Urban canyons in the gloomy part of Chinatown in Manhattan. Looking up reveals only narrow, geometric sections of sky lined with dark walls and jagged fire escapes in lightless backyards. In one of these run-down houses, Bridge (Beanie Feldstein) and her boyfriend Rich (Steven Yeun, Academy Award-nominated for “Minari: Where We Put Our Roots”) have just moved into a makeshift apartment that they can’t really afford.
A digital fireplace provides virtual warmth, the furniture has not yet been delivered, but they have invited their family to the housewarming Thanksgiving dinner: Bridge’s father, the family patriarch Erik (Richard Jenkins), and his wife (Jane Houdyshell), their sister Aimee (Amy Schumer) and her demented grandmother Momo (June Squibb), who is sedated in a wheelchair and is pushed through the impassable apartment like a piece of furniture.
Legendarily destructive festivals have already been celebrated in the cinema, birthdays, weddings, funerals, Thanksgiving. People got together to hit and occasionally kiss: Thomas Vinterberg’s “Das Fest”, Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel’s Wedding”, John Wells’ “Im August in Osage County”, Peter Hedges’ “Pieces of April”, to pick out just a few gems of familial decomposition. This now also applies to the three generations of the Blakes.
Patriarch Erik is the first there, probes and criticizes the situation and the condition of the apartment more or less openly, winces at the rumbling noises from above and has to lean against the courtyard window for cell phone reception. The house is alive, it squirms, groans, moans and rumbles. The skins of paint and plaster on the walls ripple and bulge, swell and burst in a strangely organic way, like festering wounds. The pipes visible everywhere resemble clogged, brittle veins and arteries.
The house has festering wounds, as does the family
The building structure reflects the psychological state of all family members with their various existential crises, feelings of guilt and inferiority after termination, separation and affairs. It develops a life of its own, even with hints of the horror genre. The house itself is a protagonist, constantly allying itself with the camera, with its views from non-human perspectives, at feet, chair legs and door edges, in extreme detail and flickering light reflections. It listens in, eavesdropping on residents and guests when they are out of sight.
In his feature film debut, Stephen Karam has filmed his own play, which was awarded a Tony, as a chamber play in the field of tension between long shots and extreme close-ups, between sharpness and blurriness. In doing so, he has expelled the theatrically artificial from his material. Grandiose actors engage in verbal battles that are sometimes combative, sometimes subtly hurtful, sometimes lovingly affectionate, a mixture that is only possible between people who know each other very well.
June Squibb – the late, long-tormented and posthumously missing wife of Jack Nicholson’s pensioner in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt – plays the dozing, wheelchair-bound grandmother with only occasional waking moments. Amy Schumer defies private and professional setbacks even in her first purely dramatic role, you can still feel her comedic timing. Jane Houdyshell, who played the mother in the stage version, talks about her resolution to lose weight while munching away her frustrations with crackers dipped in dip.
Most impressive, however, is Richard Jenkins, with his mixture of resignation, sarcastic humor and warmth, which he has perfected in ever new nuances since the series “Six Feet Under”: “Shouldn’t it cost less to live?” he asks the young Couple once and countered his cult of superfoods with the dry remark that living forever isn’t worth it when things are going so badly. At night he dreams of ghosts whose eyes and mouths are covered with skin, during the day he praises the family and their unconditional support: “That’s what counts!” The devastating and the comforting, despair and security are close on this evening in a heartbreakingly truthful way.
The Humans, USA 2021 – Directed and written, based on his own play: Stephen Karam. Camera: Lol Crawley. Costumes: Ann Roth. Starring Richard Jenkins, Jane Houdyshell, Amy Shumer, Beanie Feldstein, Steven Yeun, June Quibb. Rental: Mubi. 108 minutes. Streaming start: August 12, 2022.