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The elderly woman bursts through the door of the beauty salon. Wearing a hospital gown, identification bracelet around her wrist, she is clearly not where she is supposed to be. She looks desperate, but crystal-clear in her intentions, when she picks out one of the startled employees and speaks directly to her. Later, hustled into a back room by said employee, the elderly woman says, and she is dead serious: “You owe me and I’m here to collect.”
This woman is the Eleanor of the title, a new film directed by Rich Newey, and she is played by the superb Jenny O’Hara, The employee Eleanor targets is Natalie, a troubled drug addict, and played by Annika Marks (who also wrote the script as well as produced the film). Although Natalie protests that she has never seen this woman before in her life, this is not true. Eleanor and Natalie go way way back. You see, Natalie is a compulsive liar. Being an addict is a way of life. Lying comes with the territory.
Killing Eleanor is the story of the journey these two characters take, an often-harried and contentious road trip through the Midwestern states, trying their damnedest to get to Canada.
The power of Killing Eleanor is that of a stealth bomber. It does not announce its intentions at the jump, or “set up” the story-line through carefully placed clues in the beginning. It unfolds organically, with all the beautiful and human messiness that that implies. Marks’ script artfully navigates the subject, following the off-shoots of the main narrative, screeching to a halt at the many road-blocks to the overall objective, peering down side roads, looking for escape routes. What is so good about this approach is that you never doubt that the film knows where it’s going, that Marks knows the story she wants to tell, and has figured out the way to tell it.
Killing Eleanor has been described as a “right-to-die Thelma and Louise” which is … accurate, but going into it with as few preconceived notions as possible is crucial to the film’s impact. As serious as the subject matter is, Marks’ touch is light: she prioritizes character development over plot-obedience, and yet she never sacrifices thematic clarity. She’s interested in relationships, in who we are not just as individuals, but as parts of other people’s stories. We affect each other, we intersect. We make mistakes that have long-lasting impacts on other people. Natalie’s story is not just her own. It is also Eleanor’s. It is her parents’. Her sister’s story. In allowing the characters – even one-scene characters – to be complicated, Marks has her cake and eats it too. By the end, the film reverberates with its own message. But it hasn’t told us the message. It’s shown us. The catharsis is difficult but it is also thoughtful, emotional, and true.
Natalie (Marks) is first seen in a 12-step meeting, fidgeting, biting her fingernails, listening to other addicts share. She does not share. Her body language is that of anxious resistance. Whatever went down, Natalie has been (probably) court-ordered to live at home with her mother (Jane Kaczmarek), work in her mother’s beauty salon, and attend meetings. Natalie says she’s been “sober for six weeks” but the reality is she continues to pop pills, doling them out carefully to herself. We watch Natalie lie in every moment, every circumstance, to everyone. One lie begets another lie. As she lies, her life becomes more and more unmanageable. She’s a good liar too. She lies with a straight face, open eyes, and no remorse. She’s surrounded by people who are mostly tapped out by her shenanigans. Her father (Chris Mulkey) is a doctor, seemingly always on call, present but absent. Natalie’s sister Anya (Betsy Brandt) is campaigning for office, and whatever closeness she may have once had with her sister is long gone. Natalie has burnt her bridges, and is now seen as a liability for her sister’s future in politics. Before she was a drug addict, Natalie was a dancer, with a full-blown eating disorder. Anya has had it.
Everything changes though when Eleanor bursts into the beauty salon. Turns out, years ago, when Natalie was in college, she worked for a summer on Eleanor’s lavender farm. While Natalie has only hazy memories of that summer, Eleanor remembers everything. With an accusing stare, she holds out a crumpled piece of loose leaf on which the younger Natalie had written a deeply apologetic “IOU”. Apparently Natalie had stolen some money from Eleanor, probably to buy drugs. And of course Natalie never paid Eleanor back. It was years ago but Eleanor says: “You owe me and I’m here to collect.”
But Eleanor doesn’t want the money Natalie once stole. She wants Natalie to help her die. She’s been put into a nursing home by her son, and left there to rot. She can’t take care of herself anymore and she’s ready to go. She says, with a look of almost transcendent longing on her face: “I want to be still the way I want to get still.” (Listen to the reverb of that beautiful line. Marks is a very good writer. )
How Natalie is eventually convinced to help Eleanor achieve her goal is best left for audiences to discover for themselves. Suffice it to say, it is not smooth sailing. Eleanor is not a “sweet” little old lady. She is sharp, she has a hot temper, and she knows exactly what she needs and why she needs it. She is so over being condescended to, infantilized, ignored. Natalie is on the run from taking any responsibility whatsoever for who she is in the world, who she’s been, and who she will be. Her initial acceptance of Eleanor’s request that she bust her out of the nursing home has more to do with feeling harassed by Anya’s demands that she clean up her act than anything else. Natalie can’t even believe Eleanor kept that piece of paper. Who actually collects on IOU’s like that? Unlike Natalie’s easily-manipulated mother, Eleanor is having none of Natalie’s bullshit. An IOU means something, missy. That’s your handwriting. Pay up or shut up. Natalie has never been “held to account” for her actions. She hates it.
