Familial relations are idiosyncratic and complicated, frequently defined by manipulations, deceptions, projections, and performances, and they’re plumbed for both comedy and bittersweet drama in Father Mother Sister Brother.
Winner of the top prize (the Golden Lion) at this year’s Venice Film Festival, and screening as the Centerpiece selection of the New York Film Festival ahead of its Dec. 24 theatrical debut, Jim Jarmusch’s latest is a subdued triptych about siblings coping with parents from whom they are, in some form or another, estranged. Buoyed by a superb cast headlined by Adam Driver and Cate Blanchett, it’s a film of quiet, droll grace, even if its delicateness occasionally veers into slightness.
Divided into three chapters, each of them preceded by avant-garde swirls of light and color, Father Mother Sister Brother is funniest at the start.
In “Father,” Jeff (Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) take a drive through snowy upstate New York to visit their dad (Tom Waits), a widower who lives alone in a weatherbeaten abode in a remote locale that Emily dubs “nowheresville.”
As they make their way along frosty woodlands roads, Waits’ paterfamilias rearranges his living room to look messier and hermit-like—a strange bit of redecorating that seems related to Jeff and Emily’s conversation about how their father financially supports himself and the amounts of money they’ve recently given him. In particular, Emily is mildly perplexed that she never heard from the man regarding the household maintenance issues which Jeff funded, and Jarmusch allows the discussion’s sly insinuation—that their pop is cannily bilking them—to hang, wittily, in the air.
Regardless of whether Jeff and Emily suspect that their father is a con, the two find it incredibly discomfiting to be in his presence.
Their chitchat, including about the water he serves (and if you can toast with it), is the sort of small talk that strains to fill a vacuum. Father Mother Sister Brother elicits laughs from the trio’s uneasy dynamic, especially thanks to Bialik’s Emily, who quips that Jeff’s generosity toward their dad might be the reason he got divorced (he denies this), and who reacts with rightful alarm when Waits’ recluse demonstrates—too close for comfort—his handiness with an axe.
Soft-spoken and wearing bifocals, the three appear to care for one another but prefer to do so from afar, even as they’re disappointed by (and subtly bitter about) the distance between them.
The still tranquility of Father Mother Sister Brother’s opening installment reflects its characters’ alienation, and Jarmusch’s feel for his north-of-Manhattan milieu—where the silence is broken only by the crunch of feet and tires on the soggy ground—is inviting and enveloping.
While more muted, the film’s humor is of a piece with the director’s The Dead Don’t Die, and so too is its restrained despondency and prickliness, both of which escalate with “Mother,” in which a successful author (Charlotte Rampling) entertains, at her posh Dublin home, her daughters Timothea (Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps). This is a once-a-year gathering, and to prepare, Rampling’s mom has a phone session with her therapist—suggesting that, as in the prior tale, this trio isn’t very close either.
Jarmusch’s plotting is resolutely gentle in Father Mother Sister Brother; from the car trouble that delays Timothea’s arrival, to Lilith’s request that her friend pretend to be her Uber driver (which will please her mom), the film delineates its protagonists through small, unhurried details and incidents.
Once the three are reunited, the pace remains stilted and the atmosphere continues to be borderline airless, and Jarmusch immerses us in awkward silences as they sit down for tea and treats and catch up on their respective lives.
With a bleach blonde coiffure, Krieps’ faintly impudent and insincere Lilith does her best to reassure (and wow) her mom with falsehoods about her success, whereas Blanchett’s milquetoast and dowdy Timothea barely makes an impression with news about her promotion. To Rampling’s matriarch, this is a ritual of obligation more than love, and her cold smiles and imperious aura charge the proceedings with simmering tension.
Be it POV shots out car windshields or the quip “Bob’s your uncle,” the same phrases, situations, images, and feelings are repeated throughout Father Mother Sister Brother, implying that no matter their superficial differences, these disparate characters are bonded by kindred stresses.
Unfortunately, while those echoes are at first amusingly surprising, they lose their potency by the concluding segment, “Sister Brother,” in which twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) return to the Paris apartment that was once home to their parents, who recently perished in a plane crash. Stopping for coffee before visiting the now-empty abode, the siblings casually reference their “twin factor,” ruminate on the fact that “the world is really fragile,” and peruse their mom and dad’s stuff, leading to revelations which reveal that they didn’t really know them all that well—and, to a significant extent, never will.
Jarmusch leans heavily into wistfulness with “Sister Brother,” and not to the film’s benefit. Moore and Sabbat’s rapport is sweet and natural yet they’re far less charismatic centers of attention than their illustrious castmates, and the overtly melancholy tone is ultimately more than the wispy action can shoulder. Blandly affectionate and sensitive, Skye and Billy come across as plot-device pawns more than flesh-and-blood individuals.
Still, even in this underwhelming episode, the writer/director manages a few movingly unfussy touches, such as the duo’s trip to a storage unit which Billy has packed full of their mom and dad’s possessions—an easygoing scene laced with melancholy courtesy of the notion that their parents have been reduced to a collection of stuff (a destiny that awaits us all), as well as the related, distressing idea that neither is sure what to do with it.
Cinematographers Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux’s visuals are so precise and inviting, and Jarmusch and Anika’s score is so lovely, that it’s easy to coast along Father Mother Sister Brother’s lightly spiky and sorrowful currents. It may be too faint to leave a profound emotional mark, but it’s another of the auteur’s charmingly low-key portraits of isolation and its many thorny ramifications.
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