Director and writer Chris Kelly’s OTHER PEOPLE feels as though it happened to you or to someone you know. It hurts, too, like it happened to you or someone you know.
Comedy writer David (Jesse Plemons) has moved back to Sacramento from New York City to be with his family while his mother, Joanne (Molly Shannon), is dying of cancer. He conceals his breakup with his boyfriend and various career dead-ends and disappointments from his family, telling his friend Gabe (John Early), “I just want my mom to die thinking I’m doing okay.” Nobody in David’s family is doing okay, and the film is a tender dismantling of the notion that anyone could, under the circumstances, be doing okay.
The entire cast is aptly set, from the other members of David’s immediate and extended family to the old friends and his fellow comedians he has moments of limited contact with back in New York, but the frangible, taut lines of energy between Plemons and Shannon sustain the film’s sense of urgency, cloaked in a desperate patience. Through an excruciating slowness of ordinary days, we never forget, because David never forgets, what cannot be stopped. In the meantime, however, he has to endure encounters with people he hasn’t seen since high school, his father’s continual refusal to discuss his sexuality, and the discomfort and friction of sharing space with family he grew up with and grew away from.
“Jesus-y moment, sans Jesus.”
Almost every other scene in OTHER PEOPLE could be described as painfully funny. After a disastrous OKCupid date at which David somehow both vomits and cries, he goes on to shatter completely in the pharmacy aisle of an empty grocery store, unable to see the item he’s looking for although it is directly in front of him. A birthday party for Gabe’s father features a table-dancing performance by Gabe’s much younger, ecstatically flamboyant brother (J.J. Totah). Joanne’s parents, sitting in their camper trailer, cheerfully relay to David the story of how his mother consumed her sibling in the womb. Between these scenes are small, quiet moments in which the soundscape of the film is reduced to the intimacy of breath, the closeness of people in bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens preparing for death by way of talking about the span of a life. “I wanted to be a mom more than anything in the world,” Joanne tells David, “and I got to do it three times.”
Smoking pot on the neighborhood playground with Gabe, David confesses that he’s been waiting and hoping for a near-religious moment, something to make everything make sense. Gabe, whose mother died years before, relates an exchange with her that did, somehow, afford him that “Jesus-y moment, sans Jesus.” Later David makes a fumble at trying to recreate Gabe’s experience between himself and Joanne, but it doesn’t take, his attempt so insignificant to Joanne that she barely registers it.
When David’s moment does come around, like everything else in the film it’s mundane and obvious on the face of it and also satisfyingly specific to this story, these characters, this particular grasp at some constructed permanence to combat inevitable loss. The ways we keep people after they’re gone, the memory and meaning of them, are as individual and impossible to replicate as the people themselves.
OTHER PEOPLE played Sept 9-22nd at Facets, a fixture in independent Chicago film for over 40 years.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8WlTcD5gxE