Echoes: Film Review of Father Mother Sister Brother
★★★☆
By Geoff Carter
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
It’s strange and sometimes funny how patterns and motifs emerge in our experience as something more than coincidence. Last week, I wrote a review of the film Sentimental Values, a movie about an egregiously dysfunctional family. Shortly afterwards, we went to a screening of Father Mother Sister Brother, a film anthology by Jim Jarmusch about—you guessed it—dysfunctional families. It’s déjà vu all over again—the same but different. Not that films about dysfunctional families are all that unusual, but these had eerily similar resonances both between and within them—like echoes in an empty room.
The first segment of Father Mother Sister Brother opens as siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) are driving to see their father (Tom Waits). It soon becomes apparent they haven’t seen him for some time and that the three of them—Emily especially—appear to have a somewhat strained relationship.
Before they arrive, the father deliberately messes up the house, making it look as if he is unable to take care of himself. Jeff has brought a box of groceries for his dad and makes references to the repairs he has helped his dad pay for—repairs Dad seems reluctant to show him. When Emily notices a Rolex, the father insists it is a cheap knockoff. After the kids leave, their father straightens up the house, calls up a friend to make a dinner date, and takes the tarp off an expensive car in back. The life he presents to his children is not what it seems.
The second segment centers on a mother’s (Charlotte Rampling) annual tea with her adult daughters Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Kriesp). All three live in Dublin yet see each other only at this yearly occasion. The mother is a famous and wealthy author who does not appear to be looking forward to the tea. Her daughter Timothea works on the city board for historical preservation and tells her mom she’s just recently been promoted. Lilith has her friend Jeanette (Sarah Greene) pretend to be an Uber driver when she drops her off. When pressed by mom about her work, Lilith makes a vague reference about being an influencer. When her mom spots a Rolex on her daughters’ wrist, Lilith insists it’s a fake. The women engage in vapid inconsequential small talk and seem uncomfortable in each other’s presence. After the tea, the three wait silently at the front stoop for Lilith’s Uber. It is not a comfortable silence.
The final segment follows Billy (Luka Sabbat) and his sister Sky (Indya Moore) reunite and they drive to their parent’s Paris apartment to claim their belongings after their deaths in a plane crash. As they rummage through old papers and belongings, including their father’s old Rolex, they reconnect through shared memories and experiences, also discovering previously hidden parts of their parents’ lives—like a fake marriage certificate and a pack of fake IDs. When the landlady tells them she stopped the insurance company from confiscating their property, the siblings drive to a warehouse containing their parents’ belongings and simply stare at them, wondering.
There is a particular rhythm and a sort of stillness peculiar to Jim Jarmusch films, a space populated with silences and inaction—sometimes resembling inertia, sometimes resembling anticipation, though not exactly hope. His earlier works Stranger than Paradise encapsulates the angst of unrealized (and unknown) expectations while Dead Man is a perfect analogy for our knowledge of mortality and the inevitability of death.
The spaces articulated in Father Mother Sister Brother reflect the gaps in the understanding, communication, and even recognition between family members. The son Jeff and daughter Emily do not recognize who the father really is—or what he is—in the first segment. Emily seems to hold him a grudge and is happy to hold her father at arm’s length—she doesn’t want to understand him. Jeff chooses to believe he is a helpless and lonely old man who needs his financial support. The fact he brings a care package of expensive groceries is both touching and a little pathetic. He is not only helping his dad (or thinks he is) but is mitigating his own guilt. The fact that the father is using the money his son is giving him to live a secret high life he is hiding from his kids speaks not only to the existence of the gaps and secrets between them, but their willingness to accept them—and to even cultivate them.
The mother in the second sequence does not enjoy a close relationship with her daughters—by design. The fact that Lilith has to stage a masquerade to make her mother think she is taking an Uber speaks to the importance of appearances to her mother. The tea table is immaculately set and beautifully presented.
Daughter Timothea seems unsure of herself and apprehensive in the presence of her mom and is not often the focus of the afternoon’s conversation that mostly seems to center on Lilith and her mom. Even when Timothea is describing her new promotion, she is interrupted by Lilith. But for all the gaps in their relationships, the director also emphasizes their similarities, employing an overhead rotating shot of the women sitting around the table.
It is the visualization of a family situation with no beginning and no end—a snake eating its tail. The tracking shot simply keeps going round and round, implying that the daughters will carry the same emotional barriers and hesitations throughout their lives—and their daughters’ lives. The mother’s need to separate from her children is apparent when she comments that all three of them are wearing the same magenta color. “We’re color coordinated,” she says. “How unfortunate.”
The final sequence featuring brother Billy and sister Sky driving to their dead parents’ apartment is the sole sequence that appears to show genuine connection between family members. As the siblings examine artifacts of their parents’ lives—and shards of their own childhoods—they bond over their shared experiences and memories, but there is also a gap here, too. Death has separated them from their parents. While the gap is physical, the siblings are still bound to their parents by their possessions and the patina of memory attached to them. However, when the two of them uncover the false wedding license and fake IDs, they realize, as we all eventually do, that there are dark corners of their parents’ lives they cannot and may never understand.
Jim Jarmusch’s deliberate cinematic style, his willingness to let the narrative breathe, is perfectly suited to this particular film. The pauses and hesitations in conversations as characters look for the right words or try to think through how not to say something hang in this filmic universe like a heavy layer of clouds. While these gaps and silences may seem uncomfortable for the characters or the viewer, they are as right as rain in a Jarmusch film.
The director’s use of recurring motifs like the Rolex (it’s a knockoff) watches, the expression “Bob’s your uncle”, herds of young skateboarders gliding along the road, color coordination, mundane conversation, and long drives connect these diverse family units, specifically their mundane, sad, and insular emotional experiences.
Leo Tolstoy once said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The unhappy families in this film have more similarities than most, but more than simply family, Father Mother Sister Brother is also about the sides of our selves we keep private, separated from family. The father (Tom Waits) hides his outside social activity—unknowingly financed by his son—from his children. The mother (Charlotte Rampling) and daughter Lilith jealously guards their emotional being and financial health, respectively, from each other. Bill and Sky discover their parents led mysterious secret lives unknown to them.
Although we are bound to family, they do not define us. You cannot define what you don’t know.