Blackbird

Susan Sarandon follows in the footsteps of Julianne Moore in this family-focused drama of terminal illness. Moore won the Best Actress Oscar for Still Alice (2014), playing a woman rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer’s over a period of months. In Blackbird, Sarandon’s Lily is fighting a losing battle against ALS over the course of one weekend in New England.

Set in a sprawling modern masterpiece of a beach house, Blackbird unfolds like a play but is in fact based on a 2014 Danish film with an equally impenetrable title, Silent Heart. Lily’s husband is a warm, supportive physician, Paul (the stalwart Sam Neill), with whom she’s expecting three carloads of guests: two adult daughters and their with-ums, plus her friend since college, Liz (the wonderful Lindsay Duncan, Birdman).

The film’s director is the rightly respected Roger Michell (Notting Hill, My Cousin Rachel), which accounts for the A-list cast. Michell’s steady, low-key work and a fistful of great actors makes the rather unsurprising plot revelations work, giving the proceedings a sympathetic realism that’s greater than the sum of its recycled parts.

Kate Winslet has the thankless role of older daughter Jennifer, who adheres to useless proprieties and seems grossly insensitive to everyone else’s feelings, including those of her equally oblivious husband, Michael (Rainn Wilson). Mia Wasikowska has the meatier role as younger sister Anna, a lesbian with an on-again, off-again nonbinary lover, Chris (Bex Taylor-Klaus), and a deep well of anxieties. Sympathy and common sense seem to have skipped a generation in this family, as teenage grandson Jonathan (Anson Boon, Crawl), is more stable and self-aware than either his parents or his aunt.

The various confessions and explosions may not be especially original, but neither are they overplayed, so the story unfolds with a palpable humanity. It’s the kind of movie that earns respect and engagement without ever bowling you over with its emotional power. Since the screenplay — credited to original Danish writer Christian Torpe — could easily have collapsed into weepy melodrama, it’s a credit to Michell that it flows steadily and builds credibly to its bittersweet conclusion.

It’s been 22 years since Sarandon first played a terminally ill woman trying to ease her family’s pain at her inevitable passing in Stepmom, and it’s possible nobody does it better. In troubled times, pending death may not be the easiest sell for movie viewers, but Sarandon and Neill and Duncan and Wasikowski and Boon give such well-crafted, unshowy performances that the film is oddly comforting. It suggests even tragedy can impose some order on our personal connections. It’s a message worth contemplating.

Grade: B. Rated R. Available on demand September 18.

(Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Screen Media)