Exploring Death in Cinema
There is one thing that unites all of us in this beautiful, bizarre little thing we call life. Yes, it’s death, a topic so universal that it’s captured the imagination of artists for centuries, resulting in countless stories that confront what it means to say goodbye to everything we know. Add Daina O. Pusić to the list of filmmakers, authors, and painters who’ve asked themselves, “As it all goes silent, what will death look like?”
If you guess anything other than “a menacing macaw that fluctuates wildly in size at the center of an A24 movie,” then you’re not operating on the same wavelength as Pusić. This is how the writer-director pictures death in her fascinating yet flighty debut feature Tuesday: brightly colored, feathered, and all-seeing. One of the first things we see in Tuesday is, in a sense, everything – the entire planet in the eye of Oniunas-Pusic’s version of the Grim Reaper. This is a film of sensory overload, with a constant buzz running through its superb sound mixing that speaks frankly to how the world keeps turning even as it all comes to a stop for those about to die.
The opening sequence is chillingly effective, capturing the terror of when Death arrives. In lieu of a dark hood, Tuesday’s avian beacon of demise is covered in what looks like an almost spiritual coating of ash. That the bird of prey is voiced with a deep, gravelly grace by Arinzé Kene makes it even more unsettling. When he comes knocking at the door of the ailing Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), her mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), is away, so he finds ways to kill the time, like rapping Ice Cube’s 1992 hit “It Was a Good Day.” Even Death needs to enjoy himself.
It reads like a joke, but this is deathly serious business. The bird’s rapping teeters right on the edge of self-parody, but thankfully Tuesday gets stronger the longer it goes along. The relationship between mother and daughter it depicts is quite moving without ever being mawkish. From the moment we first meet Zora, she’s trying to escape the home where her daughter is spending her last days. When Tuesday calls her on the phone, she even ignores it. Zora’s intense denial runs so deep that it has hardened into painful coldness. For all of its sentiment and sincerity, there’s a spikiness to Tuesday – and the more it pulled me in, the deeper it cut. It has a wickedly dark sense of humor, but this is a film that’s most successful in expressing the feeling of being wrapped in the weight of loss.
After her years on Seinfeld and Veep, Louis-Dreyfus is best known as a comedic actor – though she’s demonstrated quite a bit of range in the Nicole Holofocener-directed dramedies Enough Said and You Hurt My Feelings. Something as straightforwardly dramatic as Tuesday is very much uncharted territory for her, but she takes to it exquisitely. Not only does she keep this whackadoo premise grounded, but she feels completely natural as Zora, embodying the flawed layers of the matriarch as she works through the fear she’s pretending doesn’t exist. While her character’s attempts to ignore and hide a giant bird are a bit of a blunt metaphor in a film that’s often crying out for more subtlety, Louis-Dreyfus gives a measured performance that sufficiently sidesteps some rough patches to find Tuesday’s beating heart. It’s not her best work by any means, but it’s hard to imagine the film working at all without her.
For all of Tuesday’s magical flourishes and iffy effects, it’s a work that authentically grapples with big questions: What does it mean to lose the person you love more than anything in the world? And what will you do after they’re gone? Its best moments are both devastating and light on their feet. Which is not to say it’s never didactic or awkward – Pusić’s script sometimes spells things out, then underlines them just so we don’t miss anything. And yet, this is a film that managed to grow on me. Tuesday captures its most transcendent truths in its closing moments, when all is pared back and it’s just Louis-Dreyfus sitting alone after everything has gone quiet. No more rapping bird; just a portrait of the pain and poetry of life amid death. It’s there that Tuesday finally takes flight.