‘Father Mother Sister Brother’ Review: A Starry Cast Excels in Jim Jarmusch’s Charming Triplicate Portrait of Familial (Mis)Understanding
The song “Spooky,” that catchy little anthem about being befuddled by love, plays twice in Jim Jarmusch‘s lovely triptych melancomedy “Father Mother Sister Brother.” Its laid-back, liquid rhythms are a perfect mood-setter for a film that also understands that loving someone doesn’t mean you know them all that well. Here, the affection is not romantic but familial, flowing in soft, subliminal waves between parents and their adult children. But that our encounters with our moms and dads as grown-ups may have a lot in common — in their white lies, face-saving tactics and loaded silences — with the early stages of a love affair is one of the peculiar observations that makes this such an unusually delightful hangout movie. The kind you might go and see in the cool of the evening when everything is getting kind of groovy.
Jarmusch has explored the anthology format before, and there are structural similarities between this film and his previous, far more uneven attempts. Each of the three segments – titled “Father,” “Mother” and “Sister Brother” respectively — partially takes place during car journeys, recalling his taxicab portmanteau “Night on Earth.” And each features at least one moment where the characters partake of hot beverages, where even the framing of the overhead shots of cups and water glasses arranged geometrically on tabletops, harks back to his sketch-omnibus “Coffee and Cigarettes.”
Here, however, there’s no sense that these symmetries are forced. Instead, like all the recurring motifs, they happen incidentally across the three stories and release little puffs of recognition-endorphin pleasure with each recurrence. Ah, there are the slow-motion skateboarders! Here’s another Rolex that may or may not be fake! And here’s someone else casually working the ridiculous phrase “Bob’s your uncle” into the conversation! The slivers of concurrence create just enough connective tissue between the three parts, set respectively in the rural northeastern US, in Dublin, Ireland and in Paris, France, to make them work chorally. But they also create the enjoyable, reverse-telescopic impression that we’re looking at lives that are massively different in the broad aspects of nationality, social class, values and upbringing, yet curiously in sync in the tiniest, chiming details.
First, we’re in America in a leased hybrid Range Rover being driven by Jeff (Adam Driver) with his sister Emmy (Mayim Bialik) in the passenger seat. They’re on their way to visit their father (Tom Waits) whom neither has seen in a while since he had “an episode” at their mother’s funeral, and who, we understand is maybe a bit of a rapscallion. We gain the distinct impression that he may have been hitting up Jeff for money for spurious repairs to his lakeside house. They arrive, and Dad seems happy to see them, even if it’s a little strange that he’s covered his nice designer sofa with a tatty throw and that he pulls his hoodie cuff down over his fancy-looking watch. But once they’ve settled in and Jeff has delivered his gift box of groceries, the three sit in the living room alternately staring at the pretty view of the frozen lake and sipping on water or tea, largely enveloped in a somehow increasingly funny, strained silence. “He always was a character,” says Emmy on the return journey.
Next, in a similar situation, a mother (Charlotte Rampling) is chatting on the phone to her therapist in her beautifully appointed Victorian Dublin home, as she awaits a visit from her daughters, Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps). Tim’s car breaks down; Lilith gets her girlfriend (Sarah Greene) to pretend to be an Uber driver so she can maintain the facade that she’s a successful businesswoman whose Lexus is in the shop. Later, after the sisters have giggled over the raunchy titles of their writer mother’s books (which they are not allowed to talk about and do not seem to have read), around a table laden with Battenburg cakes, petits fours and a porcelain tea service brewing up PG Tips (Mummy’s favorite), the conversation again stalls. Tim attempts to talk about her promotion and Lilith interrupts, in typical youngest-child fashion, with another probably untrue story of her own latest professional success.
And finally the format changes, and we are in Paris where twins Billy (Luka Sabbat) and Skye (Indya Moore) are going on a last visit to their recently deceased parents’ apartment. Billy has already cleared out all their stuff, bar a small box of mementos, so together, he and his sister pace the empty rooms and reminisce. Initially, this section may seem to be so different as not to fit with the prior two, except perhaps in the way Moore and Sabbat summon an effortless sibling chemistry that’s as believable and eccentric as that between Krieps and Blanchett, and Driver and Bialik (Jarmusch’s way with his ensemble is borderline uncanny here: not one moment between the actors feels inauthentic). But actually the switchup is Jarmusch’s master stroke, allowing richer themes of parental and intergenerational incomprehension to come in to focus. In a way Billy and Skye are a glimpse into the future for Jeff and Emily and for Tim and Lilith – all of whom have worried in low voices about whether their parent is looking old these days.
For such an episodic film shot by two cinematographers, Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux, “Father Mother Sister Brother” is consistently beautiful. It is not easy to create visual variety and interest in scenes in which by design the most important thing that is happening is that nothing is apparently happening. Yet, alert to the way dead air between family members can actually be teeming with life, each segment is beguilingly immersive from the first shot. And thereafter, the folds and elisions of Affonso Gonçalves clever editing give even the silences a certain comic timing, like he’s actually cutting along the bias of a conversation full of quips, and well, Bob’s your uncle.
The rhythm slows in part three, however and the mood becomes more reflective, even elegiac as the twins mourn their parents but also discover, with a strange kind of delight, a lot they never knew about them. There’s a lot, the movie is saying, that all of us don’t know about our parents. To that end, it’s important that all three pairs of siblings are visitors in places that are actually their parents’ home turf: Billy and Skye spent part of their childhoods in Paris but carry US passports; Jeff and Emmy are clearly interlopers in their father’s isolated home; Tim and Lilith have moved to Dublin to be near, but not with, their English mother who settled there some time before. So Jarmusch can extend his quick, quiet interest and his compassion in both directions, to the older and the younger generation, at once. But it also sets up the serene and gorgeous “Father Mother Sister Brother” to alight on the surprisingly practicable conclusion that, aside from loving and raising them the best you can, maybe the most rewarding thing you can do for your kids is bequeath to them a bunch of little secrets that hint at the richness of the life you lived out of their sight.
