Jim Jarmusch, that beat poet of mellow angst, is back on familiar turf with this triptych of stories about grown-up children and the parents they don’t really want to visit. After 2019’s limp zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, devotees will be happy to hear that the Ohioan’s stocks-in-trade – wry insights into the human condition, laconic vibes, a growly Tom Waits – come augmented with deeper heart here.
It’s divided into three roughly equal length chapters: ‘Father’, ‘Mother’, ‘Sister Brother’. In the first, Adam Driver’s divorcee Jeff and his equally buttoned-up sister Emily (Mayim Bialik) take his Range Rover in the New Jersey sticks for a long-overdue visit to see their dad (Waits). Amusingly, their stiff in-car conversation is crosscut with the old man not tidying his lakeside home in anticipation of their visit, but messing it up. He ramps up the dodderiness when the pair arrive, a sly manipulation, it turns out, designed to keep his fretful son’s cash handouts coming.
The theme of gentle deception also informs a second chapter with a faint Mike Leigh quality in which two wildly contrasting sisters, Cate Blanchett’s nervy Timothea and Vicky Krieps’s half-tamed wildchild Lilith, head to their mother’s (Charlotte Rampling) immaculate Dublin home for tea. A lot of effort has been made, cakes bought and flowers arranged, but there’s something stopping any of them enjoying the get-together. The distance between the trio is the width of a tablecloth, and an ocean. Lilith lies to her starchy mother (no one is about to call her ‘mum’) about her lifestyle, career, even her mode of transport, arriving in the back of her girlfriend’s car to make it seem like she’s taken an Uber.
This is a funny, soulful anthology worth seeking out
The vignettes work with a series of very specific common ingredients. There’s chat about whether it’s acceptable to toast with tea, each features an expensive wrist watch and someone uses a variant of the British phrase: ‘Bob’s your uncle’ (it sounds a hundred percent cooler coming out of Tom Waits’ mouth). These serve as neat motifs for family connections and dysfunction – old photos come into focus, awkward silences drag on so long you’ll want to shout conversational prompts at the screen. Occasionally, the effect is more oblique, as when skateboarders pass by in slow-motion.
That playful device does start to feel more like a game of on-screen bingo by the third chapter in which Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat tight-knit twins cross Paris for a final visit to their dead parents’ apartment. But here, the tone switches to something rueful and melancholy, a note of sincerity that puts a fresh complexion on what came before. Those uncomfortable get-togethers suddenly feel like missed opportunities. Parents, it seems to suggest, might be frustrating and unknowable, but you’ll really miss them when they’re gone.
Not top tier Jarmusch, but still a funny, soulful anthology worth seeking out.
Father Mother Sister Brother premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In US theaters Wednesday, December 24.