Film and film criticism is such an interesting world to be a part of. We all share in a communal experience watching a film together, often times notepad and pen in hand getting ready to write our reviews. But so frequently we leave that theater having had such radically different reactions to what we have just seen. In particular lately, I seem to have taken some kind of grumpy potion because I have hardly liked anything that has been presented to me on the big or small screen. Even my beloved Bridgerton was disappointing this morning. Sigh...
I say all this because my response to the latest from distributor A24, Tuesday, was decidedly more negative than nearly all the other critics that I saw it with. Artpiece films are always going to be somewhat divisive but in this case it seems to be me divided against everyone else I know. This fact doesn't change my opinion. Of course. But it is always fascinating to wonder why I didn't appreciate what was moving to so many others.
The film in question, Tuesday, is directed and written by Daina O. Pusić and it tells the story of a young lady named Tuesday who finds out that she is going to die in a quite literal way from a giant macaw that symbolizes Death. Her Mother Zora who seems quite distanced from Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) at the beginning doesn't want to accept this prophecy and does whatever she can to remove the bird (or death) from their home.
There are a lot of reasons why this particular metaphor didn't work well for me. To begin with the main point is rather pedestrian and obvious. Death sucks. We all get that. Nobody likes it. So, having this grim reaper in the form of a bird doesn't really ask any new or insightful questions to that basic hard life fact. The closest it gets is a brief conversation about the afterlife and if God exists but this script quickly moves on from such insight to more declarative statements about how death is a reality. Yep...
Then we have lots of scenes of the bird in various phases throughout the the film. He's big. He's small. He's in Tuesdays' ear canal. He's eaten by Zora (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and then regurgitated back up (a lot of gagging in the film.) None of this transformation of the bird makes the central questions more interesting or the story more compelling. It's just more bird scenes.
Did I mention I'm not much of a bird person? This is why I didn't love The Boy and the Heron as much as most- even though I did recommend that film. It just wasn't a favorite of mine aesthetically or story-wise. Here we are given far less story and even more creepy bird scenes.
The whole thing just felt incredibly pretentious, heavy-handed, repetitive, and annoying. I also felt the Tuesday being disabled was a bit of the sacrificial lamb being offered up so the Mom could live her big full life plot and that didn't sit quite right with me. It wasn't as bad but it had tinges of Me Before You in it (a film I abhor.) Couldn't they have made Tuesday more grounded and their relationship more complex? It might have been more interesting to have Tuesday be the one surviving with Zora being the one sick or dying? What would our Death bird have to say in that situation? (I'm not sure much of anything insightful but it at least would feel more fresh and unique.)
Like I said, seemingly everyone else I know loved this and it resonated quite deeply with them so maybe I'm just dead inside and a bird is going to visit me soon? I have no idea but if it does it's been real, and I hope it makes my family gag less than Zora does in this film... We can all hope.
Frown Worthy
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