Key to the everyday rhythm of Karam’s dialogue is that the Blakes are too close-knit to let a needling joke or biting remark foul the mood - these aren’t laugh lines or shock lines, just the stuff that’s blurted out when you know people well - and yet the overall tone is very much one of being on the knife’s edge. (Schumer, especially, beautifully underplays her character’s truly woeful circumstances.) As sweet-natured Rich, Yeun captures the gently nervous energy of fitting in with a new family, while Squibb has to seem there but not there, and does so perfectly. Feldstein and Schumer are believable sisters with veneers of wit they hope will keep sensitivities and disappointment at bay. The actors’ top-notch characterizations are a matrix of fault lines and abiding love, starting with Jenkins’ mix of genially judgmental bonhomie and crippling unease, and Houdyshell’s sturdily epic mom-ness. All while mysterious jolts of noise continue, lights falter, and family members occasionally need to navigate a darkness that’s sometimes literal and often verbalized. Worries and bitterness about money are one constant. But wedged in amongst the teasing, fond memories, humorous anecdotes and spoken affection are lingering anxieties and fears, sharp tongues and eye-opening revelations. When the rest of the clan shows up - Erik’s wife Dierdre (Houdyshell), their older daughter Aimee (Schumer) and Erik’s dementia-suffering, wheelchair-bound mother Momo (Squibb) - preparations begin for a folding table feast and conversation gears up. The richness of Karam’s scenario is that it’s both. (Upward views of slivers of sky surrounded by tall buildings are the movie’s evocatively cramped opening-credits imagery.) Though ostensibly there to celebrate a holiday and a loved one’s new home, the atmosphere suggests we could be in for either a domestic comedy-drama or a haunting.
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It’s very possible that in the shifting molecules of a live production performed for an attentive audience, Karam’s gifts are more directly felt here, they’re more admired than absorbed.Īs movie vibes go, however, there’s an artfully palpable unease in the beginning as Scranton, Pennsylvania-native Erik Blake (Jenkins) - alone in the Chinatown apartment his younger daughter Brigid (Feldstein) is moving into with her older boyfriend Rich (Yeun) - considers the stained walls, startling noises and smudged windows that look onto an interior courtyard. But that also gives this finely tuned movie a distancing problem with regards to the expression of its characters’ specific concerns, which amount to variations on loss: of love, of passion, of economic stability, of sanity and of life. The effort that’s gone into creating a work of dimensionalized precision about the way people talk, talk over and talk past as they move through a space together, is of a relentlessly high caliber of authenticity. He’s also done his utmost to swap out proscenium-like theatricality to take advantage of what cinema can do with close-ups, angles, movement, sound and pacing, all in tight-yet-spacious prewar Manhattan digs that production designer David Gropman (“Fences”) has made into a weary, old, possibly malevolent seventh character. Karam makes his directorial debut adapting his widely acclaimed work, and it’s not surprising he’s assembled a formidable cast: Jayne Houdyshell (the only crossover from the Broadway production, and a Tony winner for it to boot), Amy Schumer, Beanie Feldstein and Oscar nominees Richard Jenkins, June Squibb and Steven Yeun. But over the course of a three-generation, six-person get-together in a mostly unfurnished, ghostly New York apartment, Karam’s characters reveal what is edgily real about modern existence and what’s eternal about trying to survive it. The title of Karam’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play is curiously bold and blasé, like words you’d see in an elegant font on a stand next to a zoo exhibit. The threat of impermanence or, looking at it another way, the threat of unfulfillment’s permanence, hovers like a cloud over the Blake family Thanksgiving dinner that makes up the running time of writer-director Stephen Karam’s “The Humans.”
12 after the film’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
This review of “The Humans” was first published on Sept.
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