Closing Night

OVERVIEW

Sometimes, all you ask from a movie is for it not to be boring, and for all its faults, Closing Night is anything but. Cody Fern’s debut is melodramatic, excessive, and so tonally confused that a heartfelt scene about a woman facing Alzheimer’s at a tragically young age can suddenly give way to a ridiculously over-the-top confrontation that feels imported from the season finale of a soap opera. You are never quite sure whether the film wants you to laugh or cry, but you are always entertained.

It begins by following April (Naomi Watts), a hairdresser who travels to New York to attend the opening night of a Broadway play starring her estranged sister Sandra (Sarah Paulson), after receiving an unexpected letter asking her and their mother to come. Their alcoholic mother, Diane (Dianne Wiest), would rather pass. April also meets with her son Theo (Toby Wallace), who has been secretly reconnecting with Sandra alongside his girlfriend Lucy (Odessa A’zion), who has just discovered that she is pregnant. During the play, Sandra suddenly finds herself unable to finish her lines, and after undergoing medical exams, she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Sandra wants to keep it a secret, but Theo and Diane soon find out, and the revelation brings even more secrets and old wounds to light.

THE REVIEW

As you can tell, Closing Night is a lot of movie. It covers many subplots and points of view at once, sometimes not deciding who it wants us to follow. Fern originally wrote Theo as the protagonist, a stand-in for himself, before realizing the women around him were more interesting and shifting the screenplay toward them, and you can feel that sudden change in the finished film. Theo is introduced as the lead, Sandra is strangely treated like a supporting character for a long time, despite having the most dramatic storyline, and April becomes our main way into this family even as her increasingly unreliable and unstable behavior makes her one of its hardest characters to understand. It takes a long time before we can even realize what the film is about.

There are a few compelling ideas underneath all that narrative clutter, and some moments are exquisitely acted by its cast. Yet for every effective moment, there is an unbelievably exaggerated and ridiculous one, usually built around another misunderstanding or another piece of information someone refuses to share. It provides some so-bad-it-is-good entertainment, while the actresses try their hardest to sell the most outrageous turns. I do not envy their jobs.

Naomi Watts is by far the most affected, and she might be having the roughest TIFF of anyone this year (or any year). To start, she looks very weird as the fragile and unstable April, sporting a purposely old-fashioned haircut and ugly clothes, yet you never forget that you are watching the classy Naomi Watts. Watts has been giving some strange performances for a while now, but here she reaches a new low, somehow looking even more lost than in her already awful turn in The Housewife. Toby Wallace and Odessa A’zion are perfectly fine, even if the film gradually loses interest in them and barely concludes their storyline.

The one relationship that works far above anything else is between Sandra and Diane. Wiest is by far the best thing in the movie and the one performance that always rings true. From the way Fern builds up her first appearance, to her jet-lagged asking for a room with a minibar, to the cruel expressions she no longer tries to hide around her daughters, Wiest creates an extremely memorable and despicable human being, one the film thankfully never tries to redeem. It is a terrific performance that, with a better script, would have rightly placed the actress in the Best Supporting Actress conversation. Her best scenes are with Paulson, especially their heartbreaking final moments together. Equally praise-worthy, despite the script working against her, is Paulson’s Sandra. I wish we could have spent more time with her before her diagnosis, and later made it clearer the origin of Diane’s hatred.

It is not only the narrative that is awkward. Yves Bélanger’s cinematography occasionally wants to evoke Almodóvar, with expressive reds and striking compositions, but for every effective image, there is another puzzlingly distracting one, like Theo and Lucy embracing in a strange position that you spend a few seconds trying to understand how their bodies are even arranged. Equally strange is Fern’s apparent fixation with butts, with actors gratuitously flashing their buttocks at the most distracting moments. Then he can suddenly deliver a raw moment that gets you directly into a character’s head.

That is basically the Closing Night experience. You are touched in one second, and filled with secondhand embarrassment in another, while the actresses desperately try to bridge the extremes. The path is very rough, but when all is said and done, I can say one thing for Closing Night: I will probably never forget it.

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