OTHER PEOPLE Is Funny and Sad and Devastatingly Real — Sundance Review
When I walked into Other People, I didn’t know that the movie opens on Molly Shannon dying while her family huddles around her and weeps. And I didn’t know that it would then move back in time a year so that we could all watch cancer slowly take over her body together. If I had known, I probably would have skipped it. I watched my brother die of cancer three years ago, and I wasn’t keen to relive the experience, and that’s what writer-director Chris Kelly’s dramady made me do. Maybe it’s because it is semi-autobiographical, but Other People is absolutely the most realistic cancer movie I have ever seen.
Jesse Plemons stars as David, a comedy writer who moves back to Sacramento from New York to help care for his mother, Shannon, who has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. David is also somewhat adrift in his own life — he’s just broken up with his long term boyfriend and a pilot he was developing didn’t get picked up. His year in Sacramento begins at a family New Year’s Eve party where it becomes clear that absolutely no one understands what he does. “I look for you on SNL every week!” “Why? I’m not on it.” And I got my first oh-my-gosh-that’s-so-real moment when David has to smile and nod politely while an acquaintance pitches him some crackpot miracle cure (seriously, don’t do that).
Kelly understands well that life goes on, even while your mother is dying, so cancer doesn’t fill every frame of the movie. There are fun, sweet moments, there are fights, there are embarrassing first dates and hilarious family parties. And interspersed in all that are moments like deciding on funeral arrangements, choosing to stop treatment, buying diapers, watching your grandparents cry, the thousands of cuts that lead to the wound that will never heal.
Other People is never maudlin or over the top. It’s funny and sad and realistic. It underplays the tragedy and lets the comic moments breathe. Shannon and Plemons anchor the film with their strong performances, and Bradley Whitford and John Early are each wonderful, if very different, as David’s father and best friend, respectively, and the rest of the cast give lowkey renditions of people trying to cope.
I’m not sure when in the movie I started crying or the exact moment that triggered it, but I spent a good portion of the movie weeping, trying to be as quiet as possible so that no one would notice I am an emotional basketcase who shouldn’t be allowed out in public. Near the end, though, I realized that the guy sitting next to me was weeping, too. His father died of cancer a year ago. After the film we talked about all the moments we recognized from our experiences and about how awful the whole thing is, and agreed that although Other People was hard to watch, it was really great achievement. It’s the best cancer movie we’ve ever seen.