'Tis the season (to watch sad movies)

His Three Daughters (2023)

I don’t know what’s going on with me, but the Christmas spirit has felt a little inaccessible this year. Maybe it’s the weather (it’s supposed to be 50 degrees today, and currently the sun is shining through the window and almost blinding me). Or maybe it’s the fact that I spent about a year and a half in constant Christmas mode when I was writing/promoting my last book, Faking Christmas, and now my body is like, “No, we are DONE.” I’ve barely been listening to Christmas music! I’ve only baked a couple of batches of cookies! The stockings aren’t even hung by the chimney with care yet!

What I’m saying is that your lighter Netflix/Hallmark fare hasn’t been appealing to me at the moment. I’m glad everyone is having fun with Hot Frosty but I don’t think I could sit through a snowman turning into a sexy human man right now, although I am of course happy for Lacey Chabert to continue as the new, more tolerant Hallmark Christmas Queen in Candace Cameron Bure’s absence¹.

What I’ve been craving lately is something a little more melancholy. Things like The Holdovers, or The Shop Around the Corner. You know, something that engages a little more explicitly with death or bleakness (having not seen Hot Frosty, I suppose I can’t speak to how it handles these themes).

And so I watched His Three Daughters, which I guess I should say is not a Christmas movie. “Girl why did you spend three paragraphs talking about Christmas movies then?” you might be asking. Because, to me, it feels like a sad Christmas movie! It’s cold, it’s bleak, Natasha Lyonne is always smoking outside on a bench.

The film begins with the titular three daughters in conversation. They’re there, in their father’s New York apartment, because he’s dying and hospice has been brought in. Katie (Carrie Coon) is talking and it’s clear that she’s uptight and controlling. We cut to Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), who isn’t saying anything. She’s high, much to Katie’s chagrin. And then Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) enters, talking about their father and how he’s doing. She’s sweet. These characters are defined, immediately, and I did have the thought, “Uh-oh, is this a play?” Nothing against plays, but I would perhaps prefer to watch them on stage instead of on screen. This staginess does not last so you’ve got to stick with it.

I think that how this film hits you will depend on your experiences with death. Part of my reluctance to watch lighter movies right now, I think, is that this time of year always feels a bit morbid for me. Nine years ago, my grandpa died right before Thanksgiving. Much like in this film, he was at home, being cared for by hospice, and most of our family was there. That particular feeling of waiting, in a group, for an inevitable death is hard to describe. It feels bizarre and also inherently wrong. Someone is dying and we’re not doing anything about it? Logically, you know there’s nothing to do. That’s why you’re there, why hospice is there. You’re watching someone refuse food, refuse water, receive increasing amounts of morphine, become unable to communicate, and you’re listening for a change in their breath that might signal that they’re about to die. Everything about it feels awful, and everyone handles it differently.

Katie is someone who handles a situation like this by taking control, but perhaps not in a helpful way. Katie cannot stop focusing on the fact that their father didn’t sign a DNR, because Rachel, who lives with him, didn’t get him to sign one in time. She will not stop talking about it to their hospice worker, and she won’t stop making phone calls to people who might be able to make it happen. Whenever anyone else attempts to talk about something else, she inevitably brings it back to the DNR and how she knows someone whose mother didn’t sign one and then the care workers cracked her ribs trying to resuscitate her and she had to live several more painful weeks and she doesn’t want that for her father. You can tell that somewhere in there she cares, but it’s coming out in a way that’s ultimately self-serving. Focusing on this one, pointless task is giving her something to think about that isn’t her own feelings. You get the idea that this is how she gets through life.

Christina, meanwhile, is the character I relate to most because she’s doing a lot of yoga. I do think some deep breathing exercises will help most situations. Christina is a Deadhead who spends a lot of time calling her family on the West coast and talking to her daughter, Mirabella. At one point, upon learning that their second hospice nurse is named Mirabella, she can’t stop expressing her surprise. “My daughter is named Mirabella!” she says. “I just can’t believe that’s her name!” Christina is to this name coincidence as Katie is to the DNR. I know very well what it’s like to latch on to coincidences in difficult situations and let yourself believe that this is somehow the universe looking out for you.

It’s apparent from the beginning that Katie and Christina share a closeness that excludes Rachel, even though Rachel has been living with their father and caring for him this entire time. The reason becomes clear as Katie writes their father’s obituary. He’s still alive in the next room, but she’s not content to sing Grateful Dead songs to him like Christina is. She needs to be doing something. She writes that he had two daughters with his first wife, then mentions that he remarried and raised his second wife’s daughter as his own. And so the division, it becomes clear, is that Rachel isn’t their blood relation. Despite the fact that she’s the one living with him, the one who has been caring for him day in and day out while Christina lives on the opposite coast and Katie lives across town but still doesn’t come to see him, they clearly see themselves as his daughters, and Rachel as…something else.

Although there are a few scenes that take us outside the apartment (Rachel smoking on a bench, Rachel going to a store), we’re mostly stuck in the claustrophobic apartment, only getting a break from these characters when the hospice workers or Rachel’s boyfriend show up. This brought me right back to my grandpa’s death and Hollis’s mom’s death a few months later. Late 2015/early 2016 was a rough time for us (I was also pregnant, and I think spending that much time thinking about life and death does a number on your brain). There’s so much waiting, but instead of waiting for something wanted (like, say, a baby), you’re waiting for the thing you don’t want.

So much can happen in the time that you’re waiting. For the three daughters, it’s a time to really let it all out as they’re stuck in that apartment with their feelings. They have screaming fights and they say things they mean but shouldn’t say. They spend time laughing, which maybe sounds insane unless you’ve been there. When you’re waiting for someone to die, there’s time for all the feelings. I still remember how, right after my grandpa died in my grandparents’ living room, Alex and I went to Kroger to get ingredients to make tacos for the whole family. Because that’s the thing: everyone else is still living. Everyone else still needs to eat, do yoga, fight, and laugh. One person’s life ending doesn’t mean that everyone else’s lives aren’t still going on in all their messy, human glory.

