When people say there are no good roles for women in the movies what they're essentially saying is that they don't watch movies outside of the American mainstream. World cinema and American indies are filled with great female-fronted movies, but a movie like writer/director Azazel Jacobs' His Three Daughters, which stars three established American actresses and doesn't ask them to wear a spandex suit or punch a villain through a wall, doesn't come along too often in today's American mainstream filmmaking, which seems overwhelmingly focussed on sating an audience of teenage boys.
Those three established actresses are Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen. With their father (Jay O. Sanders) receiving palliative hospice care as his journey with cancer comes to an end, sisters Katie (Coon), Christina (Olsen) and Rachel (Lyonne) assemble in their family's New York apartment, repeatedly told by a hospice worker (Rudy Galvan) that their father could pass any time now.
Rachel is the middle sister and the one who has been caring for her father, with whom she lives, in his last months. That doesn't stop Katie and Christina, who have a different mother, from treating Rachel as though she were their kid sister, constantly patronising her slacker lifestyle and occasionally speaking in their own shared secret language. The prissy Katie continuously prods at Rachel, forcing her to smoke outside and highlighting her perceived immaturity at every opportunity. Rachel presents herself as a classic tough New Yorker yet allows herself to be bullied by Katie. Desperate to avoid confrontation, the ditzy Christina spends much of her time in her father's bedroom.
As their patriarch clings to life and the days drag on, the three sisters bicker and confront one another over long held resentments. It's not exactly a novel premise, but Jacobs injects his drama with nuanced details that feel like they're based on real life experience of familial estrangement. His film might be accused of being "stagey" as it almost never leaves its apartment setting and is heavy on dialogue, but it avoids monologing and shouty Oscar bait speeches. The various resentments the sisters hold towards one another are slowly squeezed out like the last drop of toothpaste in a Presbyterian's bathroom. The aggression is of the passive variety, until it inevitably isn't. How the characters move, sit and listen tells us as much as the words they speak, which can't always be taken for granted.
The three actresses all bring something different to the table, playing to their individual strengths while expanding their range. Coon's physical stiffness conveys Katie's role as the big sister who is resentful at having to be the responsible one, but who at this point of her life doesn't know how to be anything else. Lyonne understandably gets the most comic role of the three but she plays the brash Rachel with a tender centre that suggests she hasn't "made it" like her sisters because she lacks their ruthlessness. Having spent the last decade largely chained in the Marvel yard, Olsen is let off the leash and gets to play a real person. She hasn't been this good since she blew us away with her breakout role in 2011's Martha Marcy May Marlene. The prettiest and youngest of the three sisters, we suspect Christina has had the easiest life, and Olsen plays her innocent inability to understand her siblings' troubles in charming, wide-eyed fashion.
It's in the final act that His Three Daughters begins to stumble as it grasps for a way to wrap up all this drama. A late transcendental moment is misjudged and plays like it belongs in a far less nuanced film, and Jacobs ties things up a little too neatly. That said, as the sisters say their goodbyes we're left to wonder if their shared experience has brought them closer or simply solidified their estrangement, which is a tribute to how compelling and real these women feel for the duration of the drama.
His Three Daughters is on Netflix
Directed by: Azazel Jacobs
Starring: Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, Carrie Coon, Rudy Galvan, Jay O. Sanders, Jovan Adepo
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