Tuesday

A partial list of unexpected visuals from this film:

• Julia Louis-Dreyfus growing to the size of a room (a la Three Thousand Years of Longing).
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus shrinking to the size of a bug.
• The world in the eye of a macaw.
• That same macaw taking a rip of a pot filled vape.
• The top half of a man crawling across the street repeatedly.
• A decapitated bird "pecking" at a window.
• Julia-Louis Dreyfus eating the macaw.

Truthfully, I had no idea what to expect. I'd heard little of this film, but it was playing at my local theater, and the gist of a story about grief and Death as embodied by a colorful bird was enough to catch my eye. As someone who grew up on Seinfeld, I'll never be sad to see Louis-Dreyfus pop up, especially now that she's returned to movies in the years since the conclusion of her third huge television success in Veep.

My only hesitation is that I've yet to see her break free of Elaine.

Granted, her acclaimed role in Enough Said is one of my blind spots. But I didn't see a huge difference between her performance here and in last year's You Hurt My Feelings. While two examples is hardly conclusive, and it's certainly possible I've missed some of her best work, it's not meaningless that both characters were somewhat goofy and displayed an inability to take anything seriously until absolutely necessary.

Arguably, it hurts more here. Tuesday is about grief, about the death of a child from a long (unnamed) illness, about the necessity of letting go. I understand that's a heavy, potentially very personal subject, so adding some levity allows the viewer to relax for a moment and take a breath before diving back into the despair. I just wish they weren't so frequent and baked into the plot, as they confuse the tone and break up the flow of the core narrative.

That narrative is pretty solid, centering on two characters coming to terms with death from different perspectives. One is terminally ill teenager Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), who receives a visit from Death (Arinzé Kene) in the form of a size-changing macaw who slowly remembers how to speak, but even then mostly grunts. Tuesday instinctually understands the meaning of his presence, and while she doesn't outright reject it, she does ask to delay until the evening to say one final goodbye to her mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). When presented with her daughter's certainty about the timing of her passing, Zora enters full, violent denial mode, eventually taking a drastic action which leads to her assuming the mantle of Death.

That last bit is the biggest contributor to the movie's tonal issues, as it generates a ton of silliness from Zora's lack of understanding and hesitation to do what the movie very clearly shows us needs to be done. This raises a number of questions about the rules of Death, which writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusić doesn't want us to think too hard about, but are nonetheless emphasized by a bunch of cutaway shots to show us the repercussions. It's also a great encapsulation of how she has trouble fully committing to the darkness of her premise: all signs point to the climax being an incredibly tragic yet beautiful and heartbreaking scene, only to veer away from it at the last second in favor of a watered down version, greatly reducing its impact.

That we experience both mother and daughter learning about the importance of death and decay and acceptance stretches out the film, but not in a way that it feels like a slog. Those scenes are genuinely enjoyable, and generate empathy for Zora despite her frequent absence from Tuesday's life, both physically and emotionally. They're paced incredibly well, such that as the credits rolled, I felt like the movie had just begun: it all flew by. However, it ends in a slightly odd place. Emotionally, I see why Oniunas-Pusić picked the point she did. But I feel like she missed the natural point to do so about five or ten minutes earlier, and as such I wanted a longer denouement, truly impressing on us the deep impacts of the changes which came over the characters. Instead, just as we think we're about to start the third act of the film, it ends.

The acting is all pretty good. I already mentioned Louis-Dreyfus, and Kene's vocal work as Death is wonderful. But for my money, the standout is Petticrew. This is the second film in which I've seen them, and the second time they caught my eye. The complexity of the emotions that pass across their face as Tuesday interacts with Death, with her own mortality, is just fantastic. They carry the first half quite admirably, when Zora isn't a big part of the plot, and sell the idea of someone just trying to get themselves in order before passing without fighting it. Without their excellent performance, the whole film would fall apart.

This is a strange story told in a fairly ambitious and odd way, which I will always appreciate. It's an effective strategy for conveying some deeper truth while keeping the tale entertaining, allowing the addition of more surreal and symbolic elements without them feeling out of place. The weaving of these disparate elements is tough, and I'm not convinced Tuesday really pulls it off. But if I had to choose between stories told in a grounded reality and those in some strange and fantastical incarnation of our world, I'm going with the weird one every single time.