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    Natasha Lyonne’s Success Is Driven by a Sense of Mortality

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    Natasha Lyonne has her funeral all planned out.Not just planned, really, but choreographed, produced and directed, complete with music cues and writing prompts, to calibrate the emotion just right. “Otherwise it can run long,” she explained. So Lyonne, the downtown vivant actress, writer and director, has diligently assigned her passel of famous friends “jobs that they didn’t want.”There will be a month of commemorative screenings at Film Forum and songs by Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“I have a sworn promise that she performs; I’m very grateful”) and the “Color Purple” star Danielle Brooks, because her voice “breaks my heart.” The comedian John Mulaney will be on hand to punch up material. “I actually tasked him with writing speeches for people that wouldn’t want to get onstage,” Lyonne said, like her BFF Chloë Sevigny. “I was like: You need to give Chloë some jokes.”The plot she acquired, at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, alongside her boyfriend at the time, Fred Armisen, she has now graciously ceded to his wife, Riki Lindhome. “I probably don’t want to be buried in Los Angeles anyway, if I’m honest,” she allowed. But she’s still making him the funerary musical supervisor.That Lyonne, at 45, has thought at length about her own demise is, to anyone who knows her or her oeuvre, not surprising. All of her recent, most celebrated projects — including “Russian Doll,” the Emmy-winning Netflix series; “Poker Face,” the retro crime procedural on Peacock; and her latest role, in the Netflix drama “His Three Daughters” — find her confronting life’s end. She does it with a spectacular, bewitching buoyancy. Even in “His Three Daughters,” in which she displays an unexpected reserve (but exuberant hair) opposite Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen as estranged sisters caring for their father in his last days. It’s earning her Oscar talk.As a producer, Lyonne “likes the grind and the hustle, and the hard work that comes with it,” said Amy Poehler. “That’s not always the case.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesSo, when we found ourselves in an East Village restaurant on a drizzly Friday night, ordering a dessert made of Pop Rocks and talking about death, it felt just as the universe — or New York City, same difference — intended.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘His Three Daughters’ Review: Sisters at Odds Together

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      Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen play sisters who are caring for their dying father in this tender, funny family drama.Every so often in the heart-heavy drama “His Three Daughters,” the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs frames the actress Natasha Lyonne in radiant close-up. Her character, Rachel, is one of the daughters of the title, and while she thrums with palpable energy, she also has a quality of stillness about her. When Rachel stares into the distance, as she tends to do, lost in thought or maybe just lost — her huge eyes shining, her face edged by flaming red hair — she brings to mind a hummingbird hovering in midair, its wings beating impossibly fast against the strongest headwind.Rachel is the youngest of the sisters who’ve convened to care for their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), at the end of his life. With her older siblings Katie (Carrie Coon) and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), Rachel drifts through the New York apartment where their father is fading away, his heartbeat now supplanted by the beeping machinery that he’s hooked up to, which creates an eerie rhythm throughout. It’s a hard, painful setup but also absurdly funny, intimate and human. Jacobs is sensitive to life’s contradictions; he knows how abruptly love seems to boil over into hate, and how quickly adult siblings can turn into whining, raging children.Set over an inexact number of days and nights, the movie tracks the sisters during the course of their vigil. Katie is the scold (and surrogate angry patriarch), who also lives in the city, while Christina (an anxious maternal type from California) plays the part of the diplomat. Outwardly, at least, Rachel — who lives with their father in the apartment — slips readily into the role of the black sheep (and unruly child), especially given her pursuits and pastimes. When she’s not fleeing from her sisters, Rachel is hunkered down in her room, watching sports on TV, playing the odds and taking hits off a blunt. Rachel seems to be in a fog, but she’s perfectly lucid.Most of the movie takes place in the apartment, a modest, pointedly ordinary space with plenty of windows and a couple of bedrooms on the upper floor of a building in a large complex. It’s humble by mainstream, art-directed movie standards; it looks like a real apartment where real people live. There’s nothing fancy about it, just photos, tchotchkes and furniture people might actually use, middle-class people, working-class people, people lucky enough to have an affordable New York (Manhattan!) apartment. It’s a moving emblem of a nearly lost city and, by turns, a haunted house, a cozy home and a theater for the family’s drama, one that the sisters enact at times while reciting grievances they clearly committed to heart long ago.Emotions are already raw when the movie opens on Katie. Seated against a white wall, arms tightly folded across her chest, she is in the midst of an epic tirade directed at an offscreen, silent Rachel. As the camera holds on Katie, she talks and talks, her words running together into a near-indistinguishable slurry. It’s as if she didn’t believe in punctuation or the niceties of conversation; it soon becomes clear she has next to no patience for Rachel. Katie asks her a question without waiting for the answer, emphasizes the obvious, makes demands. It’s not for nothing that the first time you see each sister she is alone in the frame.As the vigil continues, things shift and settle, and other characters come and go, including a hospice worker, Angel (Rudy Galvan); a security guard, Victor (Jose Febus); and Rachel’s friend, Benjy (Jovan Adepo). Each brings some air into the fraught scene; more subtly, they reveal something about how the sisters relate to the larger world. Katie, for one, jokingly refers to the hospice aide as an Angel of Death, which isn’t funny the first or the second time she does so. That Rachel talks more readily to Victor than to her sisters says much about the family — about the siblings’ relations, worldviews and aching need for connection — as does the moment when, in her bedroom, she wearily rests her head on Benjy’s shoulder.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘French Exit’ Review: A Not-So-Merry Widow

