When a film is adapted from a play, the source material inevitably plays a role in certain artificial ways the proceedings unfold. If movies are a show-don’t-tell medium, then the stage is at least a tell-a-bit-more-than-you-show medium, ever reliant on the playwright’s dialogue. When a film is written for the screen but still has all the stilted and stagey aspects of a play, that was avoidable.

This is the greatest thing holding back Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters, which has just had its streaming debut on Netflix. Particularly given that the entire film takes place in a single New York apartment and a park bench outside, you’re fairly sure Jacobs must have adapted this from the stage. He did not. In fact, the incessant monologuing of two of the daughters – offset by the monosyllabic input of the third, who spends most of her time taking large drags from blunts – is a conduit for sharing the thoughts of the writer, not the characters. Theatre veteran Carrie Coon, who plays the most domineering of the three, might seem at home in something like this on stage, though she’d probably have a director getting more out of her talents.

Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is the grown-up stoner daughter of the man she still lives with well into her 40s, who is dying of cancer in the other room. Given that hospice care is now measuring the remainder of her father Vincent’s life in days rather than weeks, her two estranged sisters, Katie (Coon) and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), have returned to their family home to hold vigil and say their goodbyes. Katie and Christina have the same mother (also passed) but are separated by about ten years in age. Rachel has a different mother (also passed) but is about the same age as Katie, and she also has a different biological father she barely knew. (You might need to work it out on a piece of paper to figure out if this all makes sense, and some of this is inferred from the actresses’ actual ages. But it does explain the difference in their appearances.)

Of course, none really gets along with any of the others. The older biological sister is stern and bossy, her younger sister new agey and given to doing yoga in their living room. They have families with children in other parts of the country, Katie much closer to New York than Christina. Then Rachel herself is almost constantly checked out, smoking her weed outside at her sisters’ wishes, which brings her in conflict with the building’s doorman, even though weed is legal in New York. The film charts the way they clash while receiving visits from two shifts of hospice nurses and from Rachel’s boyfriend Benjy (Jovan Adepo).

This might be the makings of a good and terse family drama, the kind that has a sturdy history in films and dramaturgy in general, except for Jacobs’ remarkably unsubtle approach. The way Katie and Christina vomit up 30 seconds worth of dialogue at a time is meant to indicate their self-absorption, if we’re being generous. What it really does is function as a laboured source of exposition, forcing the actresses to give equally laboured performances. Any time Jacobs needs more exposition but is exhausted from all the face-to-face interactions – we can sympathise – he has one of these two characters call their partner back home. Here they have the same sort of one-sided conversations, which are even more awkward because the characters are allegedly answering questions. The person on the other end didn’t have the time to get a single word in edgewise, let alone a whole question.

Rachel grates on us in a different way. Jacobs cannot envision a scene where Rachel is not smoking marijuana, which gives Lyonne all sorts of affected ways of orally making love to a joint and exhaling its smoke. Although Lyonne’s comeback in recent years has been welcome, she is starting to become a caricature, her voice and mannerisms resembling more and more a 75-year-old New Yorker who grew up doing standup comedy in the Catskills.

Through all the talking that occurs here, it feels like the script is only making gestures at the sisters’ grappling with the imminent passing of their father. It isn’t burrowing into any actual issues they have with each other or with him, content to exist only on the surface of irreconcilable differences that the characters explicate in that same on-the-nose manner seen throughout.

His Three Daughters, though, is more than just its faults. One idea that comes through, not solely because of the number of times it is explicitly referenced in the dialogue, is how these sisters have shared or not shared the end-of-life duties related to their father. Katie in particular seems to be overcompensating because she lived close enough to do more, so now she’s taking out her guilt by treating the person who was here sternly. Jacobs also ends with a moment that breaks from the film’s overriding sense of realism, giving us a previously unseen perspective on these events. It works in isolation but is, alas, over too quickly.

His Three Daughters gives us a scenario faced by adult children the world over, drawn into close contact on the eve of a loved one’s passing, in a way that makes them contemplate, commiserate, and exorcise all their old demons. What it doesn’t do is let us draw our own conclusions from this scenario and allow us to map it on to our own lives. Any moment that might have featured nuance instead opts to spell everything out, which is unfortunate, especially since this director has shown far more subtlety in such films as Terri (2011) and The Lovers (2017). If he wanted to make a play rather than a movie, he should have just done that.

 

His Three Daughters is currently streaming on Netflix.