The whole movie felt uncomfortably emotional to me, almost like pressing on a bruise. It’s one thing for me to say that these back-to-back deaths in my life were a long time ago and I should be able to look at them more calmly. In some ways, I can…but mostly I can’t. The emotions aren’t right there on the surface anymore, but I certainly never processed them. I had a baby and experienced some bonkers postpartum feelings², and life went on like it always does.

There was one part, though, that made me turn off the treadmill³ because I was crying so hard that I was afraid I’d fall off. Their father has a moment of clarity and decides he wants to sit in the living room in his chair, so the sisters move him there slowly, bringing along his medical devices. And then…he gets up. He rips out his oxygen and starts walking around the room and talking, saying that he’s not done. He takes a seat on the window ledge and the girls sit down, rapt, listening to him talk. The hospice worker told them their father wouldn’t be conscious again, but here he is. His old self. Better than his old self, because he’s telling them all the things he’s never said, telling them how much he loves them, listing his regrets, even telling them about a long ago lost love. He acknowledges where he went wrong in parenting and speaks to each of their deep childhood wounds.

It’s a fantasy, of course. I want to say that no one ever gets this kind of closure, but maybe someone does. Maybe there’s a person self-aware enough to coherently tell their loved ones everything they need to hear before their death, but I don’t think this happens often. The deathbed conversation or confession or apology is a staple of movies, but not likely in real life.

At one point, Christina tells them about a rare memory she has of their dad. It was after his second wife passed away and the other girls were out of the house. She and her dad were watching a movie, and “he got really upset at what we were watching. I don’t know what it was other than that someone was dying in it. And he wanted to explain to me that the death we were watching in the film had no relationship to how it was in life, that books and movies and everything that tried to show death got it wrong. That the act itself of putting it into images, into words, is where it all went wrong. It was a big lie. Like the thing that we were watching, that…the only way to sum up a person’s life, the only way to put things in perspective—what they did, who they were, how they loved—”

She gets interrupted by the hospice worker and for a moment, they think “something’s happening,” but it’s not. And so she continues: “Just that the only way to communicate how death truly feels is through absence. Everything else is fantasy.”

The scene where their father is alert, awake, and telling them everything they need to hear made me sob because it is a fantasy. This is a movie, and it’s showing us a scene that has no relationship to life. I cried because I wanted that, because I still want that, as illogical as it might be. There’s a part of me that’s still waiting for that final conversation, even though I know it will never come.

The fantasy is cut short when we see their father actually dying in his chair, certainly not talking to them. That’s the real part. The absence. They do grow closer through his death—all of those screaming fights aired some things out—but they don’t have that hugging/laughing/crying catharsis of the scene where their father tells them all he loves them. That doesn’t happen. That wouldn’t ever happen.

As I watched His Three Daughters, I couldn’t help but think of another movie, Our Friend. Based on an article by Matthew Teague about the death of his wife, it stars Casey Affleck, Dakota Johnson as his terminally ill wife, and Jason Segel as the friend who moves in and helps them through this difficult experience. I liked this movie a lot, although the criticism I read of it is that it glosses over some of the more horrible aspects of death, in direct contrast to the piece it was based on. Variety said, “So much of the unpleasantness has been scrubbed from the picture, until what remains is precisely the kind of dishonest, sanitized no-help-to-anyone TV-movie version of death that inspired Teague to set the record straight in the first place.”

In other words, this is a movie that the father in His Three Daughters would complain about. I would still recommend watching it, as I thought the performances were great and there were a few scenes that really hit (when Dakota is telling the daughters that she’s dying…that one was rough. Also a scene where Jason Segel sings Carly Rae Jepsen. And a scene where Dakota is becoming mean and hallucinating because of her meds…that felt very real). But a lot of the film is playing to your emotions. For example, there’s a hospice worker played by Cherry Jones who is so nice and so helpful and really unlike any hospice worker I’ve encountered. I don’t say this to insult hospice workers, who have an extremely difficult job and are doing important work, but the ones I’ve been around are much more like the ones in His Three Daughters: simply doing their jobs and ready to get out of there. They are there to help the patient die with as little pain as possible, not to provide emotional plot moments for everyone else.

In many ways, this is Nothing Happens Cinema. It’s mostly in one apartment, it’s mostly conversations. But in other ways, it’s not. It’s about the biggest thing happening: death. And while it has the limitation of being a movie and not real life, I think everyone involved endeavored to make it feel as close to life as possible. If the holiday season gets you in the mood to think about mortality, then I can’t recommend a better film to watch right now. His Three Daughters is streaming on Netflix.

Next week we’ll keep things a little lighter, I promise. I’m going to go finally put up those stockings. Maybe even bake some cookies! See you soon. xo

Oh! One more thing. I decided to continue the annual subscription sale through the end of December because why not? It’s 20% off, making a subscription $40 a year.

1. Every time I see Lacey Chabert, I think of the main character in Sarah Hogle’s Just Like Magic, a book I will never stop talking about. A woman plays All I Want for Christmas Is You backwards and accidentally conjures the spirit of Christmas, a man named Hall who loves Cracker Barrel (same) and Lacey Chabert and HATES the Grinch. It’s a very, very weird and perfect book.

2. A little while ago I came across a checklist of risk factors for postpartum depression and I had all of them but one. “Recent death of a loved one,” check and check. At the time, though, I did not realize there was anything off.

3. I watch a lot of movies on the treadmill. It’s just really enjoyable.