Tuesdays With Mortality

 

TUESDAY (D+) - What the actual ... ?

I'm tempted to give this a higher grade just for the ambitious home-run swing it takes at dramatic storytelling. But this bizarre tale of a dying girl being visited by death in the form of a macaw is so dumb and flatly executed that I have to withhold my desire to lash out in response.

Going in I figured, "Well, it stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, so it will at least be tolerable for nearly two hours." But I've never been so repelled by Louis-Dreyfus, whom I consider to be one of the best actors of our generation. She looks lost as the mother who is in denial about the impending death of her teenage daughter. She is physically and emotionally unappealing.

Lola Petticrew plays the dying 15-year-old -- named Tuesday for no apparent reason. (She's also British but her mom isn't, just because.) When death comes for her, she is able to barter some time with the busy macaw so that she can make final amends with her mother, Zora (Louis-Dreyfus), who is in denial about the imminent demise. Tuesday is wheelchair-bound and uses oxygen, but she otherwise looks surprisingly perky for someone who is on death's door. I'm not sure if that is an intentional misdirection for dramatic effect or simply an oversight on the part of writer-director Daina Oniunas-Pusic, who makes her feature debut here.

The first problem with "Tuesday" is that it is at least twice as long as it should be. It really feels like a short story, but it slogs on for 110 minutes. That wouldn't be so bad if "Tuesday" had an original take on coping with death. It doesn't. It offers bland koans. It is yet another film in which the kid is much more insightful and brave than the parent is; let's move past that stale trope. The film also gives us a Death character that is simply an overworked and overwrought bureaucrat pinging from gig to gig. It's interesting that Death here pauses -- mainly getting comfort from Tuesday who magically teaches death to cope with the cacophony of voices in his head. Like Ralph Kramden, all he has to do is count to 10 and his nerves are magically calmed. 

Even the visuals here are drab and uninspired. The movie opens with and later comes back to a shot of Earth as a blue marble, pulling back with clunky CGI tricks to become the eye of the bird in mid-flight, his head ringing with overlapping pleas for a visit that will provide merciful release. Death speaks in a muddled growl that's sometimes difficult to understand. 

Petticrew is just way too zen, almost joyously so, and Louis-Dreyfus is beyond morbid, and somehow the imminent death of a teenage girl feels low-stakes and anti-climactic. Zora's outrageous reaction to the bird is bizarre and carried out in a crazy Tiger Mom metaphor. The narrative knits together a series of vignettes that don't always cohere. This is quite an attempt to tell a unique story. And it is out there. But in the end, it's a drab and oddly antiseptic film that is more annoying than moving in any real way.