Fractious family copes with mother’s late-stage dementia
Amid the clank and calculation of the usual Hollywood machinery, a movie more attuned to the human heart of things such as “What They Had” deserves an audience. If it’s good, that is.
And it is.
Small but sure, this lowkeyed actors’ feast marks the feature directorial debut of writer-director Elizabeth Chomko. “What They Had” comes from Chomko’s experiences and memories of her grandmother, who lived with Alzheimer’s disease for years. Millions do; millions more are affected by it directly, many as caregivers.
The story toggles among three generations. The heads of the family, stage 6 Alzheimer’s patient Ruth (Blythe Danner) and her ardently devoted husband, Burt (Robert Forster), begin where other screenwriters would have them arrive around the midpoint. Ruth is living in a fog of memory loss and dementia, a fog that sometimes lifts just long enough to complicate her disorientation. This long-married couple doesn’t want things to change. But they’re changing without their consent.
At the start of “What They Had,” Ruth wanders off from her Chicago-area condo on a snowy winter night. Grown son and financially strapped bar owner Nicky (Michael Shannon) acts as primary caregiver and primary worrier. He believes it’s long past time for his mother to move to a facility specializing in memory loss. Burt, a proud and loving man and a tough one, won’t have it.
Coping with doubts about her own marriage, Nicky’s sister Bridget (Hilary Swank), a California chef, comes home at the request of her increasingly frustrated brother. Bridget’s college-age daughter (Taissa Farmiga), meantime, flounders in her young adulthood, and likewise rolls in to join this extended, fractious family reunion.
The obstacles in “What They Had” may be familiar, but Chomko writes lean, purposeful exchanges with a realistic edge and a sneaky wit. She shows both grace and tact behind the camera, keeping these family members confined inside the parents’ preWorld War II domicile for much of the film but open- ing up the action to visit Nicky’s bar (there’s a very good scene with Shannon and Forster late in the game). Chomko demonizes nobody and nothing here, not even Ruth’s disease; it’s simply a hard fact of life, and of her loved ones’ lives.
Swank takes top billing, but the script doesn’t let her character bigfoot the crises; by temperament Bridget hangs back and avoids conflict and makes nice, and Swank is an interesting enough actress to find the activation points underneath all that.
Everyone’s good here. Forster and Danner really do seem like an old married couple, well into their third act. Burt, tetchy about Bridget becoming a lapsed Catholic, has no patience for the relationship ambiguities afflicting his offspring. Marriage is hard, he says, but simple: “You pick somebody you can stand; you make a commitment.”
As I said, this is an actors’ feast, and a genuine calling card for Chomko, primarily an actress (a strong one) before “What They Had,” but now very much a writer-director coming into her own.
MPAA rating: R (for language including a brief sexual reference)
Running time: 1:38