A person’s right-to-die is an ongoing idealogical battleground, and different states have different rules in place. This is why their raggedy road trip is a necessity in the first place. But how will they accomplish the “killing” part of it? Eleanor has no plan for her death. She leaves it up to Natalie, although she has some requests: no pain, no mess, etc. This leads to many funny moments along the way. Natalie lights a cigarette at one point, and Eleanor says, “Those things’ll kill you.” Deadpan, Natalie holds out the pack: “Want one?” At another point, Natalie considers hitching a ride with an 18-wheeler, cracking at Eleanor: “Maybe the driver is a psycho killer and that’ll solve our problems.” This is what I mean by Marks’ light touch. I have no idea what it took to create the right tone for this material, to avoid the inherent movie-of-the-week traps, but Marks has pulled it off.
Director Rich Newey has an extensive background in directing television, commercial campaigns, and music videos for A-list artists. His style here is both intuitive and controlled. Sometimes scenes are shot in hand-held, giving the moments a charge, an in-the-moment urgency. But he also uses establishing shots, placing characters in the frame so they contextualize the moment and the surrounding environment. Newey and cinematographer Jessica Young work together beautifully: the camera never calls attention to itself. The shots are carefully composed, chosen, deliberate, yet with space to maneuver. When the film flashes back to the lavender farm summer, to Natalie’s drug-using, the style goes slightly dream-like, golden light-flares, deep blue shadows, things are shown in fragments, the way memories come to us in images, impressions. The visual style is character-driven, with both Marks and O’Hara often in intense closeup, plunging us into their psychologies, but the shots also orient us to where they are in space and time. Since this is a road trip movie, landscape is a huge part of the story: these characters are on the move. We feel the world around them.
The cast is filled with respected and talented character actors: Camryn Manheim shows up in one scene, and practically brought me to tears, just from her warm and intimate approach to the scene. Rusty Schwimmer shows up in a couple of scenes, in what could have been an incidental “background” role, but she gets to bring her acting chops to it. And so we always get the sense that the characters who show up all come from somewhere and are going somewhere, their lives continue on off-camera. Kaczmarek and Mulkey, as Natalie’s parents, inhabit a very lived-in reality: they aren’t just there as “explanations” for Natalie’s personality, but they feel like real three-dimensional people. (This is another testament to Marks’ script). Brandt is fantastic as the politician-sister, brittle, furious and uncompromising. (She’s also very funny.) David Eigenberg has one scene as Eleanor’s son, and in that one scene he exudes the character’s entire life story.
But this is really a two-hander. Marks is well-known for her regular stint on The Fosters, but she also made a big impression in her work in Waco, The Sessions, Last Tycoon and Goliath. [Full disclosure: Marks played “Neve” in my two-person short film “July and Half of August“.] As Natalie, she gets to assert her sharp edges, her sarcastic wit, her shimmering anxiety. This is a very honest performance. About halfway through, I started clocking Natalie’s lies. Sometimes every line in a scene was a lie. This adds to the often “crazy”-making energy of Killing Eleanor. You can see why her family gets frustrated with the constant lying. Marks, as an actress, shows the toll all this lying has taken on the character, the exhaustion of having to live like that. Catharsis and growth will not be smooth sailing for anyone, and Natalie is no exception. She has terrible life-habits, and Marks is fearless in showing that. O’Hara, whose lengthy list of credits encompasses television, films, and Broadway, gives a truly great performance. When she goes deep, she goes as deep as the ocean. She is often heart-breaking, but I appreciated seeing Eleanor’s ferocious certainty, her frustration that nobody listens to her. It’s deeply satisfying to see O’Hara take center stage, a place where elderly actresses rarely get to stand. She deserves to be there.
Killing Eleanor is sure to evoke important discussions about not just a person’s right-to-die, but also our culture’s often appalling treatment of the elderly. This resonated even more powerfully with me in our current moment where politicians and even regular civilians – including people who consider themselves progressive and/or liberal – seem perfectly okay with “letting” a percentage of people die in this pandemic. “Well, they’re old anyway …” Do you not know any elderly people? Do you not want to protect them? As we age, our bodies get frail. We also gain wisdom with age. We know who we are. We know what we want. We don’t – as the kids say – “give af” anymore about what people think. This is freedom. At long last. And so to be treated like a child the second you reach a point where you have the most to teach the rest of us … it’s just wrong. If we’re lucky we will reach old age. And we will want to be treated with respect.
Marks has created something very special, something that will linger in the mind long after it’s over. One of the most entertaining parts of it – and this is a fun movie, subject matter notwithstanding – is her willingness as a writer to pile mess upon mess upon mess. So often scripts start with complexity and then simplify over the course of the story, the script being about the “untangling” process. Here, it starts simply and gets more and more complex. This is often how comedies operate! Charlie Chaplin said once, “The best definition of humor I ever heard is that it’s getting people in and out of trouble.” That’s what Killing Eleanor does, and is.
The distance these two characters travel isn’t measured in miles. What happens is nothing less than total transformation. For both of them.
