'Closing Night' TIFF review: Sarah Paulson commands a family drama on the brink
Courtesy of TIFF
Give Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts and Dianne Wiest a room together, and there’s a good chance someone will leave it wounded. In “Closing Night,” they play a family with years of grievances to work through and precious little patience for doing it gently. Writer-director Cody Fern, working from a script he co-wrote with Devon Bostick, gives all three women plenty to play, then puts their relationships under greater strain when one of them receives a life-altering diagnosis. The film reaches for more catharsis than it can always earn, but Paulson delivers one of her best screen performances in years, making it difficult to look away even when the story loses its footing.
Paulson plays Sandra Vale, a Broadway star whose command of the stage has long been a source of pride. Lately, though, she has struggled to remember her lines in a revival of “Mother Courage.” Sandra tries to push through, unwilling to let anyone see how frightened she is, until she collapses during a performance and can no longer put off getting answers. A cognitive test brings news she is even less willing to accept: she has early-onset dementia and will need help as her condition progresses. For someone who has built a life around knowing exactly what to do when the curtain rises, the prospect of losing that certainty is devastating.
Help is complicated by the people offering it. Sandra’s relationship with her sister April (Watts) is already strained, and April is dealing with panic attacks and trouble connecting with her son Theo (Toby Wallace) and his partner Lucy (Odyssa A’Zion). Then their mother Diane (Wiest), a Michigan salon owner, arrives in New York and brings old resentments with her. Fern is at his best when he lets the three women occupy the same space and test one another’s limits. A confrontation over Sandra’s condition gives each actress a chance to land a blow, then shows how quickly concern can curdle into accusation when nobody has forgotten the past. You could imagine much of this playing out onstage, with the family history surfacing through the way they speak to one another.
As more of that history comes to light, “Closing Night” becomes a story about motherhood, ambition and the costs each woman believes she has paid. Sandra gave herself over to her career; April, played by Watts with a nervy unpredictability, has her own tangled relationship with the truth; and Wiest gives Diane a hard edge that makes her concern difficult to separate from her judgment. Paulson holds these threads together without sanding down Sandra’s pride or making her fear easy to express. Even as Sandra’s choices grow harder to defend, Paulson makes clear why surrendering control feels unbearable to her.
Fern’s script is less sure of itself when it moves away from that central conflict. Theo and Lucy’s relationship gets pulled into the family turmoil without gaining enough room to matter on its own, and some of the later revelations arrive before the film has fully worked through what came before. A tighter edit might have given the climax more force. Still, the questions Sandra’s diagnosis raises about care, sacrifice and quality of life have weight because the performances give them a personal cost. “Closing Night” works best when it trusts Paulson, Watts and Wiest to find the hurt beneath all that fighting. Paulson, especially, is a knockout.
Grade: B
CLOSING NIGHT had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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