Can the terrifying mystery of death be in any way explained, or its wrenching pain softened, by a quirky hipster movie fantasy about the angel of death being a talking macaw? The answer, as provided by this bafflingly irrelevant and shallow film from first-time feature director Daina O Pusic, is a resounding no. Tuesday stars the estimable Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who has graduated from comic masterpieces such as Seinfeld and Veep to a serious movie career. But how frustrating to see a performance of this quality marooned in the middle of such pointless silliness.
The film’s setting is a London suburb (there is co-production funding from BBC Film and the BFI) where a 15-year-old British kid called Tuesday, played by Lola Petticrew, is dying at home of a terminal illness, conceivably lung cancer. Her American mom is Zora, fiercely played by Louis-Dreyfus, who theoretically is out at work while a nurse (Leah Harvey) looks after Tuesday. But Zora, convulsed with denied grief and on the verge of a breakdown, has secretly abandoned her job and hangs around cafes and parks all day and sells everything in the house to pay for Tuesday’s care.
Then a talking macaw with the ability to change size (voiced with croaky-sonorous significance by Arinzé Kene) shows up to take Tuesday away to the great beyond, but Zora angrily confronts this bird; the encounter is to have transformative significance. Meanwhile, the action of the film is lengthened by details of a bizarre apocalyptic breakdown happening in London, with freaky zombified behaviour – perhaps or perhaps not connected with Zora’s refusal to accept the natural order of things.
It could arguably be a relief to see the business of death desolemnised and mocked; not a white-masked Euro-arthouse figure who has to be beaten at chess, but a wacky creature who is almost Tuesday’s secret, like ET. But elsewhere cliches are present and correct. Tuesday’s condition is pretty picturesque and she of course is preternaturally wise in her approach to everything, unlike her scatty, grumpy mum. And in fact the death bird himself, however bizarre and chaotic, seems effectively to school everyone in the business of seraphic acceptance. The arrival of death in the real world does not necessarily have that effect. Perhaps if Tuesday had been stupid, angry and selfish and the macaw was speaking in a high squeaky voice, that might have been more transgressive. As it is, the movie can’t quite bear to make the macaw properly funny, or properly scary. So the action exists in a tonal muddle.
As for Louis-Dreyfus, she is very good in the way that only she can be: intelligent, sensitive, focused and intense, hitting the line-readings with percussive force. How overwhelming it might have been to see her and Petticrew play this story without the indie high-concept bird. Eventually Zora is to ask the macaw the big questions about existence. When Woody Allen does that in Love and Death, the cowled figure stays silent. Here, the macaw replies in terms of stunning secular-humanist banality. This is a slow death.
• Tuesday is in UK and Irish cinemas from 9 August.
