For "The Humans" to Err is Human and to Forget Divine
Monday, November 22, 2021 at 10:00PM by Jason Adams
Erik (Richard Jenkins), the patriarch of the Blake family, stands staring out a dingy window into the gray light of the alleyway -- excuse me, the "interior courtyard" -- behind his daughter's unfurnished and water-logged Chinatown apartment. His thoughts are clearly elsewhere, new worries freshly lining his already lined face, as something catches his eye, and then another -- is that snow? It's lovely, in its way, but distressing all the same -- having traveled into the big city for this Housewarming slash Thanksgiving dinner from the wilds of distant Scranton he's got to think about getting everybody home at a decent hour, and a snow-storm would have them trapped here, nary a bed in sight. (Having lugged a Mary figure there as their Housewarming gift the soft Biblical allusions to "no room at the Inn" seem let's say non-accidental.) He brings up this his most recent distress to Richard (Steven Yeun), his daughter's boyfriend, who doesn't see snow at all, instead offering the thesis that someone on an upper floor has just emptied their ashtray.
Snow to ash, and just like that beauty to death, a recurring happening in Stephen Karam's Tony-winning play turned A24's darkly funny and emotionally cataclysmic awards-season contender The Humans...
It arrives just in time for everybody to experience their own adjacent holiday traumas both inside and outside the screening rooms and theaters. Is this already the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever made? Great love and good fortunes to those of you who feel a connection to the soft suburban glow of a Planes Trains and Automobiles but the claustrophobic tumult of The Humans is much more my speed. This apartment here, with its hell-house cascade of melancholic dioramas that we pass like traffic accidents, is certainly the one that feels the most like my anti-nostalgic recollections of childhood holidays -- and may they be damned back to the dark places where they came from and never thought of again.
Like that snow to ash all of nature sours inside this place -- Erik keeps warning they're inside a flood-zone, and the walls and ceilings are dotted up and down with strange tumescent pustules pressing against the wallpaper, dripping yellow-brown smears of unclassifiable liquid, there as if to prove it. Bulbs keep bursting and light itself seems to invert, suspending us seemingly on the brim of a black hole, the city prepared to topple. You couldn't be blamed for thinking the apocalypse has already happened. This might be New York but the streets, briefly glimpsed as the camera backs away slowly, are empty, and no attendant sounds of life -- garbage trucks, sirens, the ever-present chants of street cretins -- make their way through the byzantine halls and alleys up to this sealed-off tomb of a two-story apartment buried at the back of a nondescript brick front. And true, anybody who's lived in New York for any length of time would honestly kill for this apartment, pustules be damned, but the plays played out upon these stages just might kill back.
As Kirsten Dunst memorably droned at her last meal in Melancholia -- "It tastes like ash" -- and in The Humans it's not just the meal that's raining sooty doom down. The Big Apple of this story is in full-on Silent Hill mode -- indistinct figures moving behind murky glass, sudden explosions of banging from outside. You have the feeling an existential flip may switch at any moment and all the ghosts of the past might come pouring from the faucets and pipes of this place. The specter of 9/11, and those months after where that horrible ash did fall, hangs heavy over; just how much to be revealed across the span of this film's dinner-length revelations. But this is a haunted house that grows more interiorized and closed-off as it goes -- we may just be trapped inside the traumatized Erik's spooked psyche before this meal's through, the woman without a face that he describes in a recurring nightmare perched over every plate, devouring us in reverse. And of this, they make jokes.
For all their encroaching darknesses the Blakes are hardly the worst-off family I've ever seen thrown on the screen -- there is plainly a lot of foundational love and good humor shared between Erik, his wife Deirdre (a deeply moving Jayne Houdyshell, the only holdover from the stage version), his dementia-riddled "Momo" (June Squibb), and his daughters Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and Aimee (Amy Schumer). But Karam's script is keenly aware of the dangerous ways in which Family itself, even in such surface-level agreeable circumstances, can become a cage, where memories become encased in amber and small inside jokes, repeated over and over and over again, weapons. There's nothing more unwieldy than messy life whittled down to agreeable small talk; than decades of accumulated aggrievances squashed into politely poisoned chatter. Lives lived separately start being only glanced on special occasions, and who they're becoming, in some cases curdling into, becomes entirely unknown to those theoretically closest. best to not rock the boat, before the flood.
And so we see Aimee (Schumer is very fine, wielding her comic edge to puncture every airless moment just enough) sneaking off to the bathroom to stare at her ex-girlfriend's Instagram page and cry herself sick. We see Brigid snipe at her mother about her weight as she preaches "super-foods" with the zealotry of a person actively drowning in pomegranate juice. And we see Deirdre, the second she has the room to herself, collapsing into her own quivering sobs, all shielded by a hand. The inability to be human, to adequately express to one another the terrors eating each of these individuals up, is making of them automatons who spout off the same stories whenever in each other's presence. Each repetition meaning less than the one before, and each time it becoming something just a little bit crueler, more jagged and spiked through with the pain twitching just beneath's its surface, itself screaming for breath.
The coagulation of stifled communication comes up time and again -- Brigid and Richard have decided to simply live with the deafening pounding their elderly upstairs neighbor makes since she speaks no English; similarly Momo's descent into Alzheimers is rendered through sudden bursts of nonsense speak, June Squibb selling each one with a heartbreaking pause as we see the woman realize nobody can understand a word she is saying. Momo has to write down a speech to give to her family in a moment of lucidity, one her son pointedly can't make it through himself, wherein she promises them that forgetfulness isn't so bad because you're no longer constantly cripplingly afraid of everything. That's The Humans' bleak yet beautiful vision of hope to go alongside the Cranberry sauce -- one day soon, sooner every second, all of this will slip into oblivion, so maybe just dance a little at weddings while your legs still work.
The Humans opens in theaters Wednesday November 24th.
Reader Comments (4)
And it's also coming on Showtime this week.
"That's The Humans' bleak yet beautiful vision of hope to go alongside the Cranberry sauce -- one day soon, sooner every second, all of this will slip into oblivion, so maybe just dance a little at weddings while your legs still work."
I honestly feel blessed whenever I read your reviews. The turns of phrase, the poetic synthesizations of a film's inchoate mood and ineffable themes - it dazzles. You make me want to be a better writer, a better movie watcher. Thank you so much for your wonderful work.
I'm thankful that a beautiful film inspires a great review. Thanks Jason.
Did a double take over: "You have the feeling an existential flip may switch at any moment..." but in this haunted house being devoured in reverse it works.
davidm -- glad you caught that, it was my favorite turn of phrase in the whole thing. I couldn't let it go.
Cláudio -- your words are really too kind -- no really, you're a far better writer than I am. So back at ya :)