A gay “Garden State,” the Sundance opening-night film “Other People” is an affecting dramedy about coming to terms with death that presents Molly Shannon with one Oscar moment after another as the cancer-stricken mom of a comedy writ𓂃er (Jesse Plemons) who has returned home to a dopey Sacramento just as he is starting to make a name for himself as a comedy writer in New 🐷York.
Shannon is alternately wisecracking, fearful, suffering and finally pr꧃oud as her character deals with a rare form of cancer. Chemotherapy is causing her so much suffering that she cancels further sessions, signing her own death warrant in the process but providing herself with the opportunity to have a few clear-headed and relatively pain-free months.
She takes the opportunity to celebrate the palliative powers of weed, have a funny conversation over milkshakes about why she doesn’t want to be cremated (“I don’t like fires. I don’t like camping”) and leads the family back to New York to watch her son do a comedy skit with the Upright Citizens Brigade. It’s in New York that we witness why her son David and ಌher husband (Bradley Whitford) maintain a chilly distance from each other: On a visit to the apartment David shares with his boyfriend Paul (Zach Woods), the dad refuses to come upstairs. Instea🌞d, he waits in the street. The scene is quietly heartbreaking.
In the early going, the movi🎃e relies a bit heavily on a tired attitude about the insufferability of heartland rubes (Paul Dooley and June Squibb play exasperating, out-of-touch grandparents) but the movie develops into a much subtler and more nuanced portrayal of gay life than the usual. Shannon is superb, and first-time writer-director Chris Kelly (who writes for “SNL”) gives her great lines she delivers with aplomb. When David says he wishes he could take her on a trip around the world, she🦋 replies “My world is coming to the dinner table tonight. All I ever wanted was to be a mother.”
Later there’s a haunting sc𓃲ene where she can barely speak while having an awkward farewell with her friends at the school where she teaches, and still later she notes that when she’s gone, David can simply look for her in the eyes of his sisters (one of whom is played by Maude Apatow, Judd’s daughter). If you can make it to the end without crying, you’re a stronger man than I. And there’s a moment of rueful wisdom when David, lost in a funk of depression, is told by his sister, “Other people are sad too.”