Blackbird (2020)

 Score: 4 / 5

If you know me, you know "dinner party gone wrong" is my favorite genre, after horror. The acting has to be top-notch to pull it off. The script has to be brutal and beautiful. The filmmaking or theatrical staging, whichever the case, has to be kinetic in such a confined space. Of course, often such dinner parties only comprise a single scene or sequence, either as inciting incident, climactic turn, or devastating conclusion. Sometimes they pan the full work, but that is rare. Blackbird features one such dinner, during the climax, but the movie constructed around this scene is so intimate, isolated, and insightful, that the whole thing feels very much like my favorite brand of family tragicomedy.

Lily awakens in her gorgeous Connecticut home overlooking a picturesque beach. Her husband Paul is already up-and-at-em, watering the plants and feeding the chickens, while Lily labors to put on her slippers and get downstairs to the kitchen. Her hand is clenched and she has trouble walking. Something is wrong, indicated partly by the somber music and by the idyllic, almost ethereal lighting streaming through the wall-to-wall windows. But she is not to be pitied; preparing for breakfast, she quickly switches the classical radio to jarring pop dance music and the two laugh as they get into the beat. It's sweet and charming, and it wouldn't work without two consummate, brilliant actors with stirring chemistry in Susan Sarandon and Sam Neill.

Lily has invited her family for the weekend, and they slowly begin to arrive. Her best friend of many decades Elizabeth (Lindsay Duncan) materializes, clearly comfortable with her life companions. Her well-to-do daughter Jennifer (Kate Winslet) arrives promptly on time, her husband and son (Rainn Wilson and Anson Boom) in tow. Late, and pleasantly buzzed on grass, Lily's younger daughter Anna (Mia Wasikowska) shows up with her sometime semi-romantic girlfriend Chris (Bex Taylor-Klaus). Each is given an archetype clear from their introduction, but in the hands of such a stellar cast, each is fleshed out beyond the bounds of their script, imbued with more nuance than you could find in an ensemble masterclass. They turn what is, admittedly, sometimes unwieldy dialogue into something approaching high art, and eke out surprisingly brutal emotions from otherwise simple, even wordless, moments.

Why have they gathered? Here's the kicker: Lily is dying. No real shocker there, as everyone is well aware of her degenerative disease. But Lily has decided, with her husband and with some measure of understanding and support from the family, to end her own life after this weekend. As she intends it, she will be filled with the joy of celebrating a final Christmas with them (even though it is not, in fact, winter) before committing suicide, passing peacefully into sleep and avoiding the messy, painful, and torturous decline she will certainly otherwise face. What's amazing about her character -- and the way the film uses her as the family's anchor, with everyone else swirling around while dealing with grief and denial and anger -- is that she has no fear, no second thoughts, and only love to give. She tells her grandson at one point that she has no wisdom to give, despite her age, but she is wrong. She works on forgiveness and compassion with her daughters only to learn that she's already been an amazing mother.

That's not to say there are no problems. As the family members break off to have difficult conversations privately -- and sometimes very much not privately -- the film teeters close to soap. But, given the strengths of the cast and their devotion to this difficult melodrama, each scene will elicit a dark chuckle, a knowing smile, or a painful tear from viewers who allow its sensitive beats to wash over them. By the halfway point, I was weeping, and by the end, sobbing uncontrollably. This is an unusual entry for director Roger Michell, but it also feels a natural direction for his oeuvre at this point. A beautiful parable about a life well-lived and the grace we must learn to afford for others, but also fiercely relevant in its grounded (albeit privileged) observations about what so many of us must eventually experience.