Chris Kelly’s Other People opens with one of the boldest scenes of 2016, as we see a dead woman laying in bed, surrounded by her family who sob desperately while trying to comfort each other. Then the phone rings and the machine picks it up, we hear a friend of the deceased explain how she just found out about her illness and wishes her a speedy recovery, all this while she argues with a fast food employee who got her order wrong. It’s a scene that could have been deemed heartless, if Kelly wasn’t so pithy in expressing how it’s only meant to represent that rather than his film being about the insignificance of our problems, it’s about the hope that comes with the realization that life goes on as long as we’re breathing.
We go back in time to spend a year with the woman who dies in the end, her name is Joanne (Molly Shannon) and as she deals with a rare kind of cancer, she also tries to help people around her figure out what they’ll do when she’s gone. Her son David (Jesse Plemons) has just left New York to help look after her in Sacramento, he’s a struggling writer too proud to acknowledge that he needs to be with his mother as he navigates through a so-so career, the fact that his boyfriend left him, and his father (Bradley Whitford) won’t accept him for being gay.
If the film never visits new territory (if you’re thinking One True Thing you’re not completely off), Kelly succeeds in balancing the absurd with the heartwarming, there are scenes in which David spends time with his best friend (John Early) and his precocious little brother (J.J. Totah) that deftly establish the socio-cultural distance between gay men of various generations, as David watches the little boy twerk while in drag it becomes clear to him that maybe he’s not as modern as he thinks. This helps humanize characters like David’s father, who is never reduced to being a stock villain, but someone who can’t accept something he doesn’t understand. Scenes between Plemons and Whitford are filled with rage that hurts more because both sides are wrong.
Kelly also gets effectively moving performances from his actors, most of whom are known for their comedic work and here get to shine in unexpected ways. Plemons makes for a lovable lead, who we wish we could comfort even as he throws tantrums and fails to have empathy for others around him, and Shannon gives an absolutely devastating performance turning Joanne into a woman who is exhausted of suffering, but is afraid of how things will turn out when she’s gone. Her compassion is such that in her scenes with Plemons, we see Shannon allowing his character to believe this is his story, she’s always putting her needs second.
