'Parrot of Death' was always one of my favourite Slayer songs
dir: Daina Oniunas-Pusiċ
2023
A film about a dying teenager… It’s not a guaranteed barrel of laughs. I guess there’s this weird sub-genre of YA books adapted to movies about dying teenagers finding love (just before the end), but in general you’d think studios worry the subject matter is too confronting to get bums on seats in theatres.
What about… Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus? If I told you she was in it, would that entice you back into the cinema? She has a solid number of post-Seinfeld performances such that you would think a decent person wouldn’t have to mention what she’s most famous for. She’s been great in those Nicole Holofcener movies like Enough Said and You Hurt My Feewings, and there’s her amazing run on Veep.
Her performance is much neater and much more straight-forward here (even as the story becomes more fantastical). She plays the mother of a dying teenager, and she’s pretty much in denial about it despite the constant and unavoidable daily struggle to keep things together. She knows her daughter is dying, but she can’t even talk to her daughter about it, and sort-of avoids her, palming her off onto the nurse who looks after her (Leah Harvey). She has a nurse to look after Tuesday (Lola Pettigrew) during the day, but she that time pawning things, hanging out in cafes and sleeping on a bench in a park.
Why? Well, why not?
These are not the characters we first meet in this flick, not really. There’s another character I haven’t mentioned yet who plays the most central role, other than Tuesday. I don’t know if it’s a he, or how they choose to style themselves, but today’s the day you find out that Death Himself or Death Itself is an orange macaw. A parrot. The Parrot of Death (Arinze Mokwe Kene). Born of the void, he has no friends, but he has one task, and that is to visit the dying, wave his mighty wing at them, and then see them ushered out of this world.
He grows large, he grows small as needs be, he is greeted with relief, or hate, or fear, or scorn, but the result is the same.
When he visits Tuesday, she distracts him with a joke that makes him laugh, offers him a bath (he’s absolutely filthy, don’t you know), and a few tokes on her medicinal cannabis vape.
They bop along to Tuesday’s favourite song, which happens to be Ice Cube’s Today Was a Good Day, absolute certified classic from 1992’s The Predator album. I cannot describe the unique pleasure of watching a girl unafraid of Death bopping her head along with a giant parrot to that song. It is one of the most unique images I’ve had the privilege and the honour to see in all my years of film watching.
I will carry it with me to my grave. Her efforts to delay Death’s final action isn’t for her own sake, it’s because she wants a chance to speak to her mum before she goes, in order to make it easier for her. When dear mum gets home, her reaction is about what you would expect.
Wait a second, maybe not. Instead of going along with the program, instead of acceptance, the mum goes with rage. She has become Death, the slayer of death. In what is a pretty shocking and pretty funny moment, she whacks, sets on fire, and eats the death parrot, just to keep her daughter alive a bit longer.
This has the very much expected side effect of robbing the countless death-bound of the world unable to end their existences. So people who have had horrific accidents, or would have drowned, and all the world’s flies, are stuck in undead limbo.
But mum and Tuesday don’t care for now. Realisation comes laters. Realisation comes, for the mum, when she finds that she has not beaten or conquered death, but volunteered to do his job, if only for a while. Quite amusingly, at first, she finds that she can grow and shrink at will, seemingly, which helps her launch herself all over the place, but with her daughter strapped to her back.
It perhaps sounds silly, but it didn’t feel like that watching it. If you want, you can take it literally, or symbolically, as it takes the mum character having to look through Death’s eyes and ears to hear her daughter’s pain, and to realise what she needs, and what her real fear is. Even if we don’t experience the world as depicted in these scenes, we can feel the aspects that have meaning, feel what it’s trying to say.
To talk about such a story, it must seem like it’s a mawkish or sentimental exercise. The death of a child is every parent’s worst nightmare, but that doesn’t mean that the death itself is what we fear. As this film so adroitly represents through the fierce, reluctant mum character, you could come to the realisation that your own life no longer has purpose if your every energy and strength was put into the service of trying to keep them alive beyond all hope or reason. But we all die, we know that, and how do we cope with the afterwards, when all meaning and purpose are gone? If you are the sort of person that invested your entire being in your kid, and they are gone, why keep breathing, why keep going through the motions, yourself?
If all purpose is lost, it’s not a joke any more, and it’s not something that glib answers would bring comfort for. In the face of unimaginable loss, thankfully, beautifully, the film doesn’t flinch. It respects that loss by not giving the comfort of after lives and supreme beings were calculated to bring us in through their creation. Death does not lie to the mum, giving her sweetened, treacly words with which to pacify. It boldly, but not without feeling, tells her what is, and what is not.
I can’t commend the performances enough, especially Lola Pettigrew as Tuesday. I know she’s not a teenager, but what a fantastic career you should have ahead of you. Dreyfus is great and prickly, and willing to make herself the villain for a while, and it’s a tired, ruthless and fierce performance, which also does well when it leans into vulnerability later in the film.
And the parrot? Well, honestly, there needs to be a category in awards ceremonies for entirely CGI creations. This year alone I’ve seen at least 5 films that had entirely CGI characters that were more believable that whatever it is that Kristen Stewart, Jesse Eisenberg or Will Smith get away with. I had no difficulty believing in the character, in its deathly existence, which means Tuesday and the mum were mostly emoting to something that was probably a stick with a tennis ball on it. It’s amazing they were able to make something so believable on what I presume is a miniscule budget.
This isn’t going to appeal to everyone. It’s a bit of a difficult film to recommend. It is a strange and weird experience, but for my money, a worthwhile one that has stayed with me days later.
8 times after all it’s about our oldest friend out of 10
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“You’re a real fucker, you know that?” - Tuesday
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