What would you do to protect your child from death? How far would you go to ward off the ‘Grim Reaper’? In Daina O. Pusić’s Tuesday, one mother fights with, wrestles, and smashes – even eats! – Death itself, just to save her sick daughter from…well, death. With a mixture of absurdist fantasy and dark humor but somehow missing out on key character development and emotional foundations, the laughs feel cheap, and the intended catharsis comes across as anything but real.
Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) paces about the upstairs of her sparsely furnished London home, peering out the window in expectation of a home aid nurse arriving to help care for her terminally ill daughter, Tuesday (Lola Petticrew)(She Said, Dating Amber). Tuesday’s illness has taken its toll on her: frail, visibly pale and drawn, hair lost and growing back in short, Tuesday is confined to a wheelchair, wrapped in oxygen tubes. Her living area – her bedroom – is in stark contrast to the rest of the house, full of colors and textures, and personal objects – even childhood drawings adorn the wall.
With the help of her nurse, Tuesday is taken outside – fresh air, sunlight, change of scenery. Left alone for a moment, Tuesday begins to struggle severely to breathe; the intake of air becomes a high, coarse rattle in her lungs that draws the attention…of Death, who just so happens to look like a half-blind, mangey old Cuban macaw (voiced by a very gravely Arinzé Kene)(Lee, The Pass). Tuesday infers – somehow – that this macaw is, in fact, Death, so naturally, she begins to talk to the bird, half stalling for time out of fear and half taking pity on the poor state of the bird. Offering one thing to the next – a joke, a bath, to drags of weed – Tuesday manages to connect with Death long enough to convince it to wait to take her from this mortal realm until her mother has come home so that she can say goodbye properly. Zora – who has spent her day out of the house (and very clearly not at work) – returns home to Tuesday asking to talk, eventually leading to the revelation of Death being present. Zora proceeds to chase, dive after, head butt, crush, incinerate, and then devour the bird – all to protect Tuesday from the fate of… well, death.
What happens next is easy enough to foreshadow, for the film opens with Death following the voices and calls of the dying, swooping high and low the world over to brush its wing over the suffering, and ending it; with the avian messenger of mercy literally having been consumed and no one helping relieve the sick and the suffering…what follows is a mixture of family moments made of borrowed time between mother and daughter, and the world outside their window literally beginning to be populated with the horrifically maimed and injured, zombie cows from slaughterhouses, and clouds of flies that rival stores from the Bible. Inevitably, the natural order of life and death will need to be restored to right the world, and the final stage of grief – acceptance – will have to be faced down by Zora and Tuesday both.
Humor often pops up in art where death is a factor. As a manner of deflection, avoidance, even as a mechanism to process the enormity of the concept, humor underscores the finite reality of life as a singular experience with one ultimate outcome. Poking fun at the absurdity of order, of planning, of human fallibility helps with the confrontation of the final event in every life. So it makes sense that in a scenario so laden with delayed grief and sadness, there would be humor found throughout.
"Julia Louis-Dreyfus hits every emotional note asked with aplomb."
To be sure, there is plenty of humor in Tuesday – the plot itself is a blend of the surreal and the absurd. How else would describe fighting a winged version of death and eating it? Or even toking weed and listening to Ice Cube with said version of death? Cringe comedy aplenty here as well – an area of comedy in which Louis-Dreyfus excels; watching her Zora barter with a pawn shop broker while making voices for the taxidermic rats (dressed as Catholic priests) is disastrous, though her awkward insertion of ‘…and then they kiss…’ when being confronted by Tuesday’s nurse about spending more time with her daughter is the epitome of an awkward diffuser to a strained situation gone horribly wrong.
But the humor of the film is robbed of its punch and intelligence as the story, with all of its surreal elements dropping in and out at random, cutting into the moments meant for emotional character development – and those moments are half-baked at best. The script Pusić has written tries to stuff unexplained nicknames, inside-joke sounding repeated phrases, and a heated argument rushed around a substantial revelation that all feel undercooked. In conjunction with all manner of the fantastical and the outrageous – incredible growing and shrinking macaws and women notwithstanding – the moments meant to illicit heartfelt feeling over the grief being presented, or wonder over the resulting series of events that dare to examine the existential crisis of human existence just feel hokey. To be fair, Louise-Dreyfus hits every emotional note asked with aplomb, but when paired with some hokey CGI work around the macaw, no matter how well executed a laugh or stream of tears may be, the film simply begins to fall apart.
So while the film is certainly entertaining and always keeping of one’s attention – how could it not with this Julia in this premise? – its particular mixture of humor and pathos is so self-polarizing that the overall result is the cinematic equivalent of eating off-brand Fruit Loops: colorful and sweet, can technically be called ‘filling’, but it is still empty calories and all manner of artificial ingredients and just so bad for you, just without the decency of being the ‘real deal’ that usually justifies consumption in the first place – and you know it, which makes it more unsatisfying. Tuesday, weirdly, with its arthouse production pedigree (A24, BFI, and BBC Films producing), would almost be expected to deliver the precise pathos alongside the off kilter comedy perfectly – to be the real Fruit Loops that the film sets out to be. But it is not. Too bad – sometimes the fruity cereal is exactly what we crave…when its the real deal.
In the end, while we may see just how far a parent may go to protect their child – even to eat the feather-burnt corpse of Death itself – Tuesday fails to juggle its sense of humor and its emotional ideas effectively, leaving a soggy, multi-colored bowl of mush that just is not as good as you would have hoped.
Final Thought
Louise-Dreyfus showcases more range than ever, and Pusić’s wild ideas show creative merit. But this film - while fun - is far from what it wants, or needs to be, to be effective.