Jim Jarmusch invites audiences into three family gatherings of adult children in his gentle tryptic “Father Mother Sister Brother.”
Don’t worry, you won’t be resentful you’re not part of any of them, not even the one where Tom Waits plays Adam Driver’s dad. To be fair, all the groupings are pretty cool on paper. In the first chapter, siblings Jeff (Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) drive together to visit their father (Waits) for the first time in a while. In the second, a mother (Charlotte Rampling) awaits her grown daughters Tim ( Cate Blanchett ) and Lilith ( Vicky Krieps ) for their annual tea. And in the third, all that’s left of Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy’s (Luka Sabbat) parents are things.
But these are awkward and strained hangouts, none connected to one another literally, and all in different parts of the world. Yet there are little threads throughout — Rolex watches, toasting with water, red clothing, and the idiom “bob’s your uncle,” for instance. And then there’s the more cosmically haunting realization that familiarity and closeness are not always in the cards when it comes to family. In “Father Mother Sister Brother,” everyone would rather be anywhere but where they are. Same same, but different, you know?
The film opens with “Father,” and siblings Jeff and Emily reluctantly doing a kind of wellness check on theirs. They’re both very buttoned up and formal, both in appearance (blazers, sweaters, combed hair) and demeanor. Waits, as their father, is very much the opposite — one might imagine that he doesn’t even own a blazer, or a comb for that matter. His home is as rumpled as his zip up hoodie sweatshirt and he is a little bumbling himself, rattling off all the drugs he’s not taking (anymore). The chasm between him and his children is vast and growing. Besides the death of their mother, it doesn’t even seem like there was even some inciting incident that might explain some level of estrangement — they’re just very, very different. And the father might not be as helpless and destitute as he’s presenting to his children. After they leave, he tidies the place up and calls a friend to go out to a nice dinner.
Blame it on the age of the people who get to make the movies, but the parents are often the afterthoughts, the supporting characters in the children’s stories. Jarmusch slyly inverts this in the “Father” segment, which perfectly tees up expectations for his next entry, “Mother,” in which Rampling is on the phone, presumably with a therapist, mentally preparing for her daughters to arrive. They all live around Dublin, but rarely see one another, making this tea a bit of a dreaded ritual. Blanchett’s Tim, a quintessential first born, is very stressed about being late. Krieps’ Lilith, meanwhile, is all about posturing — bragging about material things and accomplishments that she doesn’t have the receipts for and knows on some level no one believes anyway. These women aren’t connecting either.
In the final segment, the parents are gone. They’ve died and left behind only mementos in a Parisian apartment that’s three months overdue on rent. This is both a puzzle and a mess that their children now have to clean up and make sense of. “Father Mother Sister Brother” is in some ways deeply cynical about family bonds and the possibility of ever really knowing ones’ parents. It’s devoid of warm, fuzzy sentiment and trite revelations, just the crushing idea that no matter what bloodlines might exist, we’re all fundamentally strangers.
Ultimately, it’s an interesting experiment of a film, and perhaps even more interesting that it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year over the likes of “No Other Choice,” “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” “The Testament of Ann Lee” and “Bugonia.” And yet there’s something comforting about the fact that Jarmusch is still doing his thing, exactly how he wants to, and that so many great actors are lining up to be part of it. He’s a singular voice in a landscape that’s always in danger of flattening. Just don’t go in expecting a warm holiday hug of a movie.
“Father Mother Sister Brother,” a Mubi release in select theaters Wednesday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language. Running time: 110 minutes. Three stars out of four.
