His Three Daughters

Maybe it goes without saying that the three sisters who have gathered at the New York City apartment of their father where he has entered hospice care are estranged, but as “His Three Daughters” begins, writer/director Azazel Jacobs is content not just to say it but show it. The three sisters, Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) are gathered at the dining table, but Jacobs does not show them together, not at first, separating them through individual shots even as they converse with one another, or maybe more accurately, talk at one another. Only when hospice care worker Angel (Rudy Galvan), a moniker that feels less ironic than dryly absurdist, does Jacobs draw the siblings together in the same frame, underlining their congregating by necessity. Angel suggests that they're coming together might provide dad the emotional and spiritual comfort he needs to stop hanging on and just let go, setting up “His Three Daughters” as a journey of healing. Or, seeming to, anyway, because thankfully what Jacobs renders proves much more prickly, even occasionally profound in its reluctance to provide the emotional tidying up we are conditioned to expect. 

Given that “His Three Daughters” is set almost exclusively inside this apartment and is driven by so much precisely written dialogue, often in the form of monologues, one would be forgiven for thinking that Jacobs had based it on a play. I mean, when the movie cuts to its opening shot of Katie mid-monologue, you can practically feel a spotlight being switched on. But nope, this was an original screenplay by Jacobs, made specifically for the screen, and because it was, it is necessary to consider intention – why did he make such a theatrical-feeling film? And as much as “His Three Daughters” is about the eponymous trio coming to grips with their father’s impending demise, it’s more about them slipping into their pre-defined roles: Katie as the nagging “mother,” and Rachel as the detached stoner, and Christina as the stressed peacemaker. And so, while those white walls and kitchen cabinets do create a genuine lived-in sensation of a real apartment, they also give the feel of a theatrical space, underlining this sense of role-playing that these sisters resort to in order to get through.

That role-playing extends to the actors. Coon is theatrically trained, and she brings a theatrical air to the part of Katie, rehearsed in her dialogue and her mannerisms, notable straight away in that opening shot monologue. It can feel a little phony, and I mean that as a compliment, because Katie can feel a little phony in her over-determination to take charge, to set things straight, to say this how it is, and this is how it should be. Lyonne, then, as one of our most naturalistic actors, works in spectacular contrast to Coon. Rachel being a pothead with a penchant for dry witticisms might suggest Lyonne is just playing herself. Except, in becoming clear Rachel is the one daughter most sure of who she is, Lyonne’s turn becomes the one most through the looking glass, the one you can’t quite tell where the performance begins, or ends. Olsen gives the most expressively and physically mannered performance by far because Christine is the one most obviously wearing a mask, trying to leave her bohemian past behind by being someone else, even as little cracks show all the time. 

As a movie about performance, “His Three Daughters” is chiefly about the performers, but that does not mean Jacobs fails to leave an auteur imprint. For a good long while, it seems as if we will not meet their father. We see the hallway leading to the room, but the camera never enters. Near the end, though, Vinent (Jay O. Sanders) finally appears, helped into the living room by his daughters and set down in his easy chair. Independent of everything else, I found this moment incredibly moving; a dying guy who just wants to sit in his chair one more time. He does not just sit though, he speaks, delivering a monologue in which he essentially says farewell by coming clean. It’s a moment that seems too good to be true, and the way Jacobs pulls the rug out, one cut breathlessly altering the point-of-view, is as cruel as life itself, the dream of closure manifested as just that.