles the year-long lead-up.
The drama of Other People isn’t only about the mother’s decline but about the son’s thwarted ascent; he’s struggling in his career, losing in his love life – having recently broken up with his boyfriend (played by Zach Woods) – and failing in his fitful attempts to get his father to accept his sexuality. The story mirrors Kelly’s own: he grew up in Sacramento, became a comedy writer – though a far more successful one than his character in the movie, having served, for a time, as the head writer of Saturday Night Live – and he lost his mother to cancer in 2009. So, he clearly knows what he’s talking about. Every detail in the film – from the most improbably funny to the most unflinchingly sad – rings true.
I’m better equipped to testify to the veracity of that than I wish I were. Over the last decade, I’ve been through this whole “watching-someone-you-love-die” situation enough times to make my streaming gem selection double as an expert witness testimonial. I’ve seen the four people closest to me through the entire dying process – my father, my best friend, my brother and my mother, in that order. In three of those instances I witnessed the precise moment of their deaths (I missed my mom’s by minutes). And, while I can tell you that there wasn’t a great deal of hilarity in any of these scenarios, Kelly’s eager use of it in his film makes even the most wrenching moments watchable without denying a single stab of the pain that inspired them.
His actors show equal skill at balancing hilarity and horror. Plemons uses his usual sphinx-like expression as a subtle tool to indicate the full range of his character’s smothered emotion. In one amazing scene, he ends up in bed with his ex-boyfriend. The result could make cinema history as one of the most sexually awkward scenes ever filmed. Yet, as written by Kelly, and as played by Plemons and Wood, the clumsy interaction has an intimacy and warmth that touches the soul. Shannon, a comedic actor who has always been able to find empathy in even the most humiliating situations, may, at times, seem too good to be true. She could be the most likable dying person ever. Yet her grace never obscures the filo-dough-thick layers of anger and loss inherent in her lot. Even a character who might have seemed shoe-horned into the script finds a sweet place in the pathos. Josie Totah, a trans actor who played male parts during this phase of her career, appears as the beyond-flamboyant brother of Plemons’ best friend. It’s just a cameo but the contours of the characters’ outrageousness speak of a confidence you won’t soon forget.
Scene-stealing of that sort fits well in a film where most of the comedy isn’t generated by the lead character. Instead, Plemons plays the hapless observer, brooding or steaming while the other characters struggle with how to respond to the profound sadness of his mother’s situation. Her will to cause as little pain to others as possible makes the sight of her torturous medical treatments sting.
As the film unfolds, its title takes on multiple meanings – from “these kinds of horrors happen to other people,” to the notion of otherness itself. In 1981, Martin Amis’ published a novel titled Other People: A Mystery Story. But, the truth is, if you live long enough, similar situations to those in the film will happen to every single one of you.
Other People can be streamed on Netflix in the US and the UK
