Pedro Almodovar is a genius when it comes to exploring the nature of humans and he does it in vibrant technicolor. His films tend to touch on the untouchable, things that people do not want to talk about. His subject matter is like a laundry list of things that book banners want off the shelves completely but are at the same time part of the human condition.
He is Spanish and so have his films been--until now. This one is in English and it deals with not just terminal illness and death but with choosing suicide rather than a painful death when euthanasia is not an end of life option.
The movie is based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, and it is an emotional two-hander between acting titans, Juliana Moore palying the friend, Ingrid, and Tilda Swinton plays Martha, the recurrent cancer patient who is out of viable treatmnet options. As Ingrid, Moore is us, the audience--the character we have to judge ourselves against--what would we do? The cancer patient doesn't want to be alone, or to be found dead days later, so she asks a friend to be there--not to administer the fatal pill but to raise the alarm once she is well and truly gone. Ingrid is trying to do her best with an impossible task, perhaps sympathetic to a fault, yet she gracefully attempts to deal with the grief of losing her friend without making Martha uncomfortable. She does an amazing job of portraying a wman in this untenable situation, trying to support her ailing friend all while suffering the loss of a friend. Swinton is graceful in a different manner. Her performance feels restrained, holding on to a stiff upper lip even as if her character looks like she’s physically holding back the pain from appearing on her face. It is magnificent.
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