Jarmusch has explored the anthology format before, and there are structural similarities between this film and his previous, far more uneven attempts. Each of the three segments – titled “Father,” “Mother” and “Sister Brother” respectively — partially takes place during car journeys, recalling his taxicab portmanteau “Night on Earth.” And each features at least one moment where the characters partake of hot beverages, where even the framing of the overhead shots of cups and water glasses arranged geometrically on tabletops, harks back to his sketch-omnibus “Coffee and Cigarettes.”
Here, however, there’s no sense that these symmetries are forced. Instead, like all the recurring motifs, they happen incidentally across the three stories and release little puffs of recognition-endorphin pleasure with each recurrence. Ah, there are the slow-motion skateboarders! Here’s another Rolex that may or may not be fake! And here’s someone else casually working the ridiculous phrase “Bob’s your uncle” into the conversation! The slivers of concurrence create just enough connective tissue between the three parts, set respectively in the rural northeastern US, in Dublin, Ireland and in Paris, France, to make them work chorally. But they also create the enjoyable, reverse-telescopic impression that we’re looking at lives that are massively different in the broad aspects of nationality, social class, values and upbringing, yet curiously in sync in the tiniest, chiming details.
First, we’re in America in a leased hybrid Range Rover being driven by Jeff (Adam Driver) with his sister Emmy (Mayim Bialik) in the passenger seat. They’re on their way to visit their father (Tom Waits) whom neither has seen in a while since he had “an episode” at their mother’s funeral, and who, we understand is maybe a bit of a rapscallion. We gain the distinct impression that he may have been hitting up Jeff for money for spurious repairs to his lakeside house. They arrive, and Dad seems happy to see them, even if it’s a little strange that he’s covered his nice designer sofa with a tatty throw and that he pulls his hoodie cuff down over his fancy-looking watch. But once they’ve settled in and Jeff has delivered his gift box of groceries, the three sit in the living room alternately staring at the pretty view of the frozen lake and sipping on water or tea, largely enveloped in a somehow increasingly funny, strained silence. “He always was a character,” says Emmy on the return journey.
Next, in a similar situation, a mother (Charlotte Rampling) is chatting on the phone to her therapist in her beautifully appointed Victorian Dublin home, as she awaits a visit from her daughters, Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps). Tim’s car breaks down; Lilith gets her girlfriend (Sarah Greene) to pretend to be an Uber driver so she can maintain the facade that she’s a successful businesswoman whose Lexus is in the shop. Later, after the sisters have giggled over the raunchy titles of their writer mother’s books (which they are not allowed to talk about and do not seem to have read), around a table laden with Battenburg cakes, petits fours and a porcelain tea service brewing up PG Tips (Mummy’s favorite), the conversation again stalls. Tim attempts to talk about her promotion and Lilith interrupts, in typical youngest-child fashion, with another probably untrue story of her own latest professional success.
And finally the format changes, and we are in Paris where twins Billy (Luka Sabbat) and Skye (Indya Moore) are going on a last visit to their recently deceased parents’ apartment. Billy has already cleared out all their stuff, bar a small box of mementos, so together, he and his sister pace the empty rooms and reminisce. Initially, this section may seem to be so different as not to fit with the prior two, except perhaps in the way Moore and Sabbat summon an effortless sibling chemistry that’s as believable and eccentric as that between Krieps and Blanchett, and Driver and Bialik (Jarmusch’s way with his ensemble is borderline uncanny here: not one moment between the actors feels inauthentic). But actually the switchup is Jarmusch’s master stroke, allowing richer themes of parental and intergenerational incomprehension to come in to focus. In a way Billy and Skye are a glimpse into the future for Jeff and Emily and for Tim and Lilith – all of whom have worried in low voices about whether their parent is looking old these days.
For such an episodic film shot by two cinematographers, Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux, “Father Mother Sister Brother” is consistently beautiful. It is not easy to create visual variety and interest in scenes in which by design the most important thing that is happening is that nothing is apparently happening. Yet, alert to the way dead air between family members can actually be teeming with life, each segment is beguilingly immersive from the first shot. And thereafter, the folds and elisions of Affonso Gonçalves clever editing give even the silences a certain comic timing, like he’s actually cutting along the bias of a conversation full of quips, and well, Bob’s your uncle.
The rhythm slows in part three, however and the mood becomes more reflective, even elegiac as the twins mourn their parents but also discover, with a strange kind of delight, a lot they never knew about them. There’s a lot, the movie is saying, that all of us don’t know about our parents. To that end, it’s important that all three pairs of siblings are visitors in places that are actually their parents’ home turf: Billy and Skye spent part of their childhoods in Paris but carry US passports; Jeff and Emmy are clearly interlopers in their father’s isolated home; Tim and Lilith have moved to Dublin to be near, but not with, their English mother who settled there some time before. So Jarmusch can extend his quick, quiet interest and his compassion in both directions, to the older and the younger generation, at once. But it also sets up the serene and gorgeous “Father Mother Sister Brother” to alight on the surprisingly practicable conclusion that, aside from loving and raising them the best you can, maybe the most rewarding thing you can do for your kids is bequeath to them a bunch of little secrets that hint at the richness of the life you lived out of their sight.