In the movie’s most heartbreaking scene, Oh understands a moment before we do that her son (a superb Jin Ha) is in severe distress. Throughout the film there are parents worried about children and children worried about parents, the physical and technological distance only a small part of the gulf that too often separates us from what we wish we could heal. Then we see Bridget with her three brothers, trying to protect their ailing mother (Light) from her children's painful arguments about politics. And the parents learn through their son’s school essay that they have not been as effective at protecting him from the pressures of the shutdown as they had hoped. “Keeping them engaged seems like a win,” she tells the exhausted parents, as she explains an assignment to write about what her students are experiencing.
They talk to Bridget about their son over Zoom. Rosemary DeWitt and Ron Livingston are parents trying to act as breadwinner, babysitter, tutor, home school facilitator, and playdate all at once. Seeing her then very worried about her own family member, speaking in her first language, gives her character an authenticity far beyond what we might expect from her brief screen time.īridget ( Alison Pill) is a teacher trying to do her best with remote learning. We first see a home health care aide ( Daphne Rubin-Vega, another stand-out) as a concerned professional, calling in a doctor for a reluctant woman showing signs of COVID. Oh is especially affecting as a very concerned mother in one scene and then as a participant in an AA meeting in another. Seeing so many of them at work and with family or a support group grounds the film by giving them dimensionality. It is a joy to see veterans like Elaine May, Sandra Oh, and Judith Light as three very different mothers fully inhabiting their roles with such immediacy and precision. Hedges has a gift for bringing us into the lives of characters in even the briefest sketches with the strong support of an outstanding cast.
#SCARY MOVIE TRYING TO ESCAPE HOSPITAL PROFESSIONAL#
It is particularly poignant to see these many of these people both in their professional lives, maintaining some professional distance, or trying to, and then when we see them lose that distance as they struggle with their own families or with their own choices. It is not coincidental that so many of the characters are professional caregivers-two doctors, a health care aide, a nurse, an elementary school teacher, a sex worker who provides comfort in her own way, a policeman whose job is to protect and serve. A sex worker promises her client, an exhausted male nurse, that she will join the nightly pot-and-pan-bangers paying tribute to essential workers in his honor.Īll of these encounters face heart-wrenching frustrations. A father begs his daughter not to go to a Black Lives Matter rally where there may be violence. Parents waiting out the pandemic in the country check in on their adult children at home in the city. There is a bittersweet birthday gathering of four adult children and their ailing mother. A wife learns that her husband in the hospital with COVID is suddenly in critical condition, and the best the nurse can offer is to write down on what he calls “the iPad, the goodbye pad” whatever last message she wants him to hear. We see the passage of time through milestones observed online, both personal and political. While some earlier efforts at pandemic filmmaking have seemed like awkward work-arounds, even stunt-ish, writer/director Peter Hedges has transcended the structural limits to make a film that is organic, with characters that extend beyond the corners of their FaceTime and Zoom boxes.
#SCARY MOVIE TRYING TO ESCAPE HOSPITAL SERIES#
That storm, of course, is the pandemic, and “The Same Storm” gives us a series of linked stories, with a character from each online call leading us into the next. And then a clapperboard snaps shut to start the scene and the story begins with a quote from Damian Barr that gives the film its title: “We are not all in the same boat. There are comments about the “intimacy” of peeking into each other’s homes, some questions about how best to create the environment for the characters they are creating. “Can you see me?” A group of actors are assembling for the first time. That opening Zoom call is like hearing a symphony orchestra tune up before the concert.
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