Strong performances anchor awkward stage-to-screen adaptation
“Boy, the holidays are rough. Every year I just try to get from the day before Thanksgiving to the day after New Year’s,” the late great screenwriter Nora Ephron has Harry (Billy Crystal) comment to Sally (Meg Ryan) in the 1989 classic When Harry Met Sally. “A lot of suicides,” Sally dryly replies. Some 30 years later, Pennsylvania-born playwright and first-time filmmaker Stephen Karam has given us The Humans, a Thanksgiving-set film that illustrates Harry’s point. In keeping with the spirit of the holiday, though, thankfully, the picture lacks Sally’s cynicism.
Karam, who won both a Tony and a Pulitzer back in 2016 for his play of the same name, takes on double duty here in his maiden film venture: not only has he adapted his play for the screen, but he directs it, too. The results are somewhat mixed; as with so many stage-to-screen adaptations, the material often feels better suited to the theater than the big screen. Karam uses a lot of distant longshots and dark lighting that put us at a remove from the characters. The effect is like watching a play, yes, but, on film, more close ups would help us feel closer and more connected to the characters and their story.
The film drops us into the Blake family Thanksgiving. Daughter Brigid (Beanie Feldstein, Booksmart) and her boyfriend Richard (Steven Yeun, Minari) are hosting in their new-to-them but old and run down apartment in New York’s Chinatown. Their guests include Dad Erik (Richard Jenkins), Mom Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell, the only cast member to also appear in the original Broadway production), sister Aimee (Amy Schumer, Trainwreck; Snatched) and Erik’s mother, Momo (June Squibb, Nebraska).
Similar to other stage-to-screen family gathering dramas like August, Osage County, The Humans is a mostly all talk/no action piece that delves into the back stories, traumas, and resentments of each of the characters via various conversations. Watching the film, we feel a little like a fly on the wall at someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner, so your enjoyment of the film may directly correlate to your tolerance for overhearing other people’s troubles. Karam heightens the drama, though, by highlighting the apartment’s deficiencies in a way that’s reminiscent more of a horror movie than a family drama. Odd, disturbing clanging noises make characters jump, even if the foreboding sounds are just laundry running or an upstairs neighbor stomping, and creepy water damage bubbling on the walls creates a macabre feel. Light bulbs that burn out and envelop the apartment in darkness also add to the stress and tension of the proceedings. We feel on edge just as much as the characters, waiting for something truly awful to happen.
This menacing background effectively enhances the more ahem, human drama unfolding before us. Each member of the Blake family is struggling with some sort of issue, and themes of health, relationships, money and work, religion and morality, hopes, dreams, and nightmares are all touched on. 9/11 even plays a role in the characters’ current ruminations. In other words, all topics inherent to being alive, and yes, human (there’s that word again) are explored and grappled with.
If all this discourse sounds heavy, it is at times. But what saves the film from being totally morose is the dominant theme of family love and acceptance, even in times of distress. “I love that at times like this I have a family, a home base that I can always come home to,” Aimee says at one point, underscoring the film’s message.
The cast, too, is always worth watching, especially Houdyshell, who no doubt inhabits Deirdre so fully because of her many stage performances. We can see why Karam chose to bring her on screen; her face and body convey as much emotion as her words. But her new castmates hold their own against the Broadway veteran, especially Jenkins, who is terrific as the guilt-ridden, emotionally wounded patriarch who wants to do right by his family before it’s too late. As the daughters, Schumer and Feldstein have an authentic chemistry that make them seem like real sisters, despite their lack of physical resemblance. Steven Yeun, as the family outsider, portrays grace and kindness so well that you’ll wish he could be a guest at your own Thanksgiving table. June Squibb doesn’t get much to do as the dementia-addled grandmother besides an occasional outburst, but she’s such a consummate actress that she still is able to let us see the vital woman she was before the disease hit.
The Blake family, then, is a family like so many others: they have their secrets, their regrets, and their small cruelties, but they also always will have each other, and they know that. Yes, the film says, the holidays can be rough with pressure and anxiety, as Ephron pointed out, but they can also be a time of healing, forgiveness, and love.
—————————-
The Humans opens today at Bay Area theaters, and also premieres on Showtime.