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘French Exit’ Review: A Not-So-Merry WidowMichelle Pfeiffer is sensational as a newly insolvent socialite in this strange, sad comedy.Michelle Pfeiffer in “French Exit.”Credit…Lou Scamble/Sony Pictures ClassicsFeb. 11, 2021, 1:24 p.m. ETFrench ExitDirected by Azazel JacobsComedy, DramaR1h 50mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.As if rebounding as far as possible from her hard-luck character in the 2018 drama “Where Is Kyra?,” Michelle Pfeiffer glams it up as an imperious New York dowager in “French Exit.” Floating through scenes in fur-trimmed coats and slinky peignoirs, nose in the air and martini glass in a death grip, Pfeiffer is Frances Price, a diva of disdain.The role is far juicier than the movie around it, a melancholy farce of disappearing privilege and insouciant parenting.“It’s all gone,” Frances’s accountant says, referring to her money. Yet the line encapsulates the essence of a movie that trembles with loss: Looks, home, love and life itself are on the fade. After years of ignoring her dwindling fortune, Frances, along with her depressive adult son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges), must sell up and accept the loan of a friend’s vacation apartment in Paris. The length of stay is undefined, but, this time, Francis doesn’t intend to outlast the dribble of cash that remains.Too listless to fizz and too peculiar to win us over, “French Exit,” directed by Azazel Jacobs, is hampered by clockwork quirkiness and disaffected dialogue. What little there is of a plot — which includes multiple séances and a talking cat — doesn’t so much progress as coagulate around a coterie of eccentrics: A pathetically lonely expat (Valerie Mahaffey), a mirthless fortuneteller (Danielle Macdonald) and a smooth private investigator (Isaach De Bankolé), all of whom will eventually congregate in the Paris apartment. Not-so-high jinks ensue.Adapting his 2018 novel of the same name, Patrick DeWitt holds fast to his amoral heroine, a woman whose sometimes appalling behavior is neither apologized for nor regretted. Its reverberations, though, have shaped Malcolm into a passive companion, so devoted he’s willing to dump his fiancée (Imogen Poots) to accompany his mother to Paris. The character is a drip, and Hedges, despite a commendable refusal to steer into the skid for comic gain, never makes him remotely interesting.Pfeiffer is flat-out fabulous here, at once chilly and poignant. As Frances dispenses the last of her money to homeless men in the park, her largess seems more to do with weariness than compassion, her beneficiaries simply useful receptacles for something she no longer needs. A strange mixture of highbrow looniness and quiet rue, “French Exit” is finally less about one woman’s desire to die than about her inability to summon the energy to live.French ExitRated R for a disgusting death and a great deal of drinking. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In select